No matter how many miles I am from the war, or the night-sky, or the memory of blood blooming on the sand like roots in spring, my heart does not silence its wolf-howl or its lion-roar. Even the line sketching black across the horizon, broken up by the sharp shard points of my mountains, does not settle the bottomless war-song.
I wish it would. I wish I could settle my bones into the petal-soft shape of peace, or love, or eternity. I wish I could reform the monster rooting along my bones into something gentler like mothers are supposed to be.
But I am sharp. I have been made sharp by evil things, and fire, and a hunger that has burrowed into my soul like worms.
The brightness that flashes white as sea-foam behind my eyes each time I close them will never stop reminding me. I do not know how to be dull. A war has not whittled down my edges, even when everyone told me it would.
'
Fable still tries. Just as he does now as he rises from the sea to rinse the last of the desert sand from the crease of my spine and the tangles in my mane. I smile at him, the gentlest thing I still know how to do, and both of us turn to look at the horizon as that black line thickens and color starts to paint itself over it like the dawn over the night. My ship trembles and changes from cypress to marble and back again before it can start to sink.
Time starts to trickle back in, hours turned to minutes that race over my heart and pour into my lungs like water. How silly it seems, that it's time that makes my spine ache again where gore and conquest could not. But I remind myself that I am sharp, and iron, and stone. There is nothing that can drown me, not here, not home.
I laugh, knowing that the two bits of my heart waiting below the deck will hear the new lightness it in (like one of the arrows shimmering across my shoulder) and know we are so close. It won't be long now.
I still don't know how to wait, or be patient, or be anything but war-wild now.
The deck creaks below me when I leap from it. And the air billows and howls though my horn, and my tangles, and my chain, as I plummet into the waves with a dragon close behind me (a happy roar dying in the waves as he sinks into them).The water welcomes me home even as it twists and twines around my legs like snakes as I swim for the shore.
And this time I am not spit up by the waves onto the shore of Novus.
This time I rise from them. We rise from them.
I am them.
