Isra who cannot sing a song
“A war story is a black space.”
“A war story is a black space.”
D
eep in the sea, under all that glowing blue and beyond the black-glass, Fable is singing her a song. She can hear each note of it in her soul, in the rush of her blood that is starting to sound like a wave when it echoes against her bones that feel so very hollow. Her skin is itching with the melody and it feels a little like salt has dried on her skin, as if she's nothing more than a bit of dead coral washed up on the shore of a cursed island. She knows, deep down (deeper into the black than Fable is), that the song should feel like a storm sea. It should make her happy. Isra looks out towards the glowing blue, and the black, and the moon that seems paler than it should, and tries to tell herself that she is almost happy. There are still two small stars listening to Fable's song with her, two more hearts beating to the same drum-beat of her terrible magic and broken heart.
But there are glints of gold dancing off the glass in the corner of her gaze and Isra cannot bring herself to feel even a shred of anything other than sorrow, and hate. And still she does not look at Seraphina and tell her not to worry, that she's going to become monster enough for the two of them. Does she need too, when she can still feel Eik's touch weeks later?
So she only lets that silence between them drag out, broken up by the dull sound the sea makes against glass and by that song that only she can hear. And she tries to keep the storm out of her gaze when she turns back to Seraphina with her haunted eyes.
Isra does not tell her that she's going to save her, or that she can already feel the acid burn of all the blood she's going to drink. Instead she steps closer and turns the glass to smoothed down dead coral. Isra wants to brush their shoulders together so that she might remember that she is not the only dying rose in the garden growing thorns. But in the end she does nothing more than rest a single hoof against a sharp ridge of coral and inhale deep enough to taste brine and metal on her tongue.
And when she says, "Will we ever be well again?”, instead of giving an answer, that too feels as right between them as all that smooth, dead coral making a bone-white garden around them. Fable stops singing and her heart stops beating to a song she doesn't feel like hearing.
Isra looks up at the golden claw marks cleaving the darkness of Seraphina's face. She does not blink. “Have you come for Raum as well?” The space between her teeth feels hungry when she asks and her magic starts to snarl like a wildcat in her chest.
Fable starts to sing another song in the ocean only the two of them know. When he lifts his head from the sea and swims towards the blue iridescence, he thinks its looks like stars have been caught in the sea. Isra, when she inhales and tries not too feel so much like violence poised on a edge, agrees.
But she does not know if Seraphina would, even if she could hear the song.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3
