“I don’t know if I can put it into words just yet, this feeling like something’s ending.”
There has always been something religious about my castle. Even before it was mine, when I had roamed along the shadow of it like a mouse, there had been holiness in the scripture of stained-glass thin enough pull down the moon-glow. My heart breaks a little more, when I tilt my head back so far that my spine aches, to see the moon shining through all the colors now. Outside I know it'll be full and silver, but here in the entrance of my castle, it's blue, and gold, and red, and more colors than I know how to name.
I wish the moon called to me like the sea does. I wish I could feel the pull of the waxing and waning and nothing of the tide. I wish. On a hundred falling stars, on the constellations that will lament their death, I wish.
And I know I shouldn't because war has no place for wishes.
War is for being cold, and cruel, and hungry as a lion full with only stones in her belly. So I must be the winter now. I must be the deep, black sea where there is no light and only evolution. I must evolve. Even as I trace my nose across the gemstones embedded in the oak doors of my old castle, I must evolve. The universe needs me to become, to be winter and wrath, to be everything that makes evil men tremble like leaves in the storm of me.
“I am the storm.” Maybe if I whisper it to the quartz and the pearl I will believe it. Maybe if I say it over and over again until my blood howls it. Maybe if I just pull the moon down with a noose woven with the words it won't seem such an awful thing to be.
Maybe--
Antiope's steps break my focus. She sounds like a war-drum coming down the hall and it reminds me that I have no more time to linger in the golden and red moonlight and ache. I am out of time. Outside the bells are ringing and there is no time left for me to linger with my nose against stones old enough that my magic does not want to devour them. “Antiope” I say her name, because I don't know what else to say, because I don't know if there are any other words my voice will not trip on.
The doors open before me, before us (the queens, for one final moment, the queens). Out here the moonlight is silver, and cold, and it makes me miss the gold and red. It makes me miss the holiness of my castle. But it's not mine, not anymore, and so I don't look back as my hooves start to move over the stones in a rhythm far steadier than my heartbeat. I hope I sound like a war too, like a drum, like thunder roaring across the horizon.
I hope I sound as fearless as a bolt of lightning reaching for a distant tree.
The sea sounds so close now, a dull roar in my ear, a whisper in my veins telling me that it's time to come home. I think that if Eik was not wanting for me on our ship that I might walk into the tide, and run along the ocean floor until I dissolved into salt, and brine, and sea-foam as pure as a star. My ears are still echoing with the call of the sea, when I brush my nose across Antiope's shoulder. “Promise me you will love her.” I do not say, more than I was able to, but the words live in the way my hair reaches only towards the docks when the winter wind whips at our backs. And maybe, maybe it's in the way my eyes are looking only forward, only onward, only to a shore that I will raze.
For a moment, when the wind sings through my horn like a siren, I want to turn back and throw myself into the dark mountain forest, and the bottom of the lake, and dance around the fires until my legs become roots holding me here. For a moment I want to stay, I want to run back to my castle, and my children, and the fate I am too broken to hold on too.
It's slipping past me. It's too fast to catch.
I walk on because it's the only thing I know how to make myself too. I walk on because I am a storm and storms only thunder into the wind and roar against the cliffs. But I pause, just long enough for my lungs to tremble and my magic to scream. I want to cry. I inhale like I want to say something more but the words have slipped past me like fate has.
I exhale. I exhale. I exhale because the wind is the only part of Denocte that can hold me now.
And everything, every house and every brick below our hooves, turns to moonstone speckled with constellations of diamonds. The bells almost echo hollow of the beauty of it, my last gift to the city I could not love enough to stay.
@Antiope
{ So I love you all, and this thread will eventually open up for everyone to join Isra on her walk towards the dock, and say their goodbyes. However I just need to get a few more posts between her and Antiope done first. <3 }
