Of course Asterion did not want to get involved. Of course. Of course. And she cannot even blame him, not really, not totally, because it is not their problem - it has nothing do with them.
But Marisol has been thinking far too much of Isra and of how it might feel to almost-die, and she has never been one to shy away from duty.
So she takes off from the barracks in the dead of night, if not to start a fight then to gather information. All of Novus is dark and sleepy as she soars through the thin clouds and over the mountains and valleys; it is quiet except for the song of her heart, the beat of her wings, the sweet and innocent sound of birds singing in the air next to her. Despite the direness of the situation, it is almost peaceful. The quiet. The dark. The knowledge of righteousness.
The air shifts a few degrees warmer. The moon has started to settle and the sun to rise, and miles below Mari can see where the green of the fields fades into deep, golden sand. Her pulse ratchets a little higher. Now the citadel pours over the dunes, and she can see the beginnings of a sandstone civilization. With a sigh of discontent Mari folds her wings to her sides and starts her dive down, down, down -
When she lands, it is just outside the city center. Her hooves sink into the dry sand, and wind scrapes away what little comfort there is in her coat. It is dawn now. The sky simmers with light pink and oranges and purples. The streets are empty, though Marisol cannot be sure whose fault that is, if it is in anyone.
Without her warpaint or her sashes, she is nothing more than a girl shouldering her way into Solterra for the first time. Nothing more than a stranger doing her best to fulfill her duties.
Isra, the ghost wearing black
“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”
This time she is nothing more than a shadow lingering in all the bright sunlit sand of Solterra. There is black around her from the stone monoliths that tower above her, beasts made of desert and blood. Today her head is covered in a black shroud like a death priest would wear (or maybe a shed-star). Even her horn is nothing more than a spiral of ore sprouting from a brow that never anointed itself in a golden crown.
Isra is a cobweb in the dark, a tangle of silken and fragile threads. She's thin enough to sway in a breeze like a song. Most of all she's a trap and it's only in the right light, when she's draped in a necklace of dew, that the hunger in her smile is visible at all. And oh how sweetly she is smiling at the enforcers walking the empty streets (like a spider instead of a unicorn).
But then, oh then, a flurry of feathers breaks up the acid roar of fury in her belly. Her gaze snags on white down softness and skin the color of rotten wood (more dark than brown). All her hunger rises to a fever pitch and starts to feel something like fear instead of rage. Every molecule of air catches in her lungs like they are made of concrete instead of organ. Even her heart stutters in her ribs like a clock that's missing a gear.
All of Isra sobs out to see Marisol here among the red-stone and silence. She still hasn't found Eik in this sea of sorrow and suffering. Isra is willing to drown in it, this sea of black, but she's not willing to see all the veins running through her heart drown too.
She would burn this whole city to the ground first, flood it in salt-water and pearls.
“Marisol.” The black spiderweb says and all her fragile threads flutter in the breeze of the name on her lips. It's a prayer wind, that sigh of a name, and her teeth ache with the sweetness of it under all the dust and grime coating them. “You shouldn't be here.” One of her threads snaps in the breeze, and her fury is cracking beneath the weight of all this caring and fear. She's adrift in the shadows when she steps away from them.
Isra wonders if she looks like a ghost now too, a shadow set loose on Novus with hate in her heart.
Her words linger in her air like a blade deciding which spine to swing for. She wants to chase Marisol off with all the reasons she should be anywhere else but near here. But when she buries her nose against that pool of feathers her thoughts tumble over each other. The feathers tickle at her nose like pollen and petals all Isra can think is this---
“But I'm glad you are.” For just a moment Isra rejoices in the feel of feathers and the way the hunger and hate in her heart ebbs at the wind-smell hiding in Marisol's wings. And just like that, she's forgotten how to be a shadow in which a spider waits for the feast.
Marisol is overcome with the feeling that she is entering a graveyard.
Even under the watchful sun a spectral chill gnaws at her like slick canine teeth. The light that spirals down, dusty and too-white, is not at all a comfort. It singes her instead. She is defenseless here, stripped bare of her usual confidence without the familiar pattern of white on her wings, or the weight of the spear at her side; but they would not have let her in here looking like that, a weapon given godly form, and so she lets her gaze drop and her shoulders rise protectively against the glare of the guards on the streets.
And holds back the part of her that wants to bare her teeth, for the bloodcurdling way they watch her.
Anyway, she knows enough about war not to take it personally. And enough about Solterra, and enough about Raum, to realize she should have expected this from the beginning. The dread that twists up her spine is borne not from surprise, but deep, chilling righteousness, that her preparation for the worst was really as urgent as it felt: there had been parts of her that paused to weigh whether the situation was truly as dire as it sounded, and those parts were as foolish as they were stupid. She realizes it now, as the soft song of the desert fades into horrid dead silence. There are no footsteps, no music, no muted conversations. When she had been told stories about Solterra, it had always been like this:
The desert was bright and the people brighter because there was no other way in which to survive. All heat. And passion. And a desperate love of survival. People shouted in the dusty streets and watched the world from the slits of silk scarves, laced dark over the unhappy slopes of their mouths. On each corner merchants taunted and teased their wares, fabrics and swords, baklavas, rosewater, so practiced they could just as easily sell a foreigner sand. Violins and qanuns sang throughout the bustling streets and drowned the sandstone in clever, sultry operas; always there was life, even if it was violent and unstable -
Oh, it is not like that now. And Marisol, even Marisol, who would not leave her home even in the face of death, feels something in her heart twist and cry as she thinks of all the citizens who have already watched their home turn dark and rot.
Soldiers stand silently in the seams of the streets. They watch her through masks, and hair, and the thin film of dust covering everything in Solterra. Not a sound escapes them. Not even breath. They burn, and stand still in the fire. In each of their expressions is something dark, and truly evil: not because they want for Solterra’s destruction, but because they are totally complacent in the face of it.
Her name, from nowhere, sounds like breaking.
Marisol’s dark ears twist rapidly. It takes every ounce of will not to turn toward the sound - it could just as easily be a foe as a friend, waiting to drag her into the alleys kicking and screaming. She measures her step. She forces the pace to continue evenly.
Then the voice comes again, and all the training in the world could not convince her to ignore it.
Isra, she thinks, and with no more than a brief glance around the streets steps sideways into the cool dark, and oh -
Every bone of her cries in relief. Isra is here, flesh and blood, and all in one piece. Dark-eyed and weary and burning with rage, and there is no better gift Marisol could have asked for in a place so desolate as this, even if it is not quite the same Isra who taught her to dance at that party so long ago.
Beggars cannot be choosers, and Christ, is Marisol willing to beg.
The only movement of her face is the brief, jerky twitch of a blink holding back tears. Every muscle in her body has wound up; even her hair seems knot itself in confusion.Grief reveals me,she says, stunned. She cannot quite contain the breaking in her voice, or the wonder in her eyes. Her broad wing reaches to wrap around the curve of Isra’s neck, and the Commander pulls her in closer, closer again, until they are pressed together as warm and contiguous as molten glass; her pulse beats deep and quick and dark against the inside of her chest, and she closes her eyes to breathe in the smell of stars that follows Isra like perfume.
Her skin starts to burn. All of her aches to say something more, to say something useful, but she only tips her forehead against Isra's and breathes out a sigh so deep it rattles her bones. @isra <3
Isra and a bed of feathers
"into the castle’s dark shadows where night met blackened air.”
“Then let it remake you.” Isra prays like the feathers whispering against all her dark, moonless skin are an altar of some new god. Each of the feathers kissing along her skin carries her away to another world. A world where war is nothing more than ink in a old, old book and suffering a thing that only thrives in nightmares.
Her nose presses to Marisol's cheek as if she can put back together each word that's breaking the Commander's lips. Perhaps this is how wars are ended, girls piecing each other back together with lips and wings, love and heartbreak. Isra could almost forget that she knows how to smile like a spider or how she can still dissolve into the blackness like something made of silken threads instead of blood.
And oh, when Marisol presses her forehead against her, she wants to forget.
But outside their cocoon of feathers, grief, and prayers the world is suffocating in suffering. The sand is is hot with sunlight and stained with blood. Isra is already becoming aware of the way she's tilting her hollow horn away from Marisol because she's gotten used to keeping it canted down between her and the world. She's aware of the way her body is hard now from running, from fighting, from everything that does not make her happy like dancing had once.
Isra wants to cry because she knows that as much as she wants to loose herself in feathers, and the rain of white sparks tracing their way down her spine, she must not. There are so many things she's willing to give up like the heart beating in her chest, her crown, this unicorn skin. She would give them all up, toss them off a cliff with the wind at the back of each sacrifice. There is nothing she will not surrender for all the names etched in veins upon her heart.
Yet, this feels like one of the hardest thing to sacrifice: the memory of dancing, of learning another secret in this world that makes her feel less tragic and more full.
Isra pulls away and she feels like it's the pieces of her that are breaking now. She's afraid to speak because she doesn't know what sharp glass shards will fall from her lips like bits of ice. The tornado in her gut feels almost impossible to wrangle. When she leaves the bed of feathers she feels like she's no longer a bright star but a dying one in the shadow of the moon.
She does not think she will ever be whole again.
“Why did you come?” And even though she tries so very hard each word falls from her lips like glass, sharp and waiting. Isra is crying glass instead of tears and she cannot help but think that war must make sharp, dangerous things out of all of them.
Let it remake you, Isra says, and Marisol wonders what there is to remake.
Is it too much, or not enough? The weight of her body, the fact of her body, and the terrible things it always begs for. The many places her dark skin has been wrought by scars or purplish bruises. How her hair has learned, finally, to stay bristled short. Or the way her brain still asks woefully to lay quiet when there is not a quiet moment in the world to give it, now that every timeline has been swallowed by blood.
Marisol’s head buzzes like the singing of cicadas. Struggling to breathe, she pulls Isra in tighter with the curve of her wing until their is no space left between them, until every bit of warmth in the air or in their bodies is shared, and something in her mouth - an iron bit, a still-beating heart - starts to quiver. She is remade already by the way Isra’s lips touch her cheek and her pulse matches Marisol. She is remade into something worse than she was before: something that wants and wants and wants and will never do anything to fix it.
There is not enough time to say everything that needs to be said, and so, as is her way, the Commander says nothing.
They break apart. The light is blinding when Marisol finally screws her eyes open, and its glare makes her feel almost sick. It sears through her skin and into her brain. Her chest hurts wretchedly as Theodosia comes to mind, unbidden; she wonders when she became one of the people she hated most, and bile fills her throat. I have lost my morals, she thinks bitterly, and even the beauty of Isra’s delicate face is not enough to staunch her sudden disgust: I have lost everything, is the thought that follows, and her whole body clenches with the effort of holding back another crisis.
Tears shimmer into her eyes. She feels too pathetic to blink them away.
But she ducks her head against for a brief moment, at least, to hide them as they fall. Isra asks what she is doing here, and for a moment Marisol struggles to justify it as she thinks of Asterion, and Theodosia, and her own people’s struggles. There are too many reasons and none of them are good. Too many reasons and none of them matter. I heard about Raum, she says bitterly, and watches Isra through a swath of tear-dark lashes, And what he did to you, and the girl-queen. I worried… for you, and what might happen to the rest of us if Solterra was overtaken.
Most of all, though Marisol would never admit to it or its inherent selfishness, she worries what she might do to the world if Isra were hurt. How easily she would be willing to burn it.
Of course she catches the shine of tears in Marisol's eyes before she ducks her face to hide them. How could she not notice them when she's blocking out every hideous inch of suffering sand around them with the planes of Marisol's face? Isra wants to tell her not to hide. She wants to tell her that her tears look like starlight that they could drink of (or drown in).
Isra cannot bring herself to crack open her heart where there is only fire and stone left flowing through each chamber.
Instead she only reaches closer again, already unable to keep that distance between them where war lives and love dies. Around them Solterra is a planet on fire and they are the night overhead, cool dark and alive with constellations. Her lips pull at Marisol's sharp and straight mane and Isra wonders if she too tastes like a sharp thing full of star-water. She wonders what the tears winking up from the bottom of her eyes look like. Do they look like fish in a sea or like ships sailing beneath the waves?
“I would never let anything happen to you.” She says against all that sharp mane stinging her lips like small needles full of the only poison Isra wants to drink. “This rot will begin and end with Raum.” Isra tugs and pulls, anything to lift Marisol's out of the darkness of their shadows. It's enough that she lives in the blackness now and the sun always feels like acid on her skin now. Too long has she been without her cool winter nights and her jasmine spiced fires.
Isra feels like she's just woken up, staring at Marisol and her dark feathers. She's awake and she's dizzy all at once. But it's not the sound of a harp and the feel of silk against her skin that makes her dizzy now. There is so music carrying her feet through the sand as she turns. It's only a war-drum singing in her now, a thrum of fury beaten beneath the dull edge of a blade. She smiles, “And Raum ends with me.”. The flash of her teeth in the place between them is cold, like a candle melting into black water.
There is no one moment in which Isra can remember becoming a warrior. No single beat of her heart that she felt the change come upon her swiftly like a wave upon the shore. She cannot recall when all her bones decided that they wanted to move upon war instead of music. Maybe all that she is now started back with the sea. Maybe she's been bleeding primordial since her first step on sand instead of water.
Isra is grateful for it now, the way she already knows how to die. She is more of a ghost than Raum is.
“Would you like to see how?” All the things flashing in her eyes aren't fish or boats then. Each shine of silver in that deep blue is a shark, a beast of violence rising to the surface because the time has come for feeding.
"we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, "
The Commander’s gut reaction is a sad, horrible smile, a facsimile of the real thing steeped in sadness - a parting of the lips to say It’s not that simple -
But, well. Maybe it is.
Maybe it is simple after all, and the simplest explanation is not that she does not deserve protection but that no one has ever offered it to her. All this time she had thought she was the top of the food chain - something to fight, not be defended - and yet the truth of the matter, she realizes, staring into Isra’s blue eyes, is that she is still nothing more than a girl. Young. Lovely. Bruised. In need of a kiss between the eyes, bullet or lips. The simplest explanation is that Marisol is not human enough to ask, but that, too, is a lie. She asks all the time. Come deliver message with me. Hand me the spear. Give me a fight. And no one except Isra has ever caught onto it, or given it a name. Even Marisol has kept the awful, stupid desire under wraps since the first night she slept in the barracks and cried herself into silence.
Dark, dark sleep, and silence, and only the protection of a hard heart.
She blinks mutely. Something prickles over her neck, and finally she is startled from her reverie by a pleasant jolt of pain as Isra’s teeth grasp at her hair. (A little thrill of electricity goes rushing down Marisol’s spine and pools in the pit of her stomach -) The tree corrupt and so the fruit, she says dazedly, so prune the tree, and finally the glazed look in her eyes rushes away, replaced with a sharp, deadly darkness. A kind of love. An unholy desire.
Oh, Solterra is nothing now. Just dead sand and a battlefield waiting to be bloody. Against the sandstone they are two lithe shadows, and though they do not escape the glare of every guard, neither are they sniped at or battered. Marisol feels her muscles coil like a leopard waiting to pounce. Her chest constricts, and her lungs inside it; what feeling overcomes her is a cousin of passion, perhaps less moral, but just as useful.
Show me, she says, and suddenly her voice is a fierce thing, vibrating with all the force of waves crashing on rocks - salt tears into her mouth - her jaw sets and her head lowers, and she is comforted by the promise of violence in Isra’s eyes and how it matches the anger in hers. The two of them sparkle and roar.
The sun still glares from overhead, but it is nothing compared to their perfect darkness. @isra <3
It's easier to hold fire between them than it was to hold the straining melody of a golden harp.
Violence is easier than softness. It's easier to bite than love, and it tastes like spice and soot on her tongue when she grabs at this hot, wild thing rising incorporeal between them. Isra chews and the sharks are still swimming in the two salt-water pits in her head. The magic in her bones reaches out towards the black thoughts living in the small spaces between a girl with a horn and a girl with wings.
And then her magic takes the violence between its sharp teeth and worries at it like a bone.
Isra smiles. All the love in her lips has grown cold like winter and sharp like steel and she's a lovely sort of weapon when she takes a mouthful of sand and mixes it with spit. She brushes the spit and sand across Marisol's brow and down the elegant slope of the jaw she sometimes sees in her dream.
And when she pulls away all the sand turns to paint. Marisol is covered in paint as red and glittering as fresh blood, a true beast of violence instead of a girl with secret tears in her eyes. She looks like a Commander and Isra looks like a weapon.
Isra thinks she likes them better like this-- ruby-eyed monsters waiting, and waiting, and waiting in the darkness. Her smile is a weapon's smile when she says, “follow me.”
The darkness pulls back from her like a ship pulling away from the swells of a storm plagued sea. She does not think to miss it, not when the sand quivers at her hooves like grass quivering for rain. Her magic waters it, turns it not to mud but to fire opals as red as the war-paint on Maisol's cheek. She laughs as a that sea of stone spreads out from them like a pathway through a thick wood. It blazes bright in the sun like an eternal, cold fire.
Soldiers turn to look at her now and Isra laughs when she sees the way they cannot decide if they are angry, afraid, or full of wonder. Some part of her, that monstrous part, hopes that they land on anger and violence instead of fear. Magic turns the pathway of rubies to metal flowers sharp and pointed skyward in the places where soldiers are starting to draw their weapons. She will cripple them before they think to give chase.
“How much fruit do you think we can prune?” There is wickedness in her smile now, sea monsters in her eyes, and magic leaking like a oil from her voice. The ground becomes sand again when she kicks her hooves up into a gallop through the streets thick with dust and suffering.
There's a tree up ahead and Isra plans on cutting it down.
" like ink obscuring the waters around the octopus before it strikes."
Marisol knows well how much easier it is to be loved than love, and she knows, too, how much easier it is to be the victim than the judge: there is no small measure of guilt that comes with indicting a death sentence, and the voracity with which Isra is prepared to defend her decision is one that Marisol admires with her whole heart. It is terrifying. And wonderful. She has never been so sure of anything as Isra is of this. And to see the Denoctian queen so willingly bury her heart in search of God is something so pious and beautiful it almost brings her to tears.
But there is no time to cry, nor tears left to waste. Deep in her angry heart Marisol knows she will have to save her sorrow for something inevitably worse.
She stands perfectly still as Isra draws her lips over the hard plane of her forehead. She feels a little drizzle of wet sand, and then the drizzle builds and builds and builds until it is a wave coursing down her cheeks and she sees red splat-splat-splat on the cobblestone and hikes in a sharp breath. It matches sharp against her chest. It is not blood, but it could be -
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