It's easier to hold fire between them than it was to hold the straining melody of a golden harp.
Violence is easier than softness. It's easier to bite than love, and it tastes like spice and soot on her tongue when she grabs at this hot, wild thing rising incorporeal between them. Isra chews and the sharks are still swimming in the two salt-water pits in her head. The magic in her bones reaches out towards the black thoughts living in the small spaces between a girl with a horn and a girl with wings.
And then her magic takes the violence between its sharp teeth and worries at it like a bone.
Isra smiles. All the love in her lips has grown cold like winter and sharp like steel and she's a lovely sort of weapon when she takes a mouthful of sand and mixes it with spit. She brushes the spit and sand across Marisol's brow and down the elegant slope of the jaw she sometimes sees in her dream.
And when she pulls away all the sand turns to paint. Marisol is covered in paint as red and glittering as fresh blood, a true beast of violence instead of a girl with secret tears in her eyes. She looks like a Commander and Isra looks like a weapon.
Isra thinks she likes them better like this-- ruby-eyed monsters waiting, and waiting, and waiting in the darkness. Her smile is a weapon's smile when she says, “follow me.”
The darkness pulls back from her like a ship pulling away from the swells of a storm plagued sea. She does not think to miss it, not when the sand quivers at her hooves like grass quivering for rain. Her magic waters it, turns it not to mud but to fire opals as red as the war-paint on Maisol's cheek. She laughs as a that sea of stone spreads out from them like a pathway through a thick wood. It blazes bright in the sun like an eternal, cold fire.
Soldiers turn to look at her now and Isra laughs when she sees the way they cannot decide if they are angry, afraid, or full of wonder. Some part of her, that monstrous part, hopes that they land on anger and violence instead of fear. Magic turns the pathway of rubies to metal flowers sharp and pointed skyward in the places where soldiers are starting to draw their weapons. She will cripple them before they think to give chase.
“How much fruit do you think we can prune?” There is wickedness in her smile now, sea monsters in her eyes, and magic leaking like a oil from her voice. The ground becomes sand again when she kicks her hooves up into a gallop through the streets thick with dust and suffering.
There's a tree up ahead and Isra plans on cutting it down.
@
