Isra and the knowning
“ I want to change the world.”
“ I want to change the world.”
B
efore I would not have said bitterness, rage, and all this wanting were things that had a taste. To me they had been nothing more than sleeping, sharp-toothed beasts curled around my heart. They were feelings, bright as stars but not cold enough to curdle and frost. But now in the humming air and the weight of cloudless thunder I can taste it all. Iron, loam and brine. Sometimes I wonder if the brine isn't just the sea leaking out through my insides, like blackness through a window at night-- consuming.
Can Callynite feel it rising in me, this iron magic and rebellion? Does she knows I can change the world for us?
The light of my weapon is bright enough that I'm almost surprised it's not a taste too (maybe it would be sugar moonlight or the ashy taste of a dead star). It's blazing through the dawn more than I thought any light could cut through the dawn. When it bounces in the corner of my gaze to the beat of our hooves running through the meadow it makes me think of a star learning how to rise instead of fall. Later I'll wonder how high I could shoot an arrow, if I could pluck a thunder-bird out between a nest of clouds as easy as breathing.
Later I'll wonder so many things...when the night come to call against the curl of my spine again (and when it touches all the brine beneath and starts to sing).
I can see the something in the way Callynite runs that reminds me of before, of loping through the mountain paths with the deer and the goats. It reminds me of how it felt to run like air, back when war was not this stone hanging hard and heavy in my stomach. I try to mimic her stride but my joints have forgotten how to be light. When I stop trying I know I'm running like war, fast and fleet and ready to consume.
Freedom, I'll call this stride of mine. Freedom and fury.
Fable is flying over head and when I tilt my head back to look at him I think I'll call the way he's flying low enough to cut long tracks in the dirt with his tail: lighting. The wind he's brushing towards us feels electric. I can feel both curiosity and something monstrous floating up in the air around him. Potential perhaps-- although sometimes I can't name the terrible things we have the potential for, it cuts too deeply to known it. Ahead the bright-eyed thing in the grass is hissing out the song my heart-knows and Fable keens softly back in both warning and commiseration.
We understand, beast, we understand.
“It could be anything.” I answer, although what I want to say is, I could make it anything. I could make it a wolf to eat our hearts. I could make it a deer to run fleet footed away from my dragon starting to circle back towards it. I could make it into a bear pale as the bones aching with a memory under my skin. My arrow brushes against my side like it's warning me. Or maybe it's just hungry. The moon is always hungry these days, always.
I step closer, because what's growling in my heart is louder than this mangy, beaten down thing. Part of me hopes it will snarl or lunge. Another part of me wants to tap my horn across its brow and whisper things like, become and you are mine now..
And I know when I turn towards her and ask, “would you like to save it?”, I sound more like a god than I ever have before. My heart smiles.
@Callynite | "speaks" | notes: <3
