Isra and a salt story
“She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”
“She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”
F
or a moment, nothing longer than a blink of her eyes and the thrum of her broken heart, Isra debates telling Seraphina all the ways in which she knows that her soul has been forever changed. She thinks about telling her how there have been too many days to count in which she debated storming the desert alone. Or how she imagined letting Fable flood the castle until all the ghosts were fat and bloated with saltwater. Isra wants to tell her how the tender parts of her are all the only ones that saved her people from the monster her magic wants her to become. In the end what else but that was stopping her from turning the desert into a jungle and mice into wildcats to feast on the horses that were left behind?
Isra should be grateful for the parts of her that haven't torn through all the ink and paper of her storyteller heart. She should be grateful for all the ways in which she knows she is loved. And most times she is grateful; most times she's happy for it. But looking at Seraphina, with her bloodshot eyes and her tangled mane, makes Isra wonder if the once queen would be happier with no choices left to make.
And when the creature upon Seraphina's shoulders turns to meet her gaze, with eyes redder than a blood moon, Isra only looks back and dares the creature to read all the terrible thoughts floating there on a shallow sea of tenderness. She half hopes the Vulture will starting screaming, monster, monster, monster so that at least one creature in the world can see how monstrous she wants to be sometimes.
Fable rises from the sea and she looks away from those two blood colored holes to look at her dragon. In the end, in all the ends, it's only love that saves Isra-- love of the sea, of Eik, of her city, of innocence, of the twin stars growing inside of her. And maybe it's all the ends that make her a unicorn that is forgetting how to live in any skin but this one. “I refuse to let it be only about survival. Leadership should be about love.” She says and still her eyes to not leave the dragon peeking his head out from between constellations of bright organisms.
Isra is thinking about Eik, and Asterion, and how it felt to touch her skin to theirs and promise that the world could be anything they wanted it to be. And there are those terrible thoughts again--
What is stopping her from remaking it all?
Later she'll tell herself that is was only the water forming shapes around Fable's neck that stopped her from saying how the world is could be only a suggestion. Later she will make up a story to fit all those images to all the ways in which is she changing, and changing and becoming. Now all she does is smile when the shapes dissolve in deep water she remembers the flavor of. “I am a story-teller.” Isra wields those words like five small sharp blades against all the darkness of the world pressing in against the four of them standing on their garden of dead coral.
Each words cuts her open, cleaving all the ways in which she's wondering about terrible, terrible things. And yet it doesn't feel like she's bleeding when she takes a story between her teeth and pulls (the same way she's pulling at everything in this world now). “And that was a story in which all the things we thing we see are really just something else waiting to become.” Just like a queen waiting to become bones, and one waiting to become a weapon of a mother.
And maybe, just maybe, it's a story about a ghost waiting to become blood scattered across the earth like seeds.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3
