The spring wind a little warm, a little cool too, like a kiss. The stars overhead are faint enough to be pretty but not threatening; strung between their lanyards is a waning moon that sheds silver on the water like so many scales, moving gray-white-blue as each wave crashes. The darkness of the jungle has been amplified a hundred times, so that each swirling leaf has turned from green to black, and the shadows have become pure, perfect ink.
And Iscariot is not deserving of such a perfect night, oh no, she has work to do, but—who is she to ignore a gods-given gift?
The island has calmed somewhat since she crashed into it. She hasn’t talked to anyone since the portal threw her in, but she’s picked up information, bits and pieces, from listening to the conversations as they pass her.
From what she can gather, the island is new. And… not normal. It sprang up from the ocean. From a volcano. Under the tongue of a god—gods? And they say that it’s bursting with magic. (Which Iscariot has to laugh at—magic, yes, maybe, but hardly. Like a sneeze in a hurricane. Their magic is pathetic, nothing compared to the magic of her mother, nothing compared to the magic of her debtor. But let them think it’s magic. It’s nice to laugh at something instead of snarling.)
Anyway: the night is sweet, and Iscariot, against her better judgement, is enjoying it. Her spindly frame is splayed out on the beach, cheek pressed against the sand, which is still warm from today’s sun; her eyes are open but only lazily, and her dark tail splashes back and forth behind her. For the first time in a long time, she feels.. calm. Her heartbeat is slow. The world is quiet. Only the low sound of the wind and the movement of birds resists the silence that lingers above her head.
The ocean laughs at her. It whispers salt-water froth that curves along its sandy lips and echoes its siren call into her ears.
The ocean crawls its way up along the beach. It ripples like satin cloth, wrong, wrong. It is the black of ink, midnight painted, moonlight highlighted. It ripples and does not chop or hiss. It rolls in enchanting ways and lures Leto’s gaze down, down from the moon.
Oh she watches it, stares upon that wrong, wrong ocean. She gazes as it rolls up the beach toward her and only breathes when it slowly rolls back out. It does not carry her out - not yet, not yet.
How tight does Fate hold her? How does it twine in unremitting chains about her ankles? Its hold is unbreakable.
The stars keen for the girl who looked away from them.
The trees rustle and sigh for the girl who does not look at them.
No, she looks at nothing but the sands beneath her feet as she skirts the inland edges of the beach. Sigils blaze across her ebony skin. They burn golden in the moonlight. They pull upon her skin for the damp of the swamp, for the buttress trees that sit, vines strung between their sentinel trunks.
Leto might have turned then, she might have let those ancient drawings freshly made upon her skin pull her back, back across Novus and deep into the dank dark of Tinea… were it not for the chime of bones. The clack of skulls, drawn out of mud, and beads that clinked like pottery hummed like the wind. Her own bones chime from where they hang, tied tightly into the snarls of her mane. The star girl’s skull tilts, listening, wild, curious.
She looks and looks until, there, a stranger stands with webbed rope strung between her horns and pale bones woven into the tangles of her mane. There is mud in that girl’s veins, it is mud that sings to the starfire in Leto’s own. It is mud that sinks its dirty fingers deep and from amidst the galaxies of her soul draws out her Ilati bond. Slowly, slowly Leto moves, silent like prey, slow like a hunter. She knows how to weave so her metal leaves do not chime, she knows how step so her pearls do not whisper.
Closer, closer this creature of starfire and earth magic moves until she is close, close, until the moonlight shadows bathe them and drown them. All is earth here, her sigils laugh across her skin, they cry out their ancient magic into the space between them. They press and press and press their stories deep, deep into the stranger’s skin. Leto’s eyes are wide, wide and the star dare not speak when the earth has its turn to sing.
“Not many Ilati still remain…” She says like a shedstar, like a girl woven together by stars and animated by earth’s wild spirit. Leto looks, oh she looks over every inch of this girl – for sigils, for scars, for any whisper of ancient magic. “You are Ilati,” She affirms, slowly, slowly as the trees begin to groan. “Yet I have not seen you before.” For how is it that lately she has seen none but two boys with water in their veins and not an ounce of earth in their souls?
Iscariot hears the girl coming, hears the sands shifting as she moves. Her dark ears twist back toward the noise; one dirty amber eye drifts open, and as her ears flick the golden web and bright fist of sapphire between them shudder slightly, as if activated by the movement. The sand and the sea whisper to her oh-so-sweetly, and she feels it like a song running through each and every hollow bone.
She sighs, and the exhale runs through her like electricity. The steps come closer and closer, and when they start to ring in her ears, she finally sits up, a waterfall of blue-white sand sloughing from her shoulders and ribs. Her dark hair is a tangled mess, snarled with salt and leaves, and as she shakes it, the bones ensnared in her curls rattle like the sound of drums. In the dark night, her eyes glow a furious gold.
Not many Ilati still remain…
Iscariot surges instantly to her feet.
The girl across the beach is black like ink, black like oil, black like the places where Iscariot isn’t sick yet. Her eyes are a blue that chills Iscariot almost to the bone, and her black, black hair is studded with feathers, bones and beads of gold. Her voice is deep and dark and sweet and cold, and Iscariot’s heart is burning now in her chest. She listens and her pulse trembles. Ilati—how long’s it been since she met one of her own? Even heard of them?
“I’m not from here.” By far the simplest explanation, though not the most thorough or even the most honest; but Iscariot is tired, tired and homesick, and even the though of explaining her mother and Marbas makes her feel a little sick. Novus still feels like a bad dream, like a prison with invisible bars, and as she watches the stranger Iscariot realizes, maybe for the first time, that she is not comfortable here. She blinks faintly. “But my mother was Ilati. I did not realize it was so…”
Her voice fails, and she smiles. In the night, only her burning eyes and blue-white teeth are visible, the rest of her narrow form painted in perfect shadow. “Obvious.”
I am not from here. The stranger says as water falls away and silver meets gold above the rippling water.
Leto gazes, her eyes snagging upon the pale glow of sun-bleached bones, woven into the dark of this stranger’s mane, like they are in the black of hers. Snarls of hair adorn the black girl’s throat, they plait and curl, bound together by hair and vines and wild things. Feathers sway in the breeze, begging but beg for the wind.
Those words, they bring a smile to Leto’s lips. It is bright and fierce. That black smile gleams like the sun, it shines like the moon and leto wonders of the world beyond Novus. She wonders of her free-roaming brethren that stepped away, into the wilder lands.
“Where are you from?” the shed-star murmurs, hungry as though starved. She craves to know more, she yearns for whispers of different lands. Oh how she aches. Oh how she burns. Her blood glows white, white and the stars above burn bright in answer.
Leto’s lips reach for where bones hang in the stranger’s mane, for where her hair is woven into plaits. She does not wear sigils as Leto does, bold and starling – like carvings of starlight across the midnight of her skin. “Of course you do. All Ilati wear charms in our hair. Skulls and bones, leaves and berries. All that the earth gives us, we are at liberty to wear.”
She trails off, her eyes drifting toward Tinea. “Are you returning to us?” Leto asks though… us - it feels like a lie. It feels like a betrayal when she hears her shed-star blood roar, when she looks to the ocean and wonders when her bones will be lost there.
“I am not pure Ilati either. There are few who are.” Our people are dying. she does not say, though her heart is bleeding, though her soul smarts and rips.
The girl is beautiful, in the way Iscariot has always liked best—the way of all wild and dangerous things. She is blackest night and moonlit silver and dotted, in places, with the promise of death. The blue of her eyes is unforgivingly icy, and it makes Iscariot smile, almost. (She has always been jealous of eyes like those, that bring to mind the sky, or the ocean, or sea holly. Her own eyes remind her too much of her mother, too much of demons and the contract that binds her like cuffs. Her own eyes burn far too bright.)
Iscariot is not afraid. She does not flinch or shudder from the way that arctic gaze rakes over her, like a scientist classifying a new specimen. Iscariot is logical too, and in her head she is doing the same thing that is stranger must be doing—marking down all the details, how many bones line her scalp and what they might mean. Iscariot’s own accessories are nothing more than a family tradition. She has never hunted or eaten flesh; they are the same bits of femur and skull that haunted the mane of her mother.
But this stranger may very well be the kind that kills her own rabbits, and there’s no way to tell in the dark.
“Far away—“ Iscariot jerks back as lips reach for her hair. It’s not far enough to duck completely (she’s not sure she wants to) but her reflexes are sharp and scared from years of fear and she is tense at the thought of being touched. It’s been eons. But the stranger is soft and smells like something or somewhere or someone she knows, and as she tugs at Iscariot’s hair, Iscariot finally relaxes. Her shoulders unroll and her spine unwinds. Her hooves sink deeper into the shifting sand, and when her eyes meet Leto’s they are dark and sweet and winking like stars.
She nods at the introduction. “I am Iscariot,” the girl says, and her voice sounds like a song in the cool, dark night. A tiny smile curls at the edges of her lips. “I am. I need your—I need their help.”
Her jaw tightens a little, but her face is still soft, with volumes of hope shining from her eyes.
Leto’s skin is the metallic smell of earth succumbing to rain. It is ozone and the moments where sky and earth meet – lightning and snow and rain and so much more. She feels their rub, more agonizing than friction. It casts her out and yet she strives to belong, to the Ilati and the Shed-stars for she is both and yet… neither. The star-girl is a liminal space, neither here, neither there. Leto is ozone and she breathes in the static of her un-belonging.
Iscariot (she now knows) flinches from her touch and Leto pauses where she reaches, where she strains. The bones are a centimeter from her lips, but she does not touch, except to let a breath, warm with knowing, glide fondly across the smooth ivory of bone.
She smiles – such a strange thing upon her serious lips – and knows the twinge in her stomach is the same twinge she saw in Asterion’s eyes when he reached for her and she too flinched away again and again and again. Ah Ilati girls! Untouchable, wild, independent, scarred. They are all of those things and more.
So Leto draws back and knows of Iscariot’s desire – to never be touched and yet to yearn. It is a pining, a craving that itches and will not settle. But the Ilati are not made for touching.
And Leto does not know how this new girl searches for her secrets in the dark. If she only asked have you killed the creature that once animated these bones? then they would be secrets no more. For Iscariot may shy from killing, but Leto has never. It is in her blood, it is the Ilati way. They do not eat their sacrifices, for they are rituals and sacred. Each death carried out with deepest respect and gratitude.
But the girl is smiling and Leto is following the upward curve of her lips as if their ascension will bring her closer to the sun.
Help.
The word hangs and Leto’s lashes, thick with Tinea’s darkness, press down and up as she bathes this girl in the galaxy light of her unearthly gaze. “What help do you ask of us, Iscariot? All our sisters are welcome, no matter how new.” Her head tilts in waiting and her bells chime and her bones clink in a chorus, tell us, tell us.
What strange girls they are! And yet strange in the same way, and isn’t that the best kind of belonging?
Where Leto is black, Iscariot is, too; the bones in their hair sing the same wild song; on Leto’s skin is the same warm, dusty scent that so often tailed Magdalene’s bed, her sheets, her hair. Iscariot’s nostrils flare as she breathes it in deep. Home, home, home. Leto smells like childhood. She talks like belonging. But past the blanket of her relief at having someone to talk to, in her bones Iscariot is scared, scared, scared.
Scared the cure won’t work. Scared it won’t even exist. Scared that all this will be nothing, scared that by the time she makes it back home, the unmarked grave next to her mother—the one that was supposed to be for her—will be long filled by some unworthy stranger.
Fear fuels her as much as blood, now, and Iscariot’s head is buzzing as she tries to keep her feet still in the shifting sands. Her heart races in her chest like a wild snarling thing.
They are close, so close. She can see the soft single curls of Leto’s dark lashes and the easy plane of her cheeks, the threads of fine black hair across her muzzle, the easy movement of her lips. Iscariot’s stomach clenches, her mouth burns dry. When the laugh escapes her it is hard and sharp: “I am dying. Cursed,”she says, with a grin like ice. “And tired of it.”
A lapse of silence follows. Her amber eyes drop to the sand. The wind howls overhead, and even if Iscariot had a bigger heart than she does, she is sure she would not want to admit anything more.
Those words are heavy in the small space left between the girls. They are nooses about their throats and weights that pull their hearts down, down into the dirt.
Leto blinks worlds away in her gaze. She opens her galaxy eyes and baths Iscariot in the nebulae within. So many stars dance across the Ilati-girl’s skin as leto studies her ever inch and wonders where it is that ails her.
Leto may not know what it is to be dying. But she does know what it is to be cursed - cursed unto death. For is that not what fortune tellers do? Condemn their listeners with the truth - the weight of which is enough to bring them to their knees.
“What is killing you?” Leto murmurs and never has she been one to know how words can sting and how to lessen their ferocity. She speaks without fear, she speaks with knives upon her tongue and does not realise for even a moment.
Slowly her gaze lowers and runs along Iscariot’s frigid smile. The season it turning about them, winter comes beckoning, but it is not a chill that trembles its way up her spine. “Curses can be lifted, Iscariot. You just have to find out how.” Slowly Leto’s skull tilts and she regards the other girl with wild eyes. “Do you wish for help? The Ilati know so many things.”
Strange, that this girl is so brazen in asking her questions and offering her help. Iscariot has never been like that. Always shy, always careful, she minces her words and twists them, please be smooth as silk, and yet now she finds herself grateful for the bluntness of this girl.
They are all running out of time, all the time. Perhaps bluntness is the correct way to be, or the smartest. But still Iscariot does not find herself quite comfortable with answering straight: she ducks her head, shadows gathering around her skull in the dimming light. She twists away from having to answer or even having to speak.
Her throat feels raw, and her word feels wrong. It does not quite sound like her. Who is this girl who knows no better than to trust strangers? Why is she now so soft-minded? If a blush could show across Iscariot’s dark skin, it might now. But darkness of many kinds—that has always been her savior.
“Yes,” Iscariot admits, and her voice is deep as an earthquake-rumble. It builds in her chest like inner earth’s fire. She blinks up at Leto with bright amber eyes, and her ears flicker, and her body shudders from neck through spine. Cure. The thought of it is too good and too holy, too far out of reach to consider getting her hopes up for it, but oh, wouldn’t that be spectacular—a home, a cure, a life less saddled with sorrow—Iscariot breathes out of her teeth, rattled by anticipation.
She asks: “Will you take me there?”
And even without an answer Iscariot presses a kiss to the girl’s forehead and steps swiftly toward the edge of the island and the bridge of black glass that might hold their weight.
Leto sees the effect of that word upon the girl. She sees the way her lashes lower, her head bows and her heart sinks with the weight of sickness and of sorrow. It is no surprised for Leto. She has seen many like this girl before. The sick come to the Ilati with hope in their bones that the magic of Terrastella’s native healers might be enough for them.
They are content to turn their gaze from the Witch Doctor who opens the flesh of woodland animals in order to heal them. Sacrifices are just, she would say and the sick would not argue, not if it meant their life and health.
Iscariot reaches in, pressing a kiss to Leto’s brow. The bones in their hair chink together. There is something sacred in this moment. Some magic stirs and it is hot and full of sparks within Leto’s lungs.
Then Iscariot is moving. She is keen as she walks to the edge of the island and up onto the bridge of slick, slick glass. The star-girl follows her, amber eyes meeting silver as she steps up upon the bridge. “Come then, Iscariot. I will take you to your home.” Together they leave, heading along the dustbowl roads toward Tinea.
