Isra who is not a howling wolf
“The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.”
“The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.”
W
inter is a wolf across the meadow. Isra, as she waits fetlock deep in the snow, wonders if the eclipse is bringing it upon them like the moon brings saltwater to the shore. The wind is whipping against her skin even as the red moon is calling up something that lashes against her bones. Whatever it is needs distance and it needs it fast. Isra looking at that smear of blood across the black, feels like she could step out of her skin and make her way to the moon. She feels like she could walk across a staircase of snowflakes to a balcony of wind and pull that red orb down from the sky until everything is silver and shining again.
She's so sick of red, blood-red. Nothing good has ever come for her with only red over its spine.
So she watches the stars dance and chant from a distance and she tries so very hard to feel a little bit of wonder and religion. But all she can feel is winter on her back and icy snow cutting sharply at her skin and she thinks that she's used up all her wonder for the night already.
But then her dragon lands upon the snow and the wind whips at her harder where he's shoved it out of his way like a wave shoving a stone. Isra smiles and cants her head back a little further until it's not blood-red that she sees but green frothed and dipped and pearl. I bet I could go to the moon. Fable smiles as dragons do, all teeth and scale, but Isra is blind to the sharpness of his teeth and the way his eyes glow like sick moons in their sockets. All she can see is love draping a wing over her until the snow is falling all around her instead of across her back.
The wind that reaches her smells like brine then. That lashing thing quivers and settles against her marrow. And this time when she looks at the moon shining like blood in the sky, she sees fire instead of death, and the moon swallowing the sun bleeding it dry.
“Someday.” She tells her dragon as she lays her cheek across his shoulder. Someday
Isra is still thinking of that someday when she turns at the flash of Moira against the snow. Fable lifts his wing even as Isra waves her horn until her hole body is saying, Come closer, sister. The snow cuts at her skin a little less when she pulls away from her dragon and towards another name etched across her heart. “I missed you.” Isra lets her voice be swallowed up by the wolf of winter howling below the moon.
She knows that there are not enough words known by her tongue and her teeth to say all the ways in which she has missed Moira. And so she lets the howling wind say all the words with a fierceness she could never possess.
@Moira | "speaks" | notes: I have also missed all your words
