Isra in burnished gold
“Hers is a timeless life weaving through other longer lives like a flash of lightning in a clouded evening sky.”
T
he wall is looming before her like a mighty beast made of stone. It's red and dusty and Isra almost feels tiny standing before it with the desert stretching on endlessly behind her. For a moment she looks at it, for a moment she doubts herself. What does she know, after-all, about war?
But she knows how to move like a a cobweb in the breeze, invisible except for the feeling of it gossamer thin but consuming. She knows how to be as thin as a shadow stretching out too far in the noon-time. Isra knows how to be a ghost, a mist on the sea that starts slowly until it's a fog that blinds and swallows ships whole. Once, she was invisible and today she'll be nothing more than another body in the crowed, supposed but never known.
Overhead Fable is flying circles in the heavy, low clouds that would have promised rain back home. Isra doesn't know what they promise in this place. Here and there a flash of a wing cuts through the clouds, but it's gone so fast it could be nothing more than another vulture circling and searching for a corpse. It's clear on the other side of the wall. A image of the wall appears in her head, from the other side and there are no guards watching this corner of the wall near the poorest part of the city.
Isra turns back to the wall that's looming-- until it's not looming at all. Not anymore.
Part of the wall, arched and barely higher than the point of her horn, is no longer stone. On the ground there is now a pile of diamonds, ankle deep. They feel cold and sharp against her fetlocks as she moves through them into the Solterra capital. She hardly makes a sound as she moves towards a flag waving outside what seems to be an empty house. Isra smiles and takes that flag between her teeth. She rips it down.
Once it hits her back it becomes a shroud of silk, burnish gold with obsidian buttons that she latches at her chest. In that shroud of silk she's just another body dressed in the color of sand. The chain around her leg becomes a band of silver strung with amethyst and ruby. There are small suns etched in the metal between the stones. She looks like nothing more than a plain, bay unicorn. There is nothing special about her with her chain gone and her scales covered up. Isra cannot help but think this might be how she would have dressed if it was Eik who brought her here.
It's war that's brought her here though, and she shakes out any thoughts of love and softness. Now is the time to be cold as ice and sharp as a blade. She walks towards the heart of the city and reminds her hooves to move like a slave instead of a queen. It comes easy to her, the low head and downward eyes. Most nights she still dreams of the lash, and brutality. Now she's glad for the nightmares, she'll welcome each shard of steel they drive into her heart.
Each time she stumbles across a family, slat-ribbed and full of hopelessness she pauses. She directs them to the wall, whispering “Go south, follow the wing in the clouds. Take some of the diamonds with you. Buy a new life. Go and go quickly.” Over and over she pauses to send families away. She doesn't tell them to go to Denocte, but she hopes they will.
And each time she walks close to a pillar or a sign about rations and loyalty she pauses to turn the stone below it to a metal flower. Each time she leaves that message for Raum something sparks inside her, something vicious and poison. She wonders how long it will take him to hear of the metal flowers growing in the stone, bright yellow and charred black. Will he see them and think of Acton? Or will he think of her?
The center of the capital is still a way off, but she doesn't let her stride falter or the war waiting, dark and electric in her gaze dim.
open to anyone! | "speaks" | notes: anyone from the raugime is welcome to come harass her, or someone can just chat with her.
He is following her from the beginning. He is not a guard standing at the wall but he is near enough to see it collapse quietly into diamonds (how beautiful) and from that moment he is enchanted. He does not know her for who she is but he sees the way she touches things and turns them to more beautiful things.
It is so entrancing. Even if he knew he was meant to look for her he would not think to. She is all art and magic and the untouchable strangeness of the world above. If only he had known before that there was more to it than blood. He stands in the shadows as she sends away the starving families of this land; he is well fed and towering and does not hold the stature of the beaten. He was given power. Choice. Instruction. Praise.
It is all he has ever wanted (he thinks).
He catches the first flower between his teeth but then there are more, and he wants all of them but there is not enough space in his maw to hold them all and then he could not ask her what he is dying to know. (What does he want to know? How she does it? Who she is? What she is? He is not even certain of that.)
And she does not stop. She does not pause except to tell the starving to go, and they are such an unfamiliar sight to El Rey he is still not entirely certain what their bodies mean. It is only when he grows entirely frustrated of the shadows and silence does he say, around his metal blossom, ”Excuse me?” (He would’ve asked what she is, immediately, but he has begun to learn that there are things you must say first, or else you may be passed over - and that is not something he wishes for. Certainly not now.)
Isra and the black, metal teeth
“I am freedom and I will eat your heart.”
F
able is the first to spot him walking behind her not like a shadow but like an oil-slick. Against the red-stone and dust, when Fable looks down the stallion looks not black. The dragon thinks he looks like a crow, full on sad rodents and slick sided with a strange sheen that teases Fable's gaze through the cloud-cover. Careful. He warns his unicorn and he sends an image of the oil-slick reaching out towards the sea of her. There's worry running electric down that spiral of love between them, worry and anger tainted with hunger. Fable wants but he's still not sure what it is that's driving the salt-water boil of ocean in his belly.
Isra can feel that hunger too and sometimes she thinks it only belong to her. That this dragon of need is flying in the space between her ribs with wings tipped in talons and poisons. Sometimes she thinks that between her and Fable she's the real dragon who belongs in the bottom of the sea.
It seems silly now to have been so sure she drowned and came back as a still-slave in a unicorn skin. When she pauses and turns to look back at that speaking, towering pool of oil behind her the thing that blossoms below her magic feels primordial. It feels like the sea is inside of her, a world of rip-tides and ships dashed upon the bones of her.
She smiles.
His horns are the first thing to catch her gaze. How could they not? That primordial current slamming against her bones wants to know what else but gold has touched those curling, perfect horns. Have they tasted of magic? Of flesh? Of salt-water? Of blood?
Isra looks for his gaze and finds only blackness and oil. The blackness reminds her of crows and a dark cave full of knives and flowers, of ghosts, of all the things she has promised herself to devour. Her own single horn sighs in the dry wind and when the cloud-cover shifts the shadow of it waivers across the ground, like a white-tipped wave crashing against the sand. It is not tipped in gold, but the hollow curls of it look almost wanting in the dappled light shifting through the clouds.
“Do you like my flowers?” Her voice is nothing more than a whisper in the noise of the crowd around them. Isra does not miss the way the poor and the weak curl around his massive form, like he's a void that might swallow them whole if they get to close. It should make her pause, but it doesn't. Oh it doesn't! Instead she only leans into that space between them like a gavel leaning over stone and ready to swing. She hangs there and the world almost seems to pause on that inhale of desert air in her lungs.
Everything in her cries out for the spice and soot of her home's mountain breeze.
Isra swallows down the dust and the heat. She chews on the sorrow in the wind like it's ash. It coats her teeth with the grime of it. She exhales--
A circle of flowers spreads out around her where only dirt and stone was before. The jagged petals look like the black teeth of the earth reaching out from the belly of the world. They do not look like they would bend easy. They look hungry, like it's not flies that they want.
The unicorn dressed in gold does not shift her eyes from him. They shine bright like the summer sea and the current running through them whispers words that her grime covered teeth do not want to surrender.
Would you like to see how many your mouth can hold? Her eyes say.
A shadow passes overhead and Rey finds that there is a strange bird between the clouds. He ponders this briefly before she speaks, for the greatest wonders of this world above are not gore and agony but the creatures that dance between the blooming things. He would ask of it, had she not asked a question of her own.
“Do you like my flowers?”
He says, “Yes,” as those very flowers curl around her, a king marveling that they do not tear the hard soil underneath. El Rey reaches down to the hungry blossom teeth and inhales, long and slow so the void in his belly can pack itself with dust and hatred (not his own, no, he does not even see it in the bladed twists of the flowers, the searching twists of her horn. When have his horns done anything but search?) When he does not find a perfume but the sting of cold steel, he wonders what manner of natural thing they are. He remembers the wall folding into diamonds and thinks: unnatural thing.
He was told little of the unnatural things in this world.
El Rey does not know to apprehend her. He does not know what it is she does, what name she dons beneath her cloak, but perhaps foolishly he says, “What did you do to the wall to make it diamonds?” for he is only a curious child that wears death upon his brow.
He was instructed to kill when asked, to hurt when told, and when there was information to be heard, to peel back the loose lips of the traitorous and rip their tongues from their palates and listen.
He does not know if this is something for Raum.
@Isra | Pan Asian Delight ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
Isra and the dark tale
“no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate and ate”
W
ithin her garden of blooming, metal death she watches him like a hawk watches a small rabbit who thinks itself larger than the mice living in the tall grass with it. When he reaches for her field of clever weapons she wants to turn each flower into an arrow rising straight and true from the ground. She wonders if he can taste the rusted pollen on his lips or if he can feel the tetanus ache running through his nose (searching, searching, searching for blood).
Her magic begs her to find out but she swallows it down like water swallowing wildfire. There is ash and soot running through her now.
“I'm glad you like them.” The primordial ocean is speaking through her now, leaking brine from every pore of her. The sun is pulling the salt from her and she wonders if she could water her small garden of death with it (what could her sweat become if not deadly?). Part of her wants to tell him that she could sow a field of metal and rust in his court.
Would he think them perfect then?
Isra does not think to be afraid of all the things in running through her like wolves running through a blizzard. She does not think to wonder that she is more dangerous than this monument of a stallion with gold-tipped horns. There are no thoughts running through her but freedom and vengeance. He is a black shadow sanding between her and all those thoughts.
The wind and sand cut themselves on her petals and she moves closer through that field of weapons. Each place she steps turns back to sand cut through with pearls. Beauty blooms at her feet and death further than that. “Magic.” She answers him and her voice carries with it the promise of a story.
Before she was a unicorn, before she was a body in the sea, before she was a queen, Isra was a wielder of words. And now she waves the sound her voice between them like a white flag hiding the sharp point of a blade. There is a promise in her eyes, deep as the ocean, that there is more magic, more wonder, more everything waiting to escape this cage of flesh.
“Would you like to see more?” This she says like a story-teller brushing death across a child's brow and calling it an adventure.
”I’m glad you like them.” Something of a grin pulls on his mouth as he looks up at her, eyes shining along the black expanse of his form, but seeing, yes, seeing the magic and seeing the bringer of the magic to this world. He knows so little, yet
he
hungers.
El Rey wears wonder without a mask.
He has nothing to hide.
(And though he seldom thinks it for all the times he has acted on it, if there was anything worth hiding he would simply snuff out the lives of the informed like the candles of his cellar. Warm, and visible, and when the night fell -
gone.)
She comes closer to him and he only watches with that child’s face, the strange innocence of the only fed body in the vicinity. He does not notice the starved twirling away from them like petals on a wicked wind, curling from their bladed brethren on the ground or the two strange beings holding court in a desert meadow.
”Magic.”
”Magic,” he echoes, breathlessly, for there is nothing greater to the victims of mundane life.
(If his could be called such a thing.)
”Would you like to see more?”
El Rey leans forward with the force of his wonder. ”Yes.”
@Isra ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
Isra who grows rubies
“crimson flames shot out of its heart and it seemed like a great black tulip”
A
beast is growing in her, seeded by each too thin body she's watching move around them. It's fertilized by her sea of fury (her sea, of course it's her sea) when she watches a child run trembling into the darkness with one glance at this black predator standing before her. Somewhere deep where she's learning to venture, Isra promises herself that if he takes one step towards all the suffering horses around them she will turn all the sand to blades and impale him upon the altar of his own home.
She's promising herself so many things now. That becoming a monster is 'right' and she needs no other reason but 'justice' to help her sleep. Each night she promises herself that she can still go home, that she can go back to feeling empathy instead of hate.
And each night she's starting to believe herself a little less.
He looks like a child now, full of wonder and a sort of evil that is bred as much as it is grown. She thinks that each of those things makes him dangerous (like a wolf that doesn't know it's rabid). The magic he's asking for is wrapping around her neck like a snake and asking her to be just a little numb. Become numb, it says, so that you might survive..
Isra listens.
The smile on her face is bright and full of joy, as if each of those flowers at their hooves is blooming euphoria instead of rust. “I would love to show you more then.” Isra is still moving closer and flowers are still turning to pearls in the places where her shadow is black, black, black on the red-sand. Her voice carries with it an air of expectation, as if all the magic and wonder at her feet is nothing but the prelude to some great wonder.
It takes everything in her to keep her eyes from straying towards the starving city around her. Everything in her is screaming, run, run, run. Even Fable in the cloud over is starting to circle lower and lower. He's ready to sweep down upon the city and devour everything in his fury to spirit his unicorn home. Yet when she lifts her eyes up to meet his black gaze there is only a promise of greatness waiting to look back out at him. It shines and shines in the sunlight, surely there is nothing greater.
“If you could wish for one thing, magic made, what would it be? Tell me and I will create it for you.” Her steps and her garden circle him as she she moves to walk around him. Each bloom is brighter than the last, rust to gold and gold to silver. She's queen of that garden of wealth when she pauses and her horn is a diadem of bone on her brow.
Only when she's behind him does she let her gaze look back towards that dark capital in the distance. And when she looks back all the metal flowers at her hooves have grown roots of ruby, slick and shining like blood.
There is so much darkness in him and he feels none of it.
She feels all of it.
Sees him for what he is - transparent - a fish bowl, a globe, a witch’s ball hanging in a garden of ribs and sand, the end of the world, post-apocalyptic, as they say, not that he would know, no, but the sun god has scorched this land too many times for a black scorpion to crawl out of a pit, for a unicorn to push out of the sea, each born again, born twice at least, not like real mortals are. Too different for that sort of thing. You’ve got to hang from a tree at least once, maybe, twice, one eye gone, one leg crossed, stripped of all your clothes and descending into the underworld, eaten by your mentor, you a kernel and she a hen. Something like that, something, something, but it’s all magic, always. Always magic, always.
He doesn’t know what magic is anyway, well a little, you know, from some stories, besides the histories, but sometimes there is magic in the histories and his wide-eyes watch her wild-eyes but he can’t see them for what they are, he’s the one on the inside of the single-sided glass and nobody at the pool told him that if you look close enough, you can see the shapes of people on the other side.
He loves the meadow that grows around her, so beautifully, so sharply, like a torture chamber, tea-party style.
“If you could wish for one thing, magic made, what would it be? Tell me and I will create it for you.”
What is a thing that he wants in his heart that can be made into a thing that can be seen?
He thinks
and thinks
and thinks.
And El Rey says, ”No one has ever asked me what I wanted before,” he paused, inhaled, if he were any other creature you might tell yourself that there really was a trembling breath in there somewhere, “I want to go home, but I cannot go back. My family was killed. I think it was my fault.”
(And it was not that he had never been asked to make a decision, but no one had ever asked of him what was there to want beyond the duty.)
@Isra ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
Isra who is tired of lies
“The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.”
I
sra does not want to lie to him anymore. She doesn't want to pretend that she's a doe looking at a stag and wondering which apple looks the sweetest. And so she doesn't.
Instead she strikes like the wolf she's become. Her magician skin falls off and the silk shroud around her turns to butterflies of vellum paper. They all fall upon the blades like a flock of butterflies felled by a winter wind that struck to soon. They all dissolve to dust upon the bladed flowers. Dead.
Her flowers remain weapons, pointed and rusted. They beg for his hooves, and his violence, and his broken, infected innocence. Isra does not care for what he could be, not anymore. All she cares for it what he has become. All the horses avoiding him are weights hitting one side of his scales, and oh, he's unbalanced. Her magic hums in her bones, begging her to turn scale to stone and sink it into the sea.
Magic cracks against her, like hunger, like fury, like the night crashing against the sunlight. It devours every lie until she stands, surrounded in weaponry, a queen. “Of course you can't go home.” Her horn flashes upon her brow, a single crown of bone to the two blades of horns hanging from like like two points on a crucifix. The tip of her horn looks like an ending. She does not stop to wonder what his looks like.
“Look how the city trembles around you. Look how they all fear you as much as they hate you.” Isra growls like a wolf and each of her words is a rumble of hunger in her straved, winter stomach. "Of course it was your fault.” She does not want to lie to him anymore. There is only a forest monster looking back at him through a copse of metal weapons-- a wolf and a queen.
Sand begs to become between her bladed petals. Isra listens. Arrows rise up between her flowers. A stem becomes a bow. She holds both with her telekinesis. Isra waits to aim.
Her hooves move backwards, the flowers turn to glass beneath her steps. They turn back to metal the second her hooves land on another patch of dirt. The city becomes whatever she wants it to be in each place she moves.
“But,” Isra laughs and the sky above her head rattles with a dragon's roar. “I do not fear you.” She blinks and the queen is gone. Only the wolf with the winter stomach is left.
Look how the city trembles around you. Look how they all fear you as much as they hate you.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Of course it was your fault.
He sees the weapons he loves turn to weapons he can understand. She backs away. Farther farther and aiming aiming.
But -
I do not fear you.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
What to do what to do what to do without your praise?
What to do without your fear?
But the trembling and the hate is what this is all for, is it not? This is what he was made for, this is what he was raised for, trained, appointed for…
He steps forward. He does not look the arrow in the eye apple. He will not. He looks at her, two empty galaxies for seeing with. It hurts to be played for a fool - but what could he expect, now, having become someone? Truly, what else was there to do when power began to seep from your pores as sweat, as Eshek promised, his father promised, Raum promised…
He had no magic to contend with hers. He could not see a way with his beetle eyes that would allow him past the garden of arrows. He wanted to call her a coward. Stand and fight, then. Remove the barrier between us. Show me the end of your blade, I will show you mine in unison. The scraping of bone on bone could make his skin shiver.
He remembers then what else Eshek promised.
The sands had become his home. Not the cellar. Not the nursemaid. Not his father. ”I already am home,” he began, low and fathomless in depth. ”And I do not fear you.” He should’ve, oh, he should have. He knew those roses for what they were, now, but oh, o, he would stamp them flat as foil beneath his hooves to gut her in her own false garden.
@Isra | Ozymandias ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
