“no one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.”
Isra wants to be brave as she follows him and the hallways turn darker and the incline steeper. She longs to feel like she's not walking on grave-stones made slick by ice and coated in the dust of fury. Somewhere along the hallways she begs her bones to not feel fragile, to not walk as if the stone at her hooves are bones mortared together with glass.
Everything about this path seems fragile and the darkness swallows up Acton's smile that could have been the only thing to make her feel braver. Isra craves in this moment to be anything but a trespasser, a dragon-less queen who dreams more often that she lives. Deep in her bones she wants to feel like a conquer, a freedom fighter who looks at walls and feels fury instead of sadness and sorrow.
And just as she's about to turn back and let the ghosts nip at her heels chase her away from this corner of the castle, Acton shoulders open a door and she forgets all her sorrows and her fears.
Isra can only see the books, forgotten and dusty with pages as white and faded as ghost who cling to the place between this life and the next. She's there before him, running her nose over the cobwebs, reading the leather spines with a fervor that makes her unicorn blood sing. “They are so lonely.” Her voice is a whisper and the cobwebs shatter before her sad wonder, as if they are great gates of dust that crumble before the dreamer.
But their story is not finished here. Just as Isra is about to pull down a book, and crack up another world before the hungry sting of her gaze, Acton tugs on another and darkness is reveled and the books drift away from her mind like wishes.
All she can see is darkness and she swallows up that fear when it comes calling again as Acton disappears into that nothingness. When she follow him she has to remind herself she is a unicorn, a queen, a slave and there has not been a thing yet that she did not survive.
Each step in the darkness seems both longer and colder than the last and she's almost forgotten if she's taken one step or a hundred steps in that blackness. And then,
Then,
Then there are flower and starlight and moonbeams that taste like finely spun sugar on her lips when she blooms a smile. Ahead of her the trellis of jasmine and fern and ivy curls upwards like the first page of a book, before the story has really begun. It's beneath that arch that she pauses, horn dancing in the starlight and her chain seems almost empty for the way it hold brittle kelp instead of flowers. “It's good then that flowers are only flowers and their memory is a short and fragile thing that lasts but a season.” Isra tucks the words into a flower as she presses her nose between the petals and tries to forget how he seems made more of gold than moonlight when her eyes stray from the garden to him.
“I will remember it now.” Between the chime of her hooves against the path of stars the words each sound like a note of a song not yet whole. She walks towards the edge of the path, laughing as overgrown flowers brush at the sensitive skin stretched tight over her rib-cage.
And when she looks at him again with no flowers to hide the shyness in her cheeks and lips, she is the one who has to catch her breath.
@Acton
