'hope is the thing with feathers that perches inside the soul and sings a tune without words'
The night is just rising above the day when she moves towards the castle steps. The moon looks ice cold where it shines on the blood that still covers her skin in lingering memories of the violent sea waters and the collapse of all her fresh-faced dreams. Isra's hooves are heavy as she walks and the chain about her leg sounds not like bells of freedom but the heavy sighs of sorrow, cased in rust and ringing with dread sharp echoes.
Each step brings a memory; stories dripped in blood and tears, laments of loss and fragile spider webs of hope (silken and dusted with dewdrops of sadness). Isra walks on, slow through the sludge of her fear and suffering, hoping that her chain-song might, like a pied piper, draw those left through the wreckage of the tsunami to her side.
And when she alights the topmost steps of the castle she turns to them all, crusted in blood and tears and stars to speak with all the white-hot sorrow of a falling star-- glittering and fleeting and waiting for a wish. “I have no grand words to offer you. There is nothing to soothe away the corpses of those we lost, nothing for the destruction we are left to live in. I have nothing to offer you but a story.” Oh, she feels as if she should smile as a queen might or like a princess who braved the darkness to look up at the constellations and draw legends between the flickering stars.
Isra only has tight, chapped lips and a voice made raspy from days of healing and story-telling to offer them. So she offers what she can, headless of the dry fire that burns and burns in her throat. “This is not my skin although perhaps it now belongs more to me than it might belong to the gods or the sea.” It's feels like a cruelty to herself to offer those words, to tear open the black stain of her soul for all the night to drink of. “I was born a slave, a vessel for the joy and violence of others. I was raised in suffering and sorrow and ate only of darkness and loathing when I ate what life had to offer me at all. I ate and ate and ate of the darkest darkness and I learned to hate. I hated myself and life and everything that was bright and lovely and so far from my reach. I hated so much that I tried to drown...” She licks her lips and tastes only salt and the sweet, lingering iron of blood. There's wondering too in the way she pauses, wondering if they see the stain of her, laid bare like violence between a torn open rib-cage.
“But the sea wouldn't let me drown, although it felt like hours that my lungs quivered, full of salt and brine and flotsam. Because I did not drown I rose again, cast upon some distant shore in a body I did not know. The sea or whatever was hidden in the deep, dark places of the ocean floor took from me my body but not my memories” There's a tear lingering in in the shadow cast upon her face by her horn and in the moonlight it looks like a crystal (valuable and fragile all at once). It runs slowly down her face as she continues, making tracks in the dust and blood and memories covering her skin.
“When I came to Novus I stole so that I might live. I was afraid to drown again, to feel that dark of nothingness. I wanted to feel the moonlight, to sing to the stars, to walk and feels the gazes of horses who had no idea who I was, what I was. I didn't want to burn but I burned with you. I felt walls and fear and hopelessness with all of you.” Isra's skin still shivers when she talks of fire.
Her steps when she walks back down the steps are heavy with that endless chain-song, and it peels like a broken freedom chant now, slow and sad with a lonely sort of hopefulness. “And now I stand before you as a once-slave, made a leader by a moment that felt more like a dream than something real. I see destruction and suffering and crumbled wishes that were washed away in the dread sea.” Isra spots that flash of devil-red in the crowd and smiles, a soft hopeful thing. She hopes he knows what to do, what to ask.
And--
When she carries on that gentle smile remains, making it so easy to forget her voice feels like briars crawling up her soul, up her throat until they embed themselves into words upon her salted lips. “I also see something bright in the darkness, something brighter than the north-star. I see stories I hope you will all share with me. I see dreams I hope to dream of beside all of you.”
Isra pauses until she's at the bottom of the castle stairs, in the midst of them all and the last lingering puddles of the sea that rise up to her fetlocks. “All I have to offer you is a promise that I will always give you freedom--- freedom to dream, to love, to explore, to learn, to change. I give you freedom and the truth of me. I am nothing more than a dreamer who has lived a hundred different lives in words and thoughts and wondering.”
In the brightness that grows upon that wistful smile on her face that crystal of a tear turns to star-dust, faint enough to not be seen unless one looks close enough. “Please tell me how to lead you. Tell me who you are or who you want to become. Tell me your dreams...” How heavy her hooves feel now, like molten glass beneath her body. They feel as if they are barely strong enough to hold the fury of hope blooming and growing like a jungle where that black stain of her soul lives.
Silently she prays that they are strong enough to hold up more than just her. Isra prays that they are as strong as the moon, that they might be able to hold up the cloak of night against the fire of the day.
NOTE: This takes place after all the events of the SWP. The timeline I'm currently working with it that the SWP happened so soon after the night of auditions that there was almost no time to get anything done. That way we can keep things going without making it to hard to figure out what to write about.
Please come say hi and let her know what everyone hopes the court might become or how they want to help. <3
