" and while the waves crash in an ivory glance; "
For a moment there is only this--
Two women on the beach with something as black as the bottom of the sea in their eyes. A dragon in the water with only his head rising above the ways. A storm in the distance, roaring softly enough that they think it nothing more than a sea kissing the shore. Brightness dotted with rubies that gleam in the soft light like blood on the skin of a god.
And then the rest of the world starts to trickle in like rain through a broken window on an old house.
Isra realizes all at once that she's laughing like a wild thing (or like something gone mad). She swallows it when Antiope speaks and turns her eyes back towards the sea. One of her ears strains towards the waves. For a moment she looks as if she's listening to a song, a siren-song, that only she can hear. It's still ringing in her ears when she looks towards the shore glimmering in the moonlight. Magic hums in her veins-- louder, louder, louder-- until it drowns out the deadly song of the sea. “I am glad for it.” She offers instead of saying all the ways in which the ocean never gives a choice to stay or to go.
The sea takes everything in the end. Everything
Far past what she can see of the horizon is the land she was born in-- a land where mares are still praying to drown.
Fable dives back beneath the waves streaking across the horizon like comets instead of white-froth riptides. Isra's ear turns back towards the cliffs and her city flower-smoked and lit up with rows and rows of bonfires. She remembers herself, remembers that there is magic enough in her blood to make the sea a field of roses and the salt diamonds. “Sometimes,” She says between the roar of the sea and the distant storm. “when I think about death I do.” Isra brushes their shoulders together and each bloody ruby turns to amethyst and opal.
“Who?” And she does not pull their shoulders apart when she asks the question. Instead Isra leans into Antiope as if to say, stay with me
@Antiope
