Isra and the fallen constellations
“sing me a song I can never learn”
“sing me a song I can never learn”
T
his a a story I have heard only in whispers caught in the currents of the night (somewhere between stardust and cedar smoke). Perhaps if I trusted the gods, or perhaps if I did not have this terrible stream of silver magic running beneath my own skin, I would have listened closer. Perhaps I would have followed the cracks in the earth and the god-blood river instead of a war.
But I am so full of war-stories, and elk-stories, and owl-in-the-rain-stories, that I do not have room between my teeth for another seed of a tale. My soul is bloated with all the things living in this universe tumbling over and over again inside me.
I am dreaming of a bison herd and snow thick enough to sink knee deep into as I wander through the bent fall grass of the prairie. I am dreaming of frost on my eyelashes like tears, and of sailing on a sea that exists only in the places where my soul ebbs against Eik's. The earth carries on only beneath my hooves as I close my eyes to anything but the dreams stretching cobweb and paper-thin in the blackness. Their tendrils crawl underneath by skin like salt-water and seaweed.
I am lost to to the feel of them. Lost,
Lost,
Lost,
Until Fable rattles the ground beneath me as he lands beside me. There is seawater clinging to his wings and I know, before I open my eyes, that the drops of it will ring my horn like a crown and dust my eyelashes in diamond-salt. When I do open my eyes (because he has begged it of me) I don't see the tree bark, or the salt-stones, or the shadows of a bison herd flickering at the edge of my vision like phantoms.
I see only the leaves of the tree upon which bloody flowers are nestled like newborn sparrows in a nest of starlight. And I know enough about the stars (how they are chewed up and spit out by teeth instead of lips) that I do not need to feel my own magic to know what has born this mark upon the prairie. There are lines between the star-leaves, where the branches shine through with twilight lilac and lapis blue, that whisper bits of the forgotten story to me.
The story the tree whispers is a discordant thing (as broken and jagged as my soul when it forgets how to sing). I can feel the struggle in the beauty of it, in the way the grasses still sway like grass instead of gold-leaf in the crisp autumn wind. So I lay down in the grass that does not billow like a cloud because I know how it feels to be cracked in a million dark lines in which the light only barely shines through. Fable curls around us both the tree and I.
I rest my cheek against the twilight bark even when stardust pollen falls from the leaves and the flowers. And I listen to the muted roar of the silver river with the solar tree singing its ragged song to me like a hallelujah.
@Random Events | "speaks" | notes: <3
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