Isra and the diamond snowflakes
“Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,”
“Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,”
E
verything in her settles like the snow collecting on the dragon wing above their head. She's a pile words and each is a snowflake, a pit of winter-white ink, that shines crystal bright in the golden glow of her heart. She's winter, she's a birch tree coated in ice, she's a spire of an a sleeping oak in a forest of pines. Isra wants to howl like a wolf under a solstice moon-bright night. And when she brushes her nose across Illu's delicate brow, and begins her story, there is a heaviness in her words that promises all the musk and forest wonder of a wolf den full with slumbering young. “When the earth was young and the sky was nothing more than a stretch of blue, each of them spent their hours looking at the other. The sky fell in love with the earth. He loved her for her elegant throat of mountain-stone, for her skin of green grass in which deer looked like freckles as they slumbered under his sun.” Under her skin her heart surges with joy to be full of a story instead of a war. Here beneath snow and dragon wing, with the wind howling like a pack of euphoric wolves, Isra feels like she used to.
It feels like dreaming, like the snow is taking all her wishes and sending them back to the sky where the terrible gods might be listening. She almost had forgotten how her chest felt when peace and love lasted for longer than a stolen second.
Isra inhales, and begins again. The snow is falling harder now and her breath curls out from between her lips like sea-salted smoke. “And the earth loved the sky with his blue endlessness that kept all her freckles, and her sea, tinged golden and glowing. They each wanted to give each other a token of the love in their cores. So the sky took from space a bit of coldness and from the sea a bit of mist, and he made with it snow. He draped it over the earth's mountain-stone neck like a ring of pearls. The entire universe could see how much she loved it, because she asked for more and more snow to share with all the creatures that called her home.” Isra laughs on an exhale when Fable tips his wing until all the snow gathering there falls like love once fell from the sky to the earth. She understands what he means, even if his words, still young and fresh from sorrow, cannot form the words between them.
She looks at Illu, and hopes that the girl will understand too. Even if all they had was snow falling around and wind looking to cool their skin, it would be enough. She inhales the smell of smoke and winter hanging on the foal's shoulder. She smiles and her eyes shine with all the depth and endless of the sea that made them.
“What do you think the earth gave back to the sky?” She asks, because there is nothing that kept her innocence unbroken the way a good story did. If nothing else she wanted to teach Illu the strength to be found in wonder, and magic, and in snow caught on the pine trees.
@Illu | "speaks" | notes: <3
