There is no moonlight and blade to count by. Nor is there blood falling metronome steady across her eyelids, lips and throat. Acton is not here to blaze golden as a sun and with his clever fox-eyes. Hedges are not wilting and rotting around her in walls. Her throat is dry with sand and rage instead of poison. Fable is not dreaming of the sea.
But still she counts beneath the jungle boughs and the sunlight dappling soft spots of heat along her spine.
One. Her heartbeat is steady beneath her ribs. It's a monstrous sound that could live in a dragon's heart, a mountain's heart. It's a god-song, a steady thrum of thunder rolling over the desert.
Two. Raum's scarf waves like a monument of decay around the stone leg of a stone horse wide-eyed in fear. The universe inside her blazes center-of-a-star hot. It smokes and smolders and streaks through all the glass sharp edges of sorrow holding her together. The edges refract the light, make it brighter. The universe, the one that has always wanted to devour Raum, explodes.
Three. The basilisk turns towards her and the sound it makes seems more like a understanding than a challenge. She can hear the sorrow in it, the rage of a broken-kneed deer when the wind carries with it the smell of a bear. The same wind howls trough her horn and answers back in storm-sound I do not care. . Green leaves fall across her back, wet with dawn dew. The sensations reminds her of blood-- blood and gold.
Four. If there is more to the word mercy than the way it tastes like spoiled wine on her tongue Isra has forgotten it. Her blood is salt-water, brine and wave after wave after wave of magic. The dawn is rose-gold and peach overhead. Fable looks almost black against all the tan and gold, black enough that his scales ripple like the bottom of the sea beneath the white-tipped waves. When she steps from the trees he steps with her. The ground shakes like it knows that the end of anything mortal has come to call.
Five. A queen and her dragon close their eyes. Their nostrils flare like wolves scenting the doe, like lions discovering a flock of broken-winged sparrows. Mercy starts to sound like death and vengeance and retribution. Soft things discover how it feels to want cruelty. They relish it. Raum starts to laugh.
Six. Isra discovers how it feels to be a god.
I promise. She tells herself as she steps for the basilisk. Her bow lit by moon-fire is blinding even when her eyes are pressed tightly closed. I promise I will be the end. Lighting bolts are streaking through the black behind her eyes. Each bolt burns and stings. The ground is still shaking under her feet.
The sand is rubies. It's barbed wire roots shaped in ocean waves all around her. And it's quick-sand too. Somewhere in the jungle hornets are humming. The humming grows louder, and louder, and louder. Ipomoea is in the jungle too and she wonders if he's humming an ancient song too. Maybe they all are.
Maybe this is how worlds are made.
Fable is blotting out the sunlight with his wings. Sand is circling in small tornadoes beneath his wings as he lifts and lowers them over and over again in a warning only beasts understand. Isra understands it. The sand feels like sharp needles hitting her sides over and over again-- but she understands.
Salt-water is dripping from Fable's lips when he roars. Isra wonders if rainbows are streaking through the water in arrows made of rainbows. She almost wants to open her eyes to see. She resists even though her horn swings towards the sound of mud schelquing beneath hoof and talon like blood.
Her arrow sings and screams towards Raum's laughter. Fable swings his teeth, half open in a sea-roar, towards the basilisk's neck. Gods to not pause to wonder.
But in the space between, in the waiting, all the sand shifts to some strange mixture of diamond and ore.
Like it doesn't know what choice to make.
@Raum @
