Isra is fresh from the fire when she finally makes it to the festival. Her lashes are heavy with soot and ash and her tears have made riverbeds from the thick gray that looks like stone in the hollows of her cheeks. Frothy sweat clings to her shoulders like sea-foam and the leaves tangled in her mane could be seaweed for how dark they've grown through all the lands she's ran across.
On and on she ran, ignoring the frantic beat of her heart how it pleaded to stop, to rest. Even her lungs, when they burned like acid in her chest, could not stop those wild legs of her from running until they broke.
A desert clings to that hollow of her spine. Swamp mud clings to her legs and swallows up that bell-chime rattle of her slave chain. Even the stars cling to her. Though she hates the jasmine and spice of that distant night court and all it's demons, she can't quite get the hint of it off her skin.
It's only the sight of the festival, of the peace of horses with flowers upon their brows and glitter on their skin, that stops that frantic fleeing of her legs.
She's still cautious as she joins them, afraid of what monsters might lurk behind these faces that look so much like hers. Only the children don't send her slipping back for those soothing shadows of the forest. They braid flowers into her hair and draw long swooping swirls of glitter across the places of her body that look too tired and battered to be lovely. Soon she's no longer that sweaty, battered and smoke-stained ghost of a girl.
The children make a mermaid of her, a creature of scales and flowers. Isra looks more like some fantasy of the deep with the way she sparkles like the sea as the sky turns dusky. They even paint her chain to hide the rust and horror of it. It shines like the moon and rings like a falling star as she lays down to rest in the sweet summer grass.
Perhaps it's because their lack of pretense that for that first time since she drowned in the sea that words and images boil and seethe on the tip of her tongue. There is a sea of stories in her, risen up from that locked box of her past. They push and push and push at her lips.
And so she says, neck arched out to touch the nose of each child that she welcomes closer to her throne of grass and flowers. “I have a story to tell you.” Gone is that ghost of a girl and she whispers like every word she says is secret. The grass under her bends with the breeze of her breath and for a moment the meadow seems hushed, poised on the inhale of her lugs.
All the children resting around her wait, bodies quivering with that wildness that grows in Isra's smile as she looks way out over their heads. She looks as if she has spotted something grand and beautiful that only she can see, something as elegant as it is tragic.
“Once there was a girl and a sea and they both lived in a world covered in monsters and devils. There was very little kindness in this world, for it was as harsh and brutal as the sun that ruled over it. The sun never faded, never faltered and everything in that world was dull with dust and drier that any desert in Novus. Only the sea could withstand the sun and the girl often went to him for just a moment of respite from the deadly heat of her homeland.” Her voice is nothing more than a springtime breeze, a hint of warmth in a sea of ice. Only her eyes are loud and they blaze with her words. An entire galaxy could be seen in that ocean-blue if someone met her gaze at just the right angle.
And in the pause of her story her eyes look up, meeting a gaze that was not there when she started.
She smiles, forgetting for a moment that she is afraid of the older horses of this world, afraid of the terrible potential of them all. That smile seems to beckon and the scales on her sides seem to shine just a little brighter, a little bolder.
For a moment, as she waits for them to join her gathering or continue on to the blazing bonfires, Isra seems as if she could be a siren.
– as if she could be of that sea that lives now only in the magic of her voice.
* * * * * fire in the water is the body of our love
Lysander sees the galaxy in those ocean-colored eyes.
The first thing he had been caught by was her voice, the rhythm of it, the way it rose and fell like the waves. The once-god did not doubt that the girl in the story knew well the sea; the familiarity of it was there in her voice, deep as a trench, glimmering on the surface.
Oh, how he did love a story and its teller.
It drew him in until he was standing just outside the circle of children, their attention rapt on her, all of them looking like fae creatures of the meadow with glitter on their skin and flowers in their hair.
Though the memory of the last festival was still hard in his mind and written in a pale scar just behind his ribs, Lysander could not help but fall a little in love with this one. It reminded him so of home.
She did, too, this stranger whose voice wove an enchantment, whose body was stardust and the dark beneath the waves. If Florentine was an anthousai, this storyteller was something else. A Nereid, far from her waves.
When she glanced up and met his deep green gaze, Lysander swept aside whatever destination he’d had in mind in favor of this small circle of magic in the growing dark. With the slightest of nods, a smile like a secret, he bedded down in the grass behind the foals and waited, just as rapt as they, for her to continue.
Isra feels a moment of fear as she pauses long enough for it to seem as if she has forgotten the words of her story. It's long enough for her to see those tines upon his head, to wonder if perhaps they are a weapon and he a monster like the other horses of his place. Her inhale is short, as feathery as a butterfly wings and full of panic.
There is no shelter here, no place that she has left to run.
But a child, close enough to see the white that widens her gaze, is young enough to ignore the fear in her gaze. They bleat a complaint at her, demanding in an innocent voice that she continues. Isra has no choice but to comply and seeing all the glitter, paint and flowers covering their delicate skin has the words rattling wildly behind her lips again.
Her eyes though, stare only the the grass, only at the children. She looks everywhere but at the man in the back of the gathering and the sharp tips of his horn.
“For months the girl went to the sea. From his depths he gave her fish and seaweeds, enough to feed her family waiting for her. The sun was killing them, drying up their skin until they felt as if they too might turn to dust. Only the girl kept them alive, only her and the gifts of the sea kept them from dying beneath that sun that never faded. Every day she would thank him and linger waist-deep in his waves a littler longer. He told her stories and spoke in whispers of whitewater and waves and sand that sounded like music where her hooves sunk into in.” Isra pauses, enough to take a single breath, to show that she was alive and just a horse. For when she speaks she becomes a story, a tangle of words between pages of flesh, that once closed will be left to rot in some dark corner of a shelf.
Still her eyes never raise and the grass blurs and shifts to an echo of the world created only the small bright places that have been left in her mind. The places all the darkness and pain could never consume.
“The ocean began to love the girl and she began to love the sea. But that sun, that vicious cruel sun, could spare none of his people for the sea. And so he blazed brighter, hotter and the world started to burn. Places once protected by the waves were left bare to crack and dry and die. Even the girl's family did not survive. For one day when she came back from the ocean there were only flames to great her, flames and the smiling, angry sun.” A tear makes it way down her cheeks and the paint bleeds where it meets the salted water of her sorrow.
“And so the girl ran back to the waves, begging the sea with her sadness and loss to do something, to rise up and swallow all the dry sands. But he told her he could not for he had no tides to pull his waves past the boundaries he had for years. And so she turned and cursed the sun that watched them with a smile on his fiery face. 'I will end you' she promised, and the sun sparked with laughter for this weak, shell of girl who though she could end him.” Another pause, another butterfly inhale of her lungs still raw with smoke and panic and endless running.
Still her ocean eyes watch only the grass, only the way it sways like a tide under the force of her words.
“Curses have always been powerful things, dangerous things. A curse made of love and sorrow is the most dangerous curse you could ever say.” Isra remembers curses, she remembers dying.
“And so with the curse still on her lips and tasting of ash the girl turned back to the sea that she loved so. She plunged into the waves, whispering too all that sand and whitewater that it might take what it wanted of her. She offered the waves enough love and rage and power to create a tide. But the sea knew he could not end the sun alone, couldn't avenge his love so easily. And so he took her deep into his dark and covered her in pearls and barnacles. He made her a body of sand and made her glow like the sun upon his waves. He remade her and cast her out, throwing her high enough that the sky caught her.
But she was different, made lovely and powerful by the ocean's dedication to her. She became the moon, and the darkness of her sorrow consumed the sun, pushed him down, down, down past the horizon. The world was allowed to heal in her coolness, the fires died out and moon-flowers started to grow, to open and turn their faces up to her. Her power was great enough to drag the sea out, pull him towards her. Never close enough to reach though, never close enough to press a kiss into his salt and brine again.” Another tear runs down her face and Isra thinks she is as cursed to fade away in sadness as the moon.
“And that is how the moon and the tides came to be. Only they could stop the sun from burning the world. Eventually he returned, tamed by his defeat and made humble by the love that even he could no stop from being. But he never could end the moon and her night completely and every day she rises again to chase away the heat.”
Finally Isra lifts her eyes, the paint faded with tears and that spark in her eyes made dull by the shadows of shifting sun. She looks only to the children, and she smiles (choosing still to ignore those deadly horns in the back of the group). It's a secret of a smile, one that has forgotten how to know joy, to split wide in laughter. “They still say that if you find a moon-flower and offer it to the moon that she might grant you a wish.” The children move quickly then, whispering to each other of what wishes they might wish, what great heroes they might become.
Isra watches the man at the back as they depart, half hoping that he will go with the children and leave her to the hollowness that overtakes her at the end of every story.
Oh, he would be sorry to know of her fear, to know she wonders if he is yet another pretty monster.
The danger of Lysander has never been physical; no longer does he feel like a stranger in this skin of copper-gold, but Calliope was right when she thought his antlers useless, a waste of a weapon. It was not his way.
Nor is it his way to frighten such a girl as she. No, he had once sought to comfort the sorrowers and storytellers, the lovely and the weak. To help them feel alive, feel free.
He does not need to see the chain she still wears to know she does not think herself free.
Lysander rests easy in the waving grass as she continues her story. His gaze is languid as it slips over the children, as it touches again and again to the teller. He listens well to her tale, lets himself be carried away on the tide of it; still he does not miss each change in tone. Neither does he miss her tears, which echo in his heart if not his eyes. The once-god can’t remember ever crying; perhaps even now he is not mortal enough.
As her story draws to a close, a smile grows and grows on his dark lips, reflects in his green eyes. Even as his heart rests full and heavy in his chest at the conclusion of the tale (he has a Roman’s undeniable love of tragedy) he is joyful to have heard it, joyful to have been carried home on the current of her words, even for a moment. He does not mind that her eyes never touch his again.
When the children disperse Lysander climbs back to his feet and stretches, catlike, before making his way toward the girl who glimmers and shines like the moon’s reflection on the water.
“That was a wonderful story. How lucky the sea was, to have the love of such a girl.” He does not press in close to her; he lets his voice carry instead, easy and appreciative.
There is only curiosity in his gaze when he looks at her, only kindness, only an offer.
“I imagine she looks a little like you,” he says, and if he wonders if there were other truths contained in her tale, he says nothing of them.
Without her shields of words and children she is adrift.
Isra feels as if could be at sea as that man's gaze meets her own and he rises like a swell onto his feet. He is a tidal wave and she the deep, the stones and weeds and barnacles lost to drifts on the tides. She is as homeless as those ocean vagrants, left to sway and ebb and touch the shoreline just to be ripped away and swallowed up the dark again.
When he comes closer, standing above her with his horns glinting like tines of a trident she too rises to her feet. Isra has always forgotten that the horn upon her brow could be a weapon. She doesn't know that she could cut out his eye or flay his flesh to save to her own.
Isra only knows that he is a man and all the ones she has known are monsters. So she slides back into the shadow of the tree at her back and leans lightly into the knotted bark just to feel the sting of it. It lets her know she's alive.
Sometime she forgets, like when she looks into the stallion's amber eyes that seem deeper than her soul and every part of the sea, that she is no ghost. The night court made her feel like nothing, like the one broken thing in a world that talked so easy of walls and fires.
Her eyes, sea-foam and sunlit salt water, slide away from the pressure of the endlessness of his stare. He's too hard to hold in a look. She slides her rib-cage against the tree. Her chain sounds like a bell and it peels gently out even as dried glitter and paint fleck from her flesh like brine. The bark catches in the places where she's too thin, too fragile and weary to be real.
“Was he lucky though?” Her voice is a whisper of words, a soft, silver dusting of moonlight in a world lit by hot, summer sun. “In the end she's nothing more than a pile of rock lost in the space far beyond the earth and he is more chained to the mortal realm that any man.” A man at least can die. She doesn't say the words. The strength for them is far beyond her-- the scale flaked girl who was denied her death by the sea.
After her story there is so much beyond her. The words take so much from her. For each world she makes, each legend she spreads the words take from her the pound of flesh required to be summoned.
Isra is suddenly exhausted, weary from the fire at her back, the way the children took with them all her hope and the way the sun seems more unending than the one that lived only on her lips. She's parched and her skin is the dried, dead dirt from her story.
It's weary words that fall from her lips then and she sways against the tree, weak-kneed and as wavering as a specter of the past. “If she looked like me I'm sorry for her.” There's no beauty left in this skin of hers, gaunt as a winter tree bare of all it's leaves and and flowers. Only the echo of pain is left as if her soul has crept through like a sickness to devour this new flesh of hers.
Perhaps there is more she might say, whispers of words swallowed up by the weariness of her. Isra feels like she should. She feels as if that deep endless stare of his might take them from her anyway if she but looked back up at him and away from the safety of the grass at her feet.
In the end Isra isn't brave enough, real enough, to do more than close her eyes in a snowfall of glitter and pretend that he might be nothing more than any god given flesh and thought by the power of her words. Only the butterfly catch of the breaths though her lungs hint that there is more she might want to say at all.
If only she had the courage.
* * * * * oh you flightless bird, dead upon the ground
Once upon a time Lysander was nothing at all like a man. Oh, he had the shape of one, shoulders broad and tousled hair, laughing mouth and laughing eyes – but his heart was not a man’s heart, if he had a heart at all.
What had that made him, then? Were gods just as good at being monsters? Perhaps he was one, depending on the side of the story you looked at. Certainly on those true-dark nights when the only light was the flames, and those were fed higher and higher until they burned and ate at the bottom of the stars, he must have been a terrifying thing. Not on his own, merry and sly, but because of the creatures around him. In daylight they were women but on those nights, oh, they were so much more, feral and bloody-handed.
At the beginning it was not so different than this – there was music, there was wine, there were voices weaving spells of stories long into the night. And then (he can remember it still, and it quickens his blood, hot hot hot with memory) the night became a thing no longer for mortals.
Would she have fit in there? Would she have let herself become more? Lysander wonders. Maybe the both of them are less, here. Certainly he is, skin like paper and brittle-boned.
So they stand together, the girl who wears a weapon she forgets and the man who forfeited his power for his own curiosity. (They are alike in this way, too: he also forgets what it means to be real). He watches her step back into the rough embrace of the bark, and wonders what she might do if he were to close the space she opened between them.
Instead he shifts his weight, stands hip-cocked and considering. His gaze had been on the chain, caught like any curious thing by the sound of its ringing, but when she speaks he lifts it back to her.
Her story had had the pull of a tide and her words now catch him like a wave, rocking over him. He is more chained to the mortal realm than any man.
“Maybe he loves it,” he says, but he sounds more unsure than he ever has. “Maybe it’s what he wanted all along. He still has power, and her love.”
In the end, he thinks, it is only the ocean; it is only the moon. It is only a story.
Lysander shakes his head at her next words, for he can see the beauty of her – even bare branches have beauty as they stand against the winter cold. Even dried stalks bloom again come the rains. And she has her horn, and that whisper of glimmering scales, and her voice like a river.
He wants to ask her if she knows any happy endings, and if she would tell them if she did. Instead, softly, he asks the girl with her eyes pressed closed: “If one of those children were to bring you a moon-flower tonight, and if your story were true, what is it you would wish for?”
The once-god finds he would very much like to remember what it is, to grant wishes. Even if his own had always been paid for in blood.
“And if she forgets him and falls in-love with the stars? Maybe fate made her for the stars and not the sea.” She doesn't notice him shifting as she whispers with her eyelids pressed together tight enough to sting. The only thing she notices is the way words burn on her lips, strange and too loud as the music around them lulls. It feels as if the world has silenced around them, frozen but for the hushed yet heavy sounds of their tangled breaths.
She wonders in the ebbed noise if he might hear the frantic, fearful thrum of her heart over the steady inhale and exhale of her fragile lungs. “What purpose will a tethered power serve him then?” Part of her wonders if she says the words at all or if they are mere echoes of the broken, sad hum of that frozen organ betwixt her ribs.
“Love is a fickle, fragile thing. Yet they say it belies all power, all hope.” It's her heart speaking after all. That poor abused thing making words out of heartbeats and forcing them out like bile between her lips.
Perhaps he is an old, jaded thing who talks with an uncertainty that hangs on him like ice upon the summer sea. But would he be as happy to die as she? Would he see it as freedom to let loose his words and soul and blood from the cage of flesh that chains them both so?
If she dies she wants her soul to turn to dust with her bones, free at last to fetter way like a million fireflies on the breeze.
When he speaks again, the timbre of his uncertainty is enough to make her open her eyes. She watches him like the sea washes upon the shore. Her gaze touches his then washes away, back to the shadows, like a tide. Isra isn't brave enough to hold him in those sea-blue eyes. But she's brave enough to step away from the tree.
Pieces of her tail cling and tear where they were caught against the knotted, sharp bark. She doesn't notice the sting of her hair. She doesn't know to miss the strands that made up one of the only lovely features of her.
“Freedom.” The word comes as quick as a blink and it cracks with a certainty that is harsh against the tender softness of her parched lips. Freedom from this unholy skin she does not yet know well. Freedom from fear and sadness. Freedom from those black memories that seep like oil into the cracks and crevices of her soul and refused to contained any more than sea refuses to dry up to desert sand.
Her hooves move almost unbidden closer to him. It's as if every inch of her strains towards that muted music and the freedom of the wide open fields that stretch out on the edge of her horizon. She strains as if she wonders what freedom those wicked points of his antlers might offer. What freedoms might he offer with those eyes deeper than the dark parts of the sea?
Might he offer what the ocean refused to give up?
And when she speaks again it's nothing more than more whispers offered close enough that she tastes the musk and forest darkness on his skin in-between the syllables of her words. “But to gain a wish I would have to find a moon-flower of my own.” She doesn't say that she could steal the flower, something about the soft broken innocence of her suggests that she is not such a low mortal as that.
She's ruined and broken but innocent yet, ignorant to the ways of the world in places not yet swallowed up by blackness and sin.
“Would you make a wish?” Surely he could find a moon-flower, this man who smells like the most ancient of thickets. Isra offers her nose to him then. A touch for a wish as is for a moment she has forgotten she is not the moon or the sea, forgotten that she is nothing at all but cursed.
“Then she will be happy, and that will be enough.” He wonders, as he says it, if it is true. It is not in most gods’ natures to be content, or to lose; they are ever jealous things, yearning for worship, for love.
Love is what she speaks of next and though he does not nod, he recognizes in her words an echo of his own, said to a small filly with flowers growing in her mane long ago in another world. “That’s what they say,” he agrees, and wonders if he’s ever seen it (such a love that saves and gives) in all his centuries. They unfurl in his mind’s eye now like a fern, a hundred dark spirals winding to the heart of him.
The storyteller’s eyes are still closed; Lysander lets his own gaze wander her then, scales and glitter and rusted chain disguised with flowers and paint. As if all wicked, sorry things could be made lovely and fangless.
Well, who is he to say they can’t be? Isn’t that what stories are for? Little lies remade to tell new truths?
Her eyes open and they touch on him with the tenderness of sea-foam; brief as a wave her gaze washes over him and away, and the deep green of his own are too slow to catch them. Lysander lets her go, and when she steps away from the tree (though the bark pulls at her, begs her to stay) he moves back, too, leaving the same space between them.
She is like a fish, like a bird – press too close and she would fly away. The antlered stallion does not want to be the cause of her going, not of such a fair and fearful thing.
Freedom, she answers him, and the boldness of that phrase surprises him into catching her gaze again. This time, when she moves nearer, he does not pull away. He watches the arc of her horn bend nearer, the shimmer of her scales in the summer sunlight; she smells of so many things. Ashes and brine and the sweet softness of flowers.
How many stories, he wonders, does she carry in her shivering skin?
“Even one freely given?” he asks, and he is genuinely curious. Mortals loved to talk of freedom, to talk of choice; they did not realize that gods and fae were bound by as many rules, a thousand customs ancient and strange.
But he reminds herself that it is her story, and her truth.
It is not the last time her words surprise him. Oh, how many questions she has opened up inside him, this sad stranger who does not see that she could be as strong as her stories. His black lips turn up in a smile and he hesitates for only a moment before touching his nose to hers, warm breath mixing with her own, a silent exchange.
Make a wish, the girl had asked him there beside a stranger sea, and as soon as he had the world had changed around them. The sea withered to sand, and bones curved skyward, bleached for years; but it was no answer to the wish he’d made.
“I already have,” he says softly, and reaches up to touch his lips to the smooth plane of skin just below of her horn. It is a kiss or a blessing or a simple gesture of thanks, and then he is stepping back once more. “You’ll find your freedom, story-teller,” he says, and wishes for her the same thing he had wished for that little girl a world ago. Only happiness, and nothing more.
And then he turns away, his cloven hooves a whisper on the grass, to go find a golden girl with flowers in her hair.
He moves and shifts like old, ancient oak branches on a young storm-wind. He feels like too much to hold in just a gaze again. She looks at his antlers, the way the sun glints off them like amber. Another glance can only hold the bold, thick curve of his neck that's twice as large as that fragile, sculpted crest of hers.
He is made like a stag and she is made like a bird, a swallow to dip and soar and never really land.
When he touches her she instantly regrets it, that offering of her nose to his. He feels hotter than a horse should and her skin crawls where his fire touches the cool moon-glow of her skin. Isra thought that perhaps this skin was ready to feel, to know the way it bends under a touch.
But oh how wrong she was.
Isra is always wrong and this skin and her soul feel like acid in the places where they touch and tangle. Already she is leaning back again, away from the way his lips shape the word freedom. What does a man know of freedom, of sacrifice, of love? Had she known he was a god made mortal she would have told him that he knows even less than he thinks.
“I would take any freedom at all.” Even death. She doesn't say it but it's there in the sorrow stain that eats away the blue of her eyes. Let this skin of hers fade away, wither and die and leave only that soul behind.
It's her soul that carries the stories, not the flesh.
When he touches her brow she shivers. She's glad he turns away, gone to seek something else, another story-teller perhaps. But her skin still crawls with something she has no name for as she watches the tines of his antlers disappear into the throng of horses.
After she remembers that he never told her what he wished for and it feels like a blessing.
