☼ ISHAK ☼اسحاق
"Well time has a way of throwing it all in your face / The past, she is haunted, the future is laced"
"Well time has a way of throwing it all in your face / The past, she is haunted, the future is laced"
At first, there is no response forthcoming to your call.
It is a long moment in which you stand, hooves on gleaming shards. The jagged grove you’ve stopped in reminds you more of a maw than anything green. The crystal shards here claw against the sky, taller even than you. To your left, there is a thin and winding path that would take you even deeper. In curved and gleaming arcs, the spires seem to twist together as your eyes follow down them.
You look away.
To your right is the gap you thought you saw Ruth through. Slightly to the left of that, not quite ahead of you, is a proper opening for a path.
You take a deep breath, let it fill your lungs and sit there. You exhale. You were born for desert sands, for the shift in terrain and you remind yourself of this. This maze is nothing but the shift. You tell that to yourself the same way you told yourself you have not lost Ruth; she is merely not here.
You train your eyes on that opening, and your patience is rewarded.
Emerging from it, now, is Ruth. Stone and bone and living blood, Ruth. She stands there in the entrance, gold eyes sweeping over you. You watch the light breaking over her, the wash of reflected, refracted sunlight on her coat. The play of sunlight is something the crystals never seem to get quite right.
She steps towards you, “Ishak? Is that you?” You watch her approach, tentative in a way you’ve never seen her. How many versions of you, of herself, has she had to see that she’d rather not? How many versions of herself had bloodied hooves, had lives that lived up to the Ieshans’ fiction of a snake? How many versions of yourself left her dead and how many instead stand with her?
(Over her head, you can see your flipbook-self again. He’s in rough charcoal; he’s in vivid color. He’s in a spiderweb of cracks, of a thousand pieces of you making up him. He’s bloodied now, but you know somehow it isn’t his. From the shadows, bloodied-hooves Ruth trots out. She smiles with too many, bloody teeth. He doesn’t turn away from her, and you give him credit for that, at least.)
She stops directly in front of you, and you lower your head to meet her eyes better. “You’re— the real one, aren’t you?” You don’t like the hesitant note to her voice. Slowly, deliberately, she presses her muzzle to your shoulder.
For the first time since you’ve been alone in this maze, you feel like something of substance. Just existing here is still draining, but you feel less like it is trying to devour you, bit by bit. It’s been a lonely walk to get here, and it’ll be a long one to get out.
Gently, you start to braid a piece of Ruth’s mane in the three-fold pattern you first learned as a foal. It’s a nice moment to exist in, but you do have more pressing concerns.
“How about we go home?” you ask, voice soft. You finish the braid with a twist that will hold it only as long as Ruth does nothing that moves it much. Which includes walking, so not long at all.
“And I’m so sorry to say it, but if you haven’t found those plants you wanted to sample, I’m vetoing looking around longer for them.” You look up, consideringly, “You have any thoughts on which way back?”
The wind howls through the crystals, but no longer does it sound like the whistle of a blade or the scrape against a sheath. It sounds like the wind in the night, hollowing out the dunes. It sounds like home.
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