“You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite.”
Among the wisteria and rippling copper grasses Isra is waiting. There is darkness around her, a blackness the flickering lanterns have yet to discover. And perhaps, had she known what thoughts were dancing like sickness through her new champion, she would have shed her secret blackness and walked with her (shoulder to shoulder like chambers of the same heart) across the gleaming moonstones. But she doesn't know that their thoughts are running through them like two birds who haven't yet realized they are flying into the same fog thick horizon.
Isra is thinking of night-black, of darkness, of shadows thick and cloying like fermented fruit. She is thinking of bitterness and magic.
She is thinking, always, of how it would be an easy thing to change the world if she wanted too.
When she licks the back of her teeth there is still the metallic zing of blood long gone and the grit of sand (sea-sand, desert-sand, dust-sand). It all feels like a small death in her throat, all the things that are leeching each drop of sorrow and softness for her. Boudika passes by her with arrow-straight eyes and a trident catching light at her side like a comet blazing against the darkness. For a moment Isra thinks about interrupting her stride and saying, come linger in the darkness with me, if only for a while.
But she knows why the only-a-dancer has come, and she knows that tonight she's supposed to be a queen (not a once killer in the night-garden). So she walks in the wake of Boudika and the copper grasses turn to gold and platinum as she walks towards her castle gleaming in the moonlight. She walks though the doorway behind the champion and her lips curl into a smile over her teeth that still taste like blood.
It's not until the birch and oak doors sigh shut that Isra inhales sharply as if she's only just realized that coming home doesn't really feel like it always has. It feels like walking through fog on the shoreline, like finding a wave that gleams brighter than all the others in the black sea. It feels like a secret just out of reach, like bird-song in the summer thicket.
It feels right.
So she swallows down the metal taste, and dust, and dusty butterfly wings. Her magic, terrible and wonderful and dangerous, sighs like a blade pulling free. A hanging on the wall changes to bone-white ivy climbing over the old brick walls. “Welcome home.” Isra wants to ask her how it feels, how it tastes, if it makes her skin tingle like ash drifting down like snow. Instead all she does is step closer to the bone-white ivy and say, “Would you like a tour?” Like a lion she tosses her head towards a yawning black hallway.
And she does not pause to wonder if Boudika is brave enough to follow before she steps towards the darkness.
@Boudika
