“You fell in love with a storm.”
Isra, looking at Eik and her children already walking, wants to think this is all that matters. She wants her heart to feel larger than the moon, large enough to be a world of its own. And while it is large and her blood is already changing to the same beat of Eik's, there is some part of it that's black as pitch.
That part is hollow.
So very hollow.
She covers it up in the way she's brushing lines down his shoulder, and his knees, and every inch of his moon-kissed skin she can reach. There is rain on her tongue, rain and summer sweet-grass and sand (that will never leave the cracks of his skin). Even now she can still taste lavender and mint over the metallic sting of blood. Each of her legs trembles like wheat beneath the rain when she rises to press their shoulders together.
When the twins start to feed she flinches at the feel of teeth against her skin. And even though it should be the most natural feeling in the world to her, she thinks of fangs, black alleys and blood. Isra doesn't think she'll ever stop thinking those things. It's beneath the love in the way the belly of the earth is always beneath quicksand, but it's still stone-hard and ink black.
The thoughts bury themselves beneath all the love, and joy, and hope. Surely Eik knows they are there, he knows everything (even the ways she knows she's becoming something so very far from mortal, so very far from him). But when she presses her cheek to his and says, “of course,” there is only feral joy in the sound of her voice. There will be no chains, or oppressors left in the world to touch her children. Not while she still has breath, and magic, and a dragon. And fire, not while she still has fire.
Rain is falling heavier now and the wind is almost a siren-screech though the stained-glass leaves. Somewhere there's a soft rumble that the mountains are trying to swallow. There's shelter here, caught between their religion and their love, but the rain is still leaking through. Isra pauses to look up to the leaves catching what little moonlight there is cracking through the black clouds. It makes her think of arrows piercing through the night, or a storm clawing though the summer haze.
It makes her think of a hundred things that refuse to be silenced, or tamed. How could her children be anything but trouble, or wild, or gods when the world welcomes them in the soft-violent way only nature knows?
The storm is going to get worse. Fable offers the thought loud enough that Eik might hear the worry in his voice and the great ancient knowing that only beasts have.
Her children leave their meal and their shelter to streak though the howling wind like wolves. Both of them have their heads titled up to catch the salted rain-drops (from the sea, even here it's from the sea) on their tongues. They are wild and awkward as only young-souls can be. To them the storm is only a, hello.
“Just a little longer. Will you tell me what you were like as a child?” Isra whispers against Eik's lips in some strange mixture of sound and kiss (like snow, she thinks, it falls like snow between them) “Then we can take them back to the castle.” The bark of the tree is rough against her hip when she leans against it, like roots. And beneath that, below all this skin, sea, and magic that makes up Isra her heart is saying over and over again--
home
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