Isra of the silent snow
the snow fell like death, silent and full of a sorrow too painful to be made into prayer
The night when it settles is a cold thing. It's black and frozen with crystals of starlight that make the softly falling flakes of snow shine. The snow glitters around her, glowing in the moonlight and she imagines it's stardust and wishes brushing against her smile when she tilts it up, up, up towards the frozen night sky. Around her the world is muted in snow, hushed and sleepy and the soft, distant breathing of the bison herd sounds like nothing more than a frail echo of her own lungs.
Isra feels as if she is the only thing left in the world, a single thing made of heart and heat, that melts the snow when it drifts lazily down and lands upon her back. And when she walks the tall grasses sound like tiny shards of glass beneath her hooves where she walks across the places they bend beneath a layer of ice left over from the long gone dawn.
What do the stars see when they look down? Isra wonders in breaths of smoke that rise up from her smile that is still angled up, up, up towards the falling snow that glitters in the silver night lights. Do I look like a dark furrow of snow against the white, a shadow of the snow that might be ash flaking off from their light? Her smiles feels like fire on her skin as she watches the heat of her rise up like her gaze and dissipate into the winter.
Oh! how small she feels in the snowfall, dark as the ground where the snow grows thick enough to swallow the blackness into a white that almost looks blindingly bright under the moon. Even her hoof-steps as she walks though the thickening snow feel like no more than the movent of a ghost. Isra feels like a unicorn made not of the sea but of the snow and the stillness and all the things that melt away and evaporate when the sun creeps closer to the earth.
She hums to the sound of her hooves on the snow and ice, a soft gentle song of dreaming, of words too fantastic to be made into the mere language of mortals. Tonight in the snow her song feels heavier for the stillness around it, a shadow of sound in the strange white glow.
And it's not until she stops near enough to the slumbering bison herd (all tucked together into one great expanse of darkness in the snow) that she realizes it's no song of fable that lives on the edge of her lips and the hollow of her jaw.
It's a lullaby of sadness and sorrow. It's the song of a unicorn who feels as if she's the only thing that's alone in the slow, lazy snowfalls.
08-07-2018, 10:58 PM
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Rae [PM] Posts: 301 — Threads: 41 Signos: 15
Far from the clatter of hoof on stone, far from square walls and the smell of smoke and stagnant sweat, he closes his eyes. The silence of the desert settles across his back and for a moment he is free from obligation and company and the constant noise of society. Freedom. Crumpled thoughts slowly crawl out from the hidden corners and cobwebbed spaces of his mind. Out they creep, each and every thing that he ignores during the day because it is not practical. They dust themselves off, stand tall for a moment between his breath and the moon's glow, and then they take to the sky.
(Thoughts he doesn't have the words for, even if there was someone to share with. Thoughts that could more accurately be captured in sound or even in picture-- and maybe that is why the wide open sky calls to him, because it is the closest thing to a looking glass)
He lets his thoughts guide his legs and as time passes the sand turns to dirt turns to slush. And, finally, snow. Once he would have found comfort in the crunch of it underfoot, but now it just seems... cold. He feels unwelcome where he once felt at-- the sensation stops him in his tracks. The night is crisp and silent and completely indifferent to the old child and his questions, and his feelings, and his runaway thoughts.
And then-- the silence is broken. It is broken so sweetly you couldn't tell where the tear began. But we know, of course we know. The breaking starts before sound- he feels her song with his mind before he hears it with his ears. It is gentle at first, like the single chime of a bell rung far away. He doesn't understand what he's feeling, does not realize it is not his own sadness that rings but hers-- and it is only the tide drawing out before the tidal wave.
She is linked to him, and she reels him in whether she realizes it or not. He is already moving toward the stranger by the time her song reaches him across the silent chill of the night. When her voice finally hits Eik's ears, his heart clenches and he stumbles in the snow. Not just his thoughts run amuck tonight but his memories now too, memories scribbled into bone marrow and tucked between muscle fibers, broken to pieces and hidden away inside himself. They take flight, rising slowly at the same speed the snow falls.
How had he ever forgotten such loneliness?
"stop" he begs silently, crumbling gracelessly to his knees in the soft snow. "stop" is his song, the shattering of a bell made of crystal. He does not realize he is speaking aloud until the words claw their way from his throat and are swallowed by the still air. And once he realizes he is speaking out loud, he realizes that he is speaking in another way too. A silent sort of speaking-- but to who?
Even though her song might just shatter his heart, he staggers to his hooves and takes another step forward toward her. His eyes are closed in pain but he can feel her there, or rather he can feel that thing inside of her that calls to that thing inside of him. That crystalline sorrow, amplified by the indifference of the night. With an invisible hand he reaches toward that violet crystal and gently, gently, he brushes it with his touch. Their connection is broken instantly and it hurts, a little bit, like cutting off a small piece of yourself.
(-- The tip of a pinky finger, gone the second you actually realize it's there-- and you then start to think about every other piece of you that you've taken for granted, all the billions of cells you've shed without a second thought like some villain. Like some god. Like--)
In the resounding lonesomeness that follows, the back of his closed eyelids are deep, deep purple and he feels like a pot of black water brought to a simmer. If he were to open his eyes maybe he would see her there in the snow-covered plains before him, a specter in the moonlight. Instead he sighs as a bison might, a sigh with two thousand pounds of weight behind it. From the herd echoes a sigh in reply, a tired attempt at solidarity,
and then silence takes the stage with a long,
dramatic
bow.
@Isra fun with telepathy! Feel free to "read" (or be bombarded with) any of his thoughts or feelings
Isra of the burning
simmer and burn and turn to dust that floats on the breeze like a dandelion wish
It starts as a lick of sun against her sorrow, something less than fire melting away the crystalline and frozen edges of her sorrow. When she melts her thoughts taste the salt and brine and forget for a moment if it's snow her hooves stand upon or desert dune or heavy, hungry sea shores. That sunshine licks and laps at the crystal sadness and she melts and melts down to dark, black puddles of stain and rot and survival. Isra melts so slowly that at first she doesn't notice how she drips and her bones start to feel ancient with rust.
But then the tendrils of sun turn to flames and the flames turn to an inferno of exploding star-fire. Everything feels white hot and she's consumed long before she see's him crumbling to his knees that seem as pale as the snowfall. Her thoughts, her song, all the things that feel like her when she reaches into that dark soul of hers are gone. She's dust and ash and she wonders if when she opens her eyes and looks down at the snow if she will cast any shadow at all.
Stop. Her bones sing to her in shards of rust and her heart screams as it's pierced with arrows of ice that melt from her like a waterfall. The fragile web of her lungs quivers and fills with the command (stop, stop, stop) and it feels as if she's downing all over again, dragged down by the weight of all the water the sun and fire took from her.
I. She thinks it's not her word at all, for she is nothing now but sun and fire and loneliness.
The bison herd feels as if it's long gone, stolen from her dreaming wonder as the sun steals the constellation from the black blanket of the moon.
Am. These are not her words and her panic stars to rise and she flings open her eyes and they are paler than the snow when she turns to finally sees him, watches him stumble across the snow as if it's glass he walks across and not the earth at all.
Drowning. Can he feel this? Can he feel how she drips like the rain, colder than any snow could be? Can he feel this thing, this fire that belongs to the galaxies churning like whirlpools of space-dust above their heads, further than even gods can see? Can he feel? Can he feel?
Can he feel her?
And when his words make a sound that is not the cracking and hiss of that space-fire Isra can feel the melted salt water inside her start to freeze again as the fire suddenly blinks out like a firefly inside her soul, her heart, her mind. The silence feels like a blessing and the sighs of him and the herd feel like touches of dreaming across her brow. Her skin feels damp with sweat as if it too had been dreaming of fire and sun and desert dunes .
“Is this death then? Have I frozen in the snow while my thoughts ran wild like wolves?” Isra asks and she wonders that even the words feel hotter than they should on her parched tongue and sweaty lips.
She wonders that she should miss the fire now that the ice has returned to her stained soul.
Together they toss and turn in violent waves of thoughts and feelings. In these waters their words are dark swirling shapes and their memories have colors, and when it all stop, please stops the night seems too bright, too cold.
The wild magic in him is alive and on edge. It hovers at the edge of the outline she makes in the telepathic landscape. She is at once violet and and deep, deep blue. (In comparison, the buffalo are a flat, dull orange-grey and the night sky is the exact same color as what the eye sees.) The magic folds around her, afraid to reach out once again-- and yet... even in the relief that follows in the breaking of their bond, the breath of air after drowning... Eik and his magic miss her.
It goes like this: It is statistically next to impossible that nothing else alive has thought the exact same things you think. There are hundreds of trillions of animals right now eating breathing drinking laughing crying. And so you tell yourself your thoughts and feelings are not yours alone and there is a comfort in that-- but there is always a small part of you that wonders, and while it does it chips away at the inside of your mind. You don't notice at first. And then you notice but you don't care. And then you slowly start to believe in the impossible. To hell with the numbers, there must be some things that are truly original. And if that's the case then there must be some feelings too that have never been felt before.
The conclusions build like a skipping stone, rising every time you expect it to fall until you finally, actually believe that it is possibly to be truly, completely, alone.
All this to say he had given up thinking anyone in this world felt that same deep, deep blue. Until their minds met, Isra and Eik, and they were not identical (of course, they could not be) but they were similar enough to resonate. He can still feel the aftershock, ringing in the marrow of his bones. The magic in him, at once curious and afraid and excited, mirrors his own racing heart. A door has been opened but he does not step through, not yet.
Not yet.
who are you? he wants to ask. But that question could not be answered in words that would satisfy him. They have been abruptly thrown into each other's stories. They are beyond names now. She is, and that is answer enough.
"Is this death then?" In the silence of the night, with the moonglow to carry her words, Isra sounds much closer than she is. With his eyes still closed, it seems almost as though she is beside him, whispering in his ear.
"Have I frozen in the snow
while my thoughts ran wild
like
wolves?"
He opens his eyes and the moon is still shining and the snow still slowly falling. He does not sound sorry when he says, simply, "no." Not unless he, too, has died- but death could not possibly be this beautiful. This is life. This is fate and this is magic. And although he thinks himself a hitchhiker just along for the ride, he is more than that now-- he is a weaver of stories and souls. He carves his own path and does not even realize it yet. It is the unfortunate result of always looking back.
"Do you seek death?" Is that what he had felt, when their stories crashed into each other? Or was that his own heart and its secret, hidden desires? For a moment he could not tell where he ended and she began. He still wonders.
Eik approaches the stranger slowly, and somehow his steps are quiet even on freshly fallen snow.
Isra of the search
“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
For a moment the snow feels like teeth, sharp enough to be from an ancient shark that hunts in the sky. The white flakes pile up along the dip of her spine and it feels to her that when it melts it's not in rivulets of icy water but in rivers of blood that trace out the places were her ribs are too close to the surface of her skin.
She feels torn open beneath the teeth of snow and she wonders if the star-fire that burned and blazed might shine through the holes of her like rays of moon-glow behind storm clouds. And when she looks at the snow beneath her hooves and then at the snow below the stallion as he moves closer she's surprised to see it's just white, plain and blinding.
Isra fixes her gaze on the horizon, on the place where the stars look low enough to bed down in silken drifts and snow and the moon high enough to make her think that the snow is nothing more than tears of that great rock in the sky. Her gaze lingers on that horizon and the night feels like it runs through her in streams of blood and it stings now when she thinks of how lovely death might have been.
“Once.” When she licks the frost from her lips it tastes like salt and still she stares at the horizon that grows hazy the longer she stares at it. “Once I was brave enough to go looking for death although I dreamed of it as often as young fillies dream of love and colts of quests.” Isra remembers sipping from the sea and the night and her hopes as if all those things were an old vintage, pressed from rotted grapes.
Mostly she just remembers the rot, the way she could see the dark stain that lingered like disease over everything.
Isra too closes the distance between them as he does. The snow does little to silence her chain and it rings a melancholy chime as she reaches for him with her lips and her horn shines like a dream in a ray of moonlight that breaks through the snowfall. “Do you find yourself searching?” She says when she wants to add so many other words. She wants to run them in touches along his skin, just to feel that there is something else, someone else that might just burn a little beneath the teeth of snow.
Do you seek me? Isra wants to say the words as she reaches her lips to his throat. Do you seek how to live or how to die? Oh, she could cover him in a dark blanket of all the words that boil up in the dark oblivion of her soul.
In the end, she only lets her touch fall as short as all the words that never make it past her black lips. She only looks back out to the horizon and blinks away the snow that pools like tears in the corners of her eyes.
And she wonders that she feels like less as the snow starts to feel cold again.
"Once," she tells him, and he would regard her a little differently, knowing the bravery that act requires, except he already knew she was brave. He felt it in that split second their souls met.
Does he find himself searching? For death, no.
He had craved death for the longest time, but he owed it to the dead to keep living. And so obligation kept him alive, if only barely. He took it out on his skin, that ragged flag of a once-proud nation. His scars burn with memories of the self loathing that drove his body to break against the rocks like the waves of the ocean he loved so much. He imagines the snowflakes sizzling into steam as they hit his body and a chorus of dark voices laughs at him from within his skull-- he closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them.
His attention drives at the woman before him. to keep the bad thoughts at bay. At first glance she is not particularly eye catching, but the details-- the blue of her eyes, the scales reflecting the snowglare, the expressive curve of her muzzle-- the details he could lose himself in.
They stand close enough to smell the clover on her tongue and the woodsmoke on her skin and some other scent he cannot put a figurative finger on, the sort of scent you would need to taste before the word comes to you. This close, the steam of their breathing rises like a curtain between them. It clears for just a moment here and there when they inhale-exhale in synchronicity.
(a sudden rush of desire- He wants to feel her skin on his lips, he wants the word for that last scent)
He remembers what it was he was searching for tonight. What his magic was pulling him towards, before he even knew to look. It was her soul, singing to his in the way only a kindred spirit knows how. He wants to reach out with his magic once more, for when it comes to pain and sorrow he is a glutton like no other-- but something holds him back. Something like fear, of what he does not know.
"Your song brought me here." He had never much appreciated music- the beating of drums, in particular, stir up strange thoughts in his head, and his heart, stirring to race the pulse of the music like a colt who can't stand to lose, forgets to keep it's own time. But her lullaby was not the drum-beat mania of tribal music, and it was not the music sung round the fire to forget how long and dark the night is. Her song was a story and a beacon, and it drew him across miles of sand into the snow-bright night where buffalo sleep like strange shrubbery.
Even in the near-silence, he imagines her lullaby drifting across the night. He thinks idly of sirens and songs that lead men to their death... It suddenly seems to him as good a way to go as any.
"May I touch you?" He asks with his mind, a soft knock on her door. How odd that even after nine years of life, nine years of striving for consistency and order, he can still say and do things that surprise himself. He is grateful then for the lazy curtain of steam that partially veils his face.
Isra of the revelation
“I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, ”
“Oh,” The word sits lamely on her lips, crippled by frost, uncertainty and lingering crystals of salted sweat that have turned to flakes of diamond ice. The sound of it itches on her skin and bits of her feel like sloughing off. All the other things she wants to say burn and burn and burn.
Every part of her burns again when she looks at him and her lungs listen to the melody of his body and that veil of breath parts suddenly as if they are two different universes that circle around and around again. Isra feels like bits of flesh, thin as charred paper hanging from winter-dead tree branches. She feels as light as a spectral thing, tendrils of fog that live only when, only when---
Only when he inhales.
“I am,” She says and again the words feel lame on her lips. Part of her wonders and part of her has already forgotten what it is she feels when she looks at him between the curtains of snow and heat. The thoughts drift away from her like tender-snowflakes on a blizzard torrent of wind.
Something deep down, past the fear of anything but solitude wonders if he might catch those shards of her like falling stars. She wonders if he might wish (and what he would wish) if he caught all the pieces of her that feel so very far away from her bone and flesh.
And then, oh then! He's a flame once more, licking all the cool ocean fire of her. His flames turn to words, then meaning. She feels the flare of something that feels like a supernova on the parts of her that still feel as frozen as the snow beneath their hooves. It takes a moment for her to blink (and see a flash of moonlight) to make sense of the words.
No one has ever asked to touch her before. They only took and took and took and she trembles for the kindness of his fire that feels like it creates instead of consumes.
Please, she begs in thoughts for her lips feel frozen with fear and longing and surely she thinks she would sob if she made any sound in the 'real'. The word echoes like a mantra of religion in her head, one of snow and fire and want. Her knees feel like liquid and her flesh still itches with the fire beneath. Other parts of her feel like webs of fragile paper for him to write upon.
Though for all the fire inside her she doesn't open her eyes as she trembles beside him and waits to see if his touch will devour or recreate her.
Beautiful or not, the world takes everything into its jaws, and it bites down. There should be a word for the sound it makes.
(He is sharply aware of the lack of words in this language. He wants a word for the the veil of breath between them, and another for moonlight on water. He wants a word for her that is not a name.)
But not everything breaks. He did not break, or rather he did and then, piece by piece, he put himself back together, this time better. This time he built a dam to hold at bay all that sorrow and all that guilt. A dam hidden so completely behind a maze of doors that he could forget it was even there.
"Oh," she breathes out.
He knows she did not break, either, or if she did she rebuilt herself too. He felt it when their minds touched. He replays again the feeling of her sorrow washing over him. A leak has sprung in the dam and he does not know if he should fix it or let it burst. He was never good at big decisions. This time the choice probably isn't his to make, anyway.
"I am,"
The landscape seems to fall apart and rebuild itself with every breath, like they're standing in the lungs of the world. It is just madness, pure madness that he is here at all. And it is the word for one-step-past-madness that he is feeling these wild feelings, that his blood is buzzing like it has a story that it needs told-- like it has a story that it needs told now.
(What is love, if not madness-- and is this the former, the latter, or both?
Could it be neither?)
Oh, Isra, he does not want to devour or recreate-- he just wants to know what's real. So he steps forward, reaches out, and tentatively brushes his muzzle across her shoulder.
When they touch, it is not magical at all. It is solid and certain. It is grounding and humbling. For the first time in a long time he stands separate from the past, and the future, and he is not as small as he thought he would be without them.
He lets go a breath he did not realize he was holding.
Eik's only thought is that she is cold (how long has she been out here?) so he steps closer (slowly, so slowly it could be an accident, two boats pushed together by the tide) until their chests are pressed together, and his head finds a place to rest lightly on the small of her back.
He feels very still and very content. It is slightly uncomfortable in its foreignness, and it is not what he had expected to feel, pressed against a dream made real. He had so many questions for her but they all flew away the moment they touched. When one of his questions returns, to his own surprise it slips out with insistency-- and a certain sort of desperation. "Who are you?" He presses an uncertain kiss to the top of her hip. In his touch is another question, one he has not found the words for yet. What are we doing here?
Isra of the barb-wire roots
“My body aches like an after-kiss breaking in soft fires and wildflowers”
He touches her.
Isra shatters.
The bits of her crack like glass or perhaps it's more like the moon cracking through a cloud or a low and weighty fog. Either way she is breaking and she knows it's not light that pours from the labyrinth of her soul (it's not her mind, he's deeper than that) but bits of oil and darkness and blood. And when there is no more blackness the sea pours out and the salt touches the blood and Isra in the now quivers for the sting of it and remembers how to drink of the brine and down.
She doesn't feel cold and for a moment she cannot even feel his lips across her shoulders. Isra feels only the kiss of his heat, the way he slips slowly down her flesh like the first gentle stroke of a switch before the lash, before the pain. Now when she trembles it's the marrow of her bones, tainted by the soul, that shift like stones under the tide and wipe away any sculpture the shore might have treasured.
Their chests press together, the tender and mortal flesh that holds their hearts and might shred with the mere kiss of a blade. Isra molds to him, fits all the soft roundness of this body that hardly belongs to her to his desert skin. She almost sobs to think that sea sand and desert sand are both a little salted, a little coarse, a little desperate to be made into glass, to be molded by the wind and weather and time.
What would time make of them when the day comes, when the snow starts to melt and the bison disperse like dandelion wishes?
Isra's spine feels like silk beneath him and the ice on her back melts and forms hot-springs in all the creases of her before it flows down like slats of her side like tropical falls.
And though they are fitted together, soot to snow, freckles to scales like a puzzle that has only just realized it was only pieces waiting to be found, Isra is still shattering. The oil and sea and blood are still dripping out between the slivers of her. Flashes leak out: of golden skin dressed only in chain, of looming faces that seem to be looking down and dripping violence like flowers drip seeds, of lash and whip and stories told to slip away, away, away just for one night.
Her hip feels golden again when he kisses it and for a a moment she forget what skin (is it even skin anymore or a nebula of dust?) holds all those broken bits of her into something that might look like form. A flake of snow melts from her horn and drips into the corner of her eye like a tear and Isra remembers. Oh she remembers!
“I am,” Her lips whisper against his rib-cage and she hopes that his heart might feel the way her lips vibrate like hummingbird wings and glass. Or at least that his soul might feel something of the truth of her.“not myself.”
It's her soul that cries and reaches out to his with something like roots and something like bared wire. Isra. Her soul cries out her name, the only true part of her, and she blows it his way like ivy seedlings and prays that her roots will find soil deep in the fire-sand of him.
Something long in hibernation, forgotten in the labyrinth of painful memories. It buzzes in tune with the universe. It sings,, a song he does not know the words to. A song whose words do not matter. She trembles in tune with his buzzing, and oh! How dearly he wants to leave, and how dearly he wants to hold her close, and really he wants too many things, all at once, so he does nothing but continue to embrace her in the only odd way he knows how, chest to chest, neck wrapped across her perfectly delicate spine.
I know your sorrow, he wants to say, I know-- but the words or even the thoughts don't quite come to life or mind. He feels her shattering as a near yet far sort of feeling, a tickling sensation at the back of his mind, and it devastates him, and he wants to pick up all the pieces and put them together-- but really they are still strangers, and anyway with her it seems sacrilegious to presume, to do anything without permission. In his mind she is a goddess spun of glass (yet solid at the core, the way only those who have suffered are) and she just might collapse into a pile of snow and dreams and diamonds if he presses too hard.
(In time he may learn how strong she is-- and although he has an idea of it now he doubts himself, because in the end he is always wrong)
In this moment, all his curiosity and all his yearning has been honed to a single point which he presses against (gods, he'll think about her skin for days-- weeks-- months to come) because words or even thoughts are not enough to convey his senseless desire.
(He is constantly at odds with himself, torn between intuition and logic. It is endless, exhausting work to quash the voice that cries "this is madness!"
And in truth, a part of him begins to succumb to that voice. If this is madness, it is madness of the most exquisite kind. We'll take it, hungrily.)
Eik feels like a set of dominoes would, all lined up and ready for the push, when he feels her breath on his ribs, sweeter than a touch (there is more promise to it than a touch would have, there is still a mystery there) and hears her voice from this angle, coming from the middle of him as though it is Isra her speaking but his own foolish heart. His hairs stand on end with the power of it all.
"How does it feel," he asks, voice quiet and low, "to be not yourself?"
He has a thousand other questions for her-- maybe she can feel them, barely contained as they are in his mind. But this seems the most important. Eik is never sure of when he is not himself, but he suspects it is often-- and yet-- how does one know? How does she know that she is not herself right now, and a mask all other times?
"Who are you" he wonders as he breathes her in, smokey and dreamy and wonderful, "when you are yourself?"
"Will I ever know?"
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe all that matters is here, and now, and the way his soul feels pressed close to hers. And then a single thought bubbles to the surface-- Isra.
He grabs at the word, holds it close. Roots and barbed wire and Isra, these things dig into him and take root in some place he's forgotten ever existed. "Isra," he repeats, and it is the closest thing to a prayer that he has ever known. Isra, Isra, Isra chants his quivering heart. Roots and barbed wire, roots and barbed wire, sinking gleefully into the core of him. Isra. It is an answer to a question he did not know to ask. For now, it is the only answer he needs. For now, he does not think about the dawn.
