Isra in the church tree "I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps."
She did not make it to the lake the morning after she sailed along the sea inside her bones and inside Eik's bones.
The next morning rose, pinks and pastels, and it was the loveliest morning this part of Novus has ever seen. Every nocturnal horse in her court was happy to crawl from their beds, blink back the crust of their eyes, look at the sky and whisper, never has there been a morning that had more promise. That morning there was no denying that all the early hours felt like gold-dust on the skin. Some even whispered that time stumbled over his breaths that morning.
But Isra was not at the lake that morning either, and she saw nothing of the hopeful dawn and the way that her court of dreamers loved it so.
It's not until the third dawn that she manages to make her way towards the lake. She has no trail to leave this time and the one she left before has long since withered and died. Only her hoof prints lead the way and they drag though the dirt and muck until there are lines between each of them from the tips of her hooves. And even then there are hundreds of other marks in the spring mud and her own look no different than the rest.
Isra hopes that Eik will still find her. It's a wild, rabid sort of hope (the kind that burns and smolders and consumes).
By now there are tents flapping in the dawn wind and horses gathering at the pathway that splits the lake. Each of their steps rings like a metronome and pushes her onward to the dark sanctuary of a willow tree far from the water's edge. No one notices the queen slink like a shadow between them and no one notices the blood crusted on the fragile curve of her throat. Isra blinks, trembles, and thinks that it's better this way, better that they are all free to fearlessly enjoy the beauty of the second most lovely dawn.
For now they don't need to know that a monster walks among them and their own queen is is so very afraid (deep inside where she will never let them see).
When she walks between the branches and silken leaves of the willow each of them lingers on her flesh like a kiss. The hollow pit of her magic fills just a little, summoned up from the dark of her by the way the willow seems to want something. To dream, she thinks, it wants to dream as I do.
So she curls down into the soft, muddy dirt and listens to the metronome of horse hooves on wood and gold. Each step has her eyelids getting heavier, each bubble of laughter makes her lungs feel heavy and her heart weary. On and on it goes-- laughter, ringing hooves, laughter.
And it's not until Isra surrenders to her dreaming that her magic crawls out from her skin and travels like an army of caterpillars up the bark of the tree. Each satin, delicate leaf turns to glass and each leaf changes to a different color. Up, up, up the magic travels until it's not a willow tree that hides her from view but a church of light and glass, wood and color.
He moves through a landscape that fills him with love. Every dreamlike sight he passes reminds him of Isra, and why wouldn't it? In their brief time together they've swam through a sea filled with thoughts and feelings and painted with memories, they've slept beneath the dreams of bison and learned the shape of each other outlined in falling snow and moonlight. So even without knowing Isra's history, he knows she puts a piece of herself into everything she makes. She gives, and gives, and gives, and as he walks through her kingdom he lets himself believe, for a moment, that she has hidden these pieces of herself for him and him alone to find.
A troupe of dancers, each adorned with paint of a different color, tumble over and around each other as they weave through the crowd. One of them bumps into his shoulder and leaves behind the scent of sage. Something about the dancers reminds him of the certainty of a river carving its way to the sea. They know their destination, if not their course, and this he has in common with them. When he closes his eyelids he can picture his destination, or at least the bright blue of her eyes. Isra
She could be anywhere, so he looks to the willow trees and the way that they lean gracefully to the left. Something about the way the wind runs through them suggests laughter and a message- "this way to your love, child! This way!" He follows them because he's always trusted trees, but also because he has no other direction. His path takes him through rows and rows of tents, each full of something different and wonderful-- but never Isra. At one point his path crosses the dancers again and they laugh merrily to see the intent grey stallion again. "Smile!" one of them demands. He does, but not with his lips.
Eventually he reaches the lake. The sight of it stops him in his tracks. It is so Isra, and as that thought crosses his mind the smell of her does too, and also he feels her in his head like a drop of water in still water. It seems that a bell rings, somewhere, and every cell of his body is summoned to attention. There-- the light streaming through the stained glass of her cathedral paints a kaleidoscope of colors on her resting body. He sees the grass stirred by her sleeping breath and he feels stirred too. His heart, awakened by her nearness, strains in his chest until it becomes impossible to stand there watching any longer.
She looks so small, curled beneath her tree, even as he approaches and she fills his vision. In a language that does not feel like his own, in a language that is all theirs, he says her name softly. "Isra." He kisses her the way the ocean kisses the sky-- with a deep look and not a touch. And then he moves closer and kisses her with gentle lips. First the tip of her nose, then the corner of her sad mouth, and finally the edge of her temple.
There is a weight to this moment that he does not want to ignore. In fact there are many things he wants to say ("are you okay/ what happened/ I'm here, tell me-") but it seems that first, a moment of sweetness is in order.
He draws a small bouquet from where he had (poorly) hidden it beneath his mane. Violets, lavender, and clover... it is not much compared to the flowers that she could dream into being, but he just wanted to give something, anything, back to the one who has given so much. For a moment the bouquet hovers ghostlike between them and it is appears he does not know what to do next. After a moment too long he unties the bundle and weaves the violets gently into Isra's black mane. The lavender is next. He brushes it across her cheeks so she might breathe in its comfort, then tucks it between her chain and her leg, because that part of her too deserves to feel a gentle touch.
Finally the clover. He considers it for a moment, then gently places half between her lips and the other half on his own tongue. He looks at her intently with a hundred love letters in his eyes. And when he leans forward to kiss her again, their lips both taste like clover, and hunger, and sadness.
E I K "A thousand dreams within me softly burn. From time to time
my heart is like some oak whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn."
-
Isra running through the dark "if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me,"
In her dreams the sky is endless. It stretches on, infinite and eternal, and if there is a pattern in the way small moons and constellations break up the deep dark it's lost on her. There is poetry in her sky, moons that twist around like dragons and stars that gather, close and hot like bison in the tundra. Everything is black and silver. Here the air tastes not like brine but sugar and glass. It cracks and bites when her lungs chew the black wind.
Aimlessly she is floating on that sea, leaving lines of blood and scale when her tail fades into the darkness between two stars. On and on she floats, ephemeral as one single wave in a hurricane sea. It seems endless, this boneless, floating way of moving (she thinks this is how a cloud feels). Behind there is only darkness and ahead there is a silver moon that expands suddenly and swallows up her vision like a exploding black hole.
It's silver and dappled with bits of shadow and when she looks at it until her eyes burn and smolder in her sockets she thinks, Eik. Eik. Eik.
And then suddenly she's not a wave in a sea, or a unicorn without hard edges and rage. Suddenly she is Isra running through the darkness, and her trail isn't blood and scales anymore but pearl-dust and gold-leaf.
Then it's not a sea of black at her hooves and she's not dreaming.
Suddenly she's alive, her heart beating like a thunder in her chest (roar after roar) and she thinks that if she were to open her mouth thunder and lightning would pour out instead of love. So her eyes speak for her and all the shadows and fear are devoured by awe and wonder. Lavender coats the air between them like a world of sweetness in which there are only two souls, and a million flowers to taste. When she licks her lips she only tastes clover and sand and skin.
It feels like chewing on the sun.
She doesn't think about the blood flaking off like rust around her throat when when reaches up to press her lips to the hollow of his chin, his jaw, and the darkest part of his lips. She doesn't think about her horn rising up like a cross between them and she doesn't think about the revolutions of the world. All she thinks about is-- Eik,
Eik
“Eik.” She whispers and the stained glass leaves sing the song of his name as the wind rushes between the branches. The world explodes in sound sharp enough to sting like needles behind her eyes. The sound of this church of theirs is alive! Alive like the sun and the moon and as magical as any constellation in her endless, black dream sky.
“I'm sorry that we missed the sunrise.” She's never been so sorry for a thing in her life, and it brings tears that turn into molten glass before hardening on her cheeks in rivers of refracted light.
The word Eik rests like satin on her lips and chimes like a hymn in the leaves above them. Behind his still face there is movement. A silent, ancient bell rings inside of him, and it sounds like a memory that was never lived. Tides begin to churn. Slowly his chest starts to feel like a dam that struggles to hold back all the rivers and oceans, all the scars and stories that want to flow towards Isra. It is as though his name has never been spoken out loud, not really, until now.
He closes his eyes and tries as hard as he can to hold on to the way he feels in this instant.
When he opens his eyes there are tears in hers. He does not frown, not exactly, but his eyes darken. No. "There will be others, love." Despite the charcoal-colored fear that quivers in his chest his voice is calm and steady. A wall of warmth seems to rise up within him as he says that word- love. This thing they have, it is terrifying for someone so accustomed to having nothing. It feels like a weakness, like a gamble, but he can't help himself-- he loved Isra even before he laid eyes on her.
"There will be so many sunrises, we won't be able to remember them all." Eik feels so incredibly sure that this is true. It makes him wonder if this is what Isra feels like when she creates. It is not wanting or willing, it is knowing what a thing will be.
"Isra," he says again, because he likes saying it. It feels like biting into a a crisp apple, like fall, like falling. When she reaches up to him, he catches the too-familiar scent of blood. Mingled with lavender and clover, it is deeply, deeply wrong. "Tell me what happened." His voice is gentle but his eyes are guarded as he looks at her. On the inside he feels red hot, like glass being spun into something-- something that changes with each moment from beautiful to terrible, fragile to strong-- something that does not know yet what the fire will make of it.
E I K "Oh, sweet dream, fall with me
fall fast-- fall free-- fall with me."
-
Isra wearing a blood crown “I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new.”
A song is singing in her blood. The stinging sound her glass tears make when they fall to hit her knees is nothing more than another melody. There is the low hiss of rage, the whispers their lashes make when they blink away the darkness and brightness of their gazes. Below all that is the bang, bang of her heart that slows to match the beat of Eik's.
She would ask him if he can hear it, the way her entire soul sings at the nearness of him, but she already knows he knows he can.
It's easy to look at Eik and forget that there is still the blood crusted on her throat (easier still to forget that now part of her wants blood too). There is no violence here, in the lavender air between them with clover in their kisses. There is only love and the sound it makes when it falls as easily as an apple from this tongue.
“Liar,” She whispers and even that sounds like love when she rises before the echo of it has faded. Isra presses her nose to the pulse just bellow his jaw and she counts each beat of his heart like it's the number of all the wealth in the world. “I will not forget a single sunrise.” Her lips follow the pathway of his veins, down his throat. Then across his chest where she plants a single kiss to the center of it.
There's a moment when she wants to trace each of his muscles with her lips. Isra wants to cover him in stories written in touches instead of ink. The heat of the fire rising him in scorches her lips and she doesn't want to call it rage and fury, yet. She doesn't want to call it anything but love and when she decides to be brave, passion.
But when she meets his gaze, and it's made cold and guarded by the fire, Isra knows it's not only love between them, not anymore. Part of her, the part that remembers how it felt to be branded, wants to run from the dark glint in his eyes. It's only when she pulls away to brush the hair back from his eyes that she remembers that she too feels an inferno of cold fire in her chest.
She knows that she would raze the world with steel flowers and glass ivy if anyone touched Eik in hate. Just the thought of it terrifies her both with the possibility and with the way she feels the anger and welcomes it. It's not just the world that terrifies her anymore, it's herself she's scared of now.
I understand, my love, what this will make of us, of me. Forgive me. She lets the words rise to the surface of mind, a slick of oil on the ocean of her empathy.
Isra brushes the sweet clover sticking to her lips across his brow, trying to make things between then gentle and innocent again. It's strange, how sweet her lips are and how cold and trembling her voice is. “Me and a crow, called Raum, had a disagreement on what makes a blade and how orphans should be given homes.” She says no more, afraid to tell him how she grew a meadow of metal flowers. Fear about what Eik will think of her, when it's not just wonder she wields but terror, turns all the rest of her words to ash.
A glint of sun shines off her dried blood and makes it looks like a string of rubies draped across her throat. “He has no blades anymore but those made of his body. I turned his knives to daises. ” Isra smiles then and brushes their lips together. And for the first time she thinks of that ring of wounds around her throat like a crown.
Even as close as they are, his heart strains to be closer. Closer and closer until her smile is his smile, her eyes his eyes, her heart his heart.
"Liar," she says, and despite all the love in her voice he is taken aback. It is the first time he has held the title of liar. It feels uncomfortable, until she brings him back with a kiss to the chest that feels so good it aches. "I will not forget a single sunrise," she continues, and he takes it as a challenge. "We shall see," He huffs gently, as if in disbelief... but oh, he knows the marvels of her mind, knows the vastness and the brilliance of it. And maybe love has run off with some of his wits or maybe it has uncovered a well of faith. Regardless, he really believes what he says next, in the silent way of speaking: "If anyone could, it would be you."
Despite the regal curl of her horn, he doesn't often think of her as a queen. But he does now when she looks at him, and somewhere inside of her there is a cold flame, and he thinks that if the fire in them meets it could burn a hole right through this wicked world.
"There will be nothing to forgive," he whispers back to her. They are survivors yet for all the things they have seen and done, they both have secret hearts that are tender and innocent. Maybe some day violence will seep into their souls, anger into their hearts, but he thinks-- he hopes-- that as long as they have each other to come back to, the gentlest pieces of themselves will be sheltered from the rot.
He tenses when he hears the word "crow" and the tremble in her voice, and the sweet breeze that dances in the space between them. Raum, he repeats so he will not forget. And maybe a part of him thinks his magic can find this man if he repeats the name enough, like a summoning. Raum. Raum. He wants to run, he wants to hunt, he wants to be a creature that Isra would not recognize, and should not love. "... a disagreement on what makes a blade and how orphans should be given homes." He cocks an ear in skepticism. A disagreement. About orphans. "He has no blades anymore but those made of his body. I turned his knives to daisies."
She smiles.
The love and the pride swells in him and overflows with sudden laughter. He lips at her smooth cheek, breathes her in like a dying man. (Why did you choose me, you wild, wonderful woman? Me, out of every other shipwreck.) But the levity does not last, could not last. The crow is out there still and this all stinks of something unfinished.
Slowly, with a sigh, he lowers himself into the mud beside Isra. From here the dreaming tree rises tall above them like a flag- love was here- and insect sounds gently wash over them like waves on a beach. Their thoughts come and go and he can smell fear in the air around them, his and her own, for the same and different reasons. It mingles with the floral scents of his gifts and he wonders if they are tainted or liberated by it.
Again, she smiles.
He twines his love around her like fingers, like roots.
"Will you come home with me when all this is done?" He gestures to the lake before them, with all the colorful tents flapping like strange birds in the wind. With his thoughts he paints her a desert sunrise, a violence of pastels-- the sort he used to love the most, before Isra came and turned everything on its head. "Just for a little while." Solterra is not an inherently safe place, but at least there he would have more power to protect her. His eyes rest very deliberately on the lake, so that she won't see the painful sort of need in them. So that she can say no if she wishes, without having to see how it wounds him. (it is likely in vain-- their hearts are too in tune for deception-- but he tries nonetheless.)
E I K "Oh, sweet dream, fall with me
fall fast-- fall free-- fall with me."
-
Isra burning like a pyre "if I touch near the fire, the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you"
Under the sunlight there is only fire between them, hot and consuming. It flicks at her ribs in touches that sting and smolder. It wraps around her heart and squeezes tight like a cobra until Isra thinks that she might be the sun instead of a the moon and the scales on her flesh petals of flowers instead of constellations. And for the first time she thinks that being ash upon the breeze might not be so terrible a way to find freedom.
Perhaps it's the violence still stretching out in her bones that makes her feel hotter than a dune of sand under the sun. Perhaps it's the passion and the want that trembles ravenously through her as he lips at her cheek. Isra feels almost wild then, almost tame, almost like a flame rooted in the center of the universe.
She feels holy against him.
Her skin could be sermons written to him and her blood could be wine coursing sweetly through her veins. She is ink and love and god-like things that are ephemeral and eternal. Isra is his and he is her new religion.
If she had his magic she would have told him he wasn't a shipwreck but sea, silvered by moonlight against a desert shore. There was never any choice but this, but Eik, but sun and flame and slow-rage that is hot as love. She twines her love with his fire like seaweed. There is between them a cool sea upon which a pyre burns. And each of his words lights another pile of kindling in her heart.
“Do not.” She demands and almost regrets that she's learning how to be a queen instead of a unicorn. The tinkling of the stained-glass branches ring sweetly above them and her heart feels like charred sugar when he doesn't look back quickly enough. And perhaps it's the violence she's learning that sets her teeth to his shoulder. Perhaps it's fear that she tastes only sand and smoke between her teeth.
“Don't look away from me.” Her teeth turn gently to kiss and her lips tug and tangle on his name. Each pull sends her heart to crying, do not ask and look away. How strange it is that for a moment she feels like a heroine, a brave thing that laughs at a storm too bright for others to look at.
And perhaps then, their love is not a cool sea but a fire-storm, a thing that will burn them to ash and resurrect them into something new, something raw. Words build between then, floating bits of smoke and soot that Eik could pick out like blades from her mind. It is for love that I turned blades to daisies. You make me brave.
Isra lifts her lips to his ear and her horn rises above their heads like the base of a cross. The sun dances over them in colors and warmth and song. “I would follow you to the end of the world.” And even the sun and the song are not as warm as her words.
He's never been much interested in power. Even when he became emissary and learned how a title (a word) could be a weapon. Even when magic darkened his blood and ripped back the curtains from every window. But love, or maybe desire, changed him from a beaten dog to a hungry one.
He longs for power now.
To hold this moment, and stretch it out forever...
To make a paradise of her-- great plains of her neck and mountains of her rib cage, oceans of her eyes, heavens of blue scales--
To be in many places at once, to protect all the ones he cares for.
It would never be enough, though. That was the problem with power-- the more you had, the more you needed. But she lights a big old fire in him that needs more tinder, more gasoline, more more more. It licks at all the spaces between them, jumping upon that pyre.
(we'll even make burning delightful, and our ashes will dance in ways we never could)
She says "don't look away from me" more like a queen than a lover, and without thinking his dark eyes rise back to hers. If he had ever foolishly thought that part of her beauty could just be chalked up to the tricks that moonlight play... Isra is just as stunning in the sunlight, just as beautiful in the mud as in the falling snow. His heart sighs dramatically.
"We'll see it all, then. End to end. Together." He does not need to say I promise for his resolve to be heard.
But-- there is a nagging thought that Eik can only push it aside for so long. He wanted to keep it to himself but he can't help it, not when he's looking into her eyes. "I can't rest knowing he's still out there." His voice turns a little flat at the end, a little angry. It is a glimpse into the rage that simmers, a rage he can feel hiding in her bones as well. There can be love, there can always be love, but there cannot be peace without justice.
E I K "Oh, sweet dream, fall with me
fall fast-- fall free-- fall with me."
-
Isra with the beast of want " all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”
Someday she will tell the story of this moment. She will open up her mouth wide enough that ink and legends might pour out from her like light pouring from the sun. Words will gather in the cracks of her teeth like blade of grass. And then she will remember that there was this word power between them, powers to stop time, power to lover, power to waste just a little time before they wear their violence in their eyes.
Isra could change the tree over their heads into a statue of them. She could turn it to iron and weapon, but instead she's content to lean her shoulder against it and listen to the wind sing though the stained-glass. For now she's content with the way he looks back at her with a universe in his eyes.
Maybe she should stop to think about this new thing in her that wants instead of wishes. She should worry about this monster that wants to change the world like clay. But she doesn't. It's foolish and it might be beginning of the end of her but she cant' bring herself to do anything but love the fresh fires smoking in her bones. There is one for love and one for justice and one for fury (but that one is a cold star-fire).
“Yes.” She says while brushing her lips across his brow like a sinner to their god. Isra trembles at the sparks that pass between them, small tendrils of fire and love that wrap around her like whips. The sunlight feels like ash on her skin, ash on her brow, ash made of things that she wants to be anointed in. Isra never thought she would learn to love the sunlight, but she does, she does, she does.
All the anger in Eik's voice only opens wide the mouth of the thing in her that wants. It lounges against her bones. And because it lives inside a story-teller that beast of want (that never wishes, only takes) it already knows how the story will end.
It already knows what it will take even if Isra doesn't.
She has no idea of that the beast of fury in her is anything but rage tempered by the heat between their skin. “Just a little longer,” she begs. Already her eyes are closing and she drapes her head across his spine and tastes the sand (and smoke) on his skin. The glass willow still chimes and she's sweeping away on it, heedless of that thing inside her that is starting to hunger. “Stay with me just a little longer, then we will find him.”
If she wasn't so tired she would have said, then we will have justice and maybe after that we will have blood.
@Eik (She's falling asleep. Going to end his here for reasons....)
As soon as he says those words ("I can't rest...") it all begins to feel like too much. The warm velvet of her skin, the smell of mud and clover and want. The future so uncertain and yet, in some ways, so very certain. He can almost feel the storm that still rests on the horizon, the warmth of blood on his hands (hands that will always know the shape of violence)... and he can almost feel fate yielding to their determination... almost see the shape of it at the edge of his vision, shrouded in a thin veil... almost...
"Stay with me just a little longer..." Her voice cools the wild boil of his thoughts to a simmer. "Stay with me just a little longer, then we will find him."
The heat leaves with his breath as he murmurs quietly-- "Of course," into a velvet-soft ear. The statement conveys his love and desire as best as any two words could. But the one that follows suggests something greater than desire, something closer to devotion. It rings between them like the first raindrop on still water. "Anything."
Isra leans against him and his heart surges forward, and then slows down, and surges forward again. He should learn how to pace himself before love burns its way straight through him. But there is something so, so appealing about a fire, even to him who lost everything to it. "Anything for you." The moth is perhaps the most noble of creatures. It doesn't care what love will do to it, take from it. It lovingly sets itself ablaze.
His eyes gently close themselves, although his mind still paces like a wild thing in a cage. Eik has never felt, at once, so soft and so violent. Conflicting emotions sway like the glass leaves overhead. The rhythm of their song beats gently, persistently, at a drum hidden deep in his core. A moment later he feels it echo in Isra too. Her breath grows heavy and his slowly follows suit.
Just a little longer.
One dream makes way for another. He'd stretch this moment out forever, if time could be so easily played with. Since it can't, he'll have to remember the smell and feel and taste of this instant. This will be what he fights for, when the time for fighting comes. He thinks this may very well be what he dies for, when the time for dying comes.
This is what he thinks, as he drifts into a beautiful but restless sleep:
Just
a little
longer.
-
@Isra -swoon- thank you for another lovely thread!
