The market feels like a creature tonight. It has a weight to it that reminds me of flesh, and fur, and claw. The noise it makes, a hundred voices layered on top of each other like the night sky, sounds more like the lumbering roars of a monster’s hunger than the sounds of life. If there is music I cannot pluck it loose from the din enough to make out a single word of it.
But I do not need to hear the words, or the chorus, to know that the sound of the song is one of joy. A joy so bright and vibrant that I wonder how the moon and all her pale and silver glory can hold it. I think perhaps I should linger in the crowds and lose myself to that song so that I might rediscover how it feels to be too bright for the night to carry.
I should. But I don’t.
I don’t think I want to be bright anymore. I don’t think I want to be gold, or silver, or any other color that this fragile city can name. I want to be the market with a hundred voices, a hundred songs, layered over my bones so that I am both as terrifying as a god and as unknowable as one. Perhaps then those that watched my mother sail off to war, with a child at her side and a dragon above her head, would not see Isra each time they looked at me.
It has been a very long time since I have been anything like my mother. None of my stories, when I whisper them into Foras’s ear, have endings like hers. All of my stories end with the sea.
Tonight though, I am in the belly of the market creature, and their fur is a warm shield around me. The market makes me forget that I began and ended with the sea in the story Foras is still remembering as he walks at my shoulder. We are still remembering it when we pull that fur around us and press close to the fires and the song of joy (the one that I can hear echoes of love in as I draw closer).
Firelight halos my horn and I do not need to look up to know how wicked, how like my mother’s it seems, when a boy lingers too long on the tip of it. Nor do I need to know how each step my wolf and I take as we dance has no echo of the song in it. I do not need to watch my shadow know that when I dance it is like a tide pressing up against the icy shoreline of a wolf.
I do not need to look to see my soul draped across the outside of me when I dance.
@Layla <3
