"Like black moonrise her voice fell still..."
If Michael is bleeding out, if he's dashed at the bottom of her hooves like a hundred bits of crystal that are all sharp and bloody, she's there trying to change each piece to something harder. When his words stumble out accidentally (like the way she's trying to think he left her) she can hear the way they fall like stones and ice. She knows it's the way they will always talk to each other, like two winter winds howling through the mountain pass and dreaming about being spring.
It's sorrow she can taste on her tongue, like wine, like Eik's skin, when she traces the curl of his ear. “It is never easy.” She says because it's like getting your throat cut, or your skin peeled back from your skin, it's like coming home even as you stop breathing. It's like eating a star.
And when she turns towards her children and her dragon she can feel it in her belly burning like acid and fire all at once. A daisy is crushed under her hoof before it becomes a bit of moss, soft and tufted, begging for the shade. She doesn't pause to wonder if it feels the change, if it enjoys it, or if it wanted to be a butterfly that lived on wind instead of by the power of roots and dirt.
She can feel him hold on tight, like she's Fable instead of Isra in the daisies and pearls. It feels like eating a sun instead of a star, still home, but not silver and moonlit. “Come on.” On her brow her horn swings like a divining rod pointing towards a crevice in the earth, or water, or a treasure. “They won't leave the water.” When she laughs it's softer than he's heard it before, a dandelion in the wind instead of an arrow flying for a heart.
Isra doesn't know which feels easy and which feels like a lie.
Her hooves kick up into a trot towards her children just as Fable turns to bellow a greeting that sounds like the sea crashing against a desert dune (as if it's a thing only gods might do). Isra, when she feels the press of his mind can feel all the eagerness and gentle hurt she feels reflected back at her after it's been tainted by the sea.
The sound is enough to make her children turn their but not enough to make their hooves leave the waterline. Nothing is ever enough for that.
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