CERTAIN GAMES ARE PRACTICAL the way animals gnaw on what's inedible so they'll become better knives.
It is night, and the moon hangs heavy over the edge of the water, like a droplet of morning dew on the tip of a leaf. It is night, and Seraphina is standing with her hooves half-buried in the pale ivory of the coast, Ereshkigal hunched like a shadow between her shoulders; her feathers are coated in a thin gloss of sand, and it is so pure and white that it catches in the moonlight like some makeshift, gritty glitter. It is night and the water is almost disturbingly calm. It is night, and there should be waves, at least a rolling tide, but the dark expanse of the sea is still, interrupted only by a flash of scales or a fin breaking the surface. It is night, and the water is like a mirror, reflecting a cloudless sky. It is night, and there are two moons – one above, and one below.
She stands inland, brow furrowed. She is used to the murky froth of the Terminus, a sea which is as grey and unpleasant as oceans come; most days, it is full of chop, with the occasional riptide sweeping through the dusky water as a tantalizing but deadly interruption. A silent sea feels like a threat.
But, then, doesn’t everything on this island feel like a threat? Seraphina can no longer discern her paranoia from well-founded caution; she knows Tempus’s tricks, because she’s lived through them before (and sometimes she wonders if that ink-monster would have killed her, had it caught her), and she knows better than to trust the good intentions of the gods. She also knows that, reasonably, not everything in the world – or on this island – wants to hurt her, but sometimes it is hard to believe. (And, besides, she knows that it is far safer to assume the worst.) “We should keep hunting,” Ereshkigal whispers, close to her ear. Seraphina wants to; she longs for blood between her teeth in a way that she has never longed for it before, in a way that she doesn’t want to want. Seraphina doesn’t want to; she is tired of fighting when nothing ever comes of it, and she is tired of the rage that is eating up a black, gaping hole inside of her chest, and she is simply tired, from the white strands of her hair let to fall loose and unkempt about her neck to the heavy sag of her shoulders to the red rims of her feverish, fire-and-ice eyes. “We should,” Seraphina agrees, although she doesn’t want to; she doesn’t want to stay here, either. (She doesn’t know what she wants, beyond what ends with blood and broken bones – she wants to want something else, but she doesn’t know if she can.) Ereshkigal spreads her wings, and she is about to fly, but, just as the mare turns, to cast herself into the woods again, something further down the coast catches her attention. “Ereshkigal. Do you see that?” The vulture settles back on her shoulder, leaning forward, and nods. “Something in the water,” she says, with a giggle, “but there are – so many things in the water. Things that would eat you up. And they’re probably hungry. I'm hungry.” She bites back the urge to roll her eyes at the vulture’s posturing, and, instead, she strides forward along the shoreline, forcing herself to ignore the way that running scratches at the inside of her throat, makes her limbs feel loose and unsteady; at least she’s well-accustomed to exhaustion. (Enough, at least, for it to leave her primarily unhindered, though not untouched – for now.) Trees pass in a dark blur. The sand in a sea in of itself beneath her, with its little ridges and curves like the crests of waves.
Finally, she stands down the shoreline, where pale beach gives way to black crags of rocks, sharp and shiny as obsidian. The water remains eerily still, but it laps a bit, where the water meets the coast; but more important than the water is what is within it. It glows electric blue, as though a nebula has spilled out along the edge of the water. This goes on for a good thirty feet in every direction, and it bobs and dances wherever the water meets stone, little creatures disturbed by the faintest of ripples. Seraphina stands on the edge of the stone shoreline, looking down into the water, and discerns that this mass is not one thing, but an accumulation of thousands – millions – of tiny beings, like stars in the night sky. It is not a dark night, but the glowing mass of things still stands out against the deep navy-violet of the water, like a beacon.
She doesn’t know enough about the sea to know what they are. But they are bright, and they are beautiful, and she lets herself linger in their light for a moment, buffeted by the salty breeze.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Isra and iron wake “I must down to the seas again,”
I
sra loves a still sea that's as smooth as glass running in shining planes out beyond the horizon. She does not miss the tempestuous waves with white crowns of froth upon their heads. This still sea has nothing in it that feels as primordial as that fathomless, hollow, sea-foam froth that waits deep in the core of her. This sea is not calling her home to the center of the black; it's not calling her to the cold-as-death waters.
This sea is is only giving her two moons, and constellations tangling together on horizon. This sea is painted with silver, and when she looks to the left, a glowing blue that only makes her think of Fable and that sea she sailed once, in a half dream, with Eik. Isra thinks of love, instead of pale shoreline that is still turning to iron and steel at her hooves.
What she is not thinking about is the way that pathway of smelted down weaponry is stretching out both before her and in the wake of her as she walks towards the blue glow. It's as smooth as the glass-still sea but no moons and stars shine on the surface of it. It is only black and slick as snake-scales in a cave. She can almost fell the pulse of it, like a heart, beneath her hooves as she walks. But she tries not to think of that too.
Ahead she can see the gritty shine of the shore on wings and below that a hint of gold, made pale and faded by the silver moonlight. The magic in her blood hums a recognition against her ribs, a steady tap-tap-tap like a shovel against a gravestone. Isra wants to smile, she wonders if her lips remember the shape of it (more and more it's feeling like they have forgotten).
The pale shore gives way to black rock and her ore dies where it meets the already dark island. Isra almost sighs with relief when she chains enough of her magic to keep the shining blue in the sea nothing more than shining, spectral blue something. She turns to the mare and that sand-dusted vulture and she still does not smile.
They don't need such things as smiles between then, not when Isra can see her own violence rippling down her wake in slick sheets of iron. She wonders what Seraphina would make if she could cut out her magic like a organ and give it to the once-queen. Part of her does not think it would be so different, in the end, although she hopes (oh, she hopes so viciously) that it would be.
"Seraphina.” Her words don't sound like the sigh of a sword even though Isra thinks that everything between them should sound like weapons cutting through the world. And even though the black rocks make no sound when Isra changes them all into mirrors, the way the blue intensifies until it devours the brightness of the moon seems a little like the suggestion of a blade swung towards a thing neither of them can see.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORS and there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself. and there's no one listening with one ear pressed sacred against the wall to the sound of a girl howling --
She hears Isra before she sees her.
She hears her magic, or she feels it – in the way that the pale expanse of sand becomes a metal so black and dark that it swallows the light of all the bodies in the sky, and the way that the sound of her hooves against it makes her think of the collision of weapons, of the death-music of a bloodied battlefield. Ereshkigal shifts on her shoulder, but she is blessedly silent. Seraphina looks away from the stretch of glowing blue with something that is almost regret, because, for a moment, she saw something beautiful.
But, if there is one thing she knows, it is that nothing beautiful can remain. Nothing kind. Time wears everything down to outlines, even the strongest materials – even stone.
Isra approaches, and, as her hooves make contact with the black rock of the outcropping, her magic fades momentarily. She does not smile, and Seraphina is grateful for it, because she is sure that any smile she forced to her lips would look more like bared teeth. She admires the look of her, the raw strength – the way that the blue glow from the little things in the water catches on the scales on her belly, turns them to the twinkle of distant stars, but sharper. Like fractured light. “Seraphina,” she says, and that is enough.
Beneath her hooves, those ink-black rocks turn to mirrors, strong enough to bear the weight of the both of them, and, for a moment, Seraphina finds herself looking at her own image and Isra’s, suspended upside-down with the star-spangled clarity of the night below them. The blue light catches oddly on the golden scars raked across her cheek, drawing her attention momentarily, but she forces her eyes away from them. She looks into her own face, into her own eyes – grown haggard and red, sunken – and she does not see herself looking back.
For most of her life, Seraphina was impassive. Not in her depths, but externally, and that was enough. She survived by hiding herself; her features showed nothing, nothing, nothing, her eyes became glass marbles, her lips lines so straight and worn that they might have been great cracks in the earth. Now, nothing is hidden, and all of the parts of her that are dripping out, like blood from an open wound (like those horrible, beautiful scars on her face), are vile. Disgusting. She doesn’t want to look at herself. She doesn’t want to know.
She looks back up, at Isra.
She wonders if those eyes of Isra’s, like depths of ocean, can open wide and see all of the horrible things inside of her – the way that she is rotting from the inside out. She wonders if she can see the hollow, hungry space, and she wonders if she knows how ravenous she is. When she looks at her, she feels like she can see right through her, with those eyes; she feels like she is staring at some silent jury. Maybe it is simply because Isra has seen her at her lowest point (though she feels like she has sunk lower), and her pride cannot forgive her for that, but she thinks that it is more likely the jealousy that burns a hole in her stomach whenever she thinks of her. She saved you. Be grateful. But she still doesn’t know if she’s glad to have been saved. A part of her is sure that she would not have been better in the grave and herself than – this. “Isra.” The sound of her name on the once-queen’s lips is heavy with an emotion she cannot discern. The worst part, Seraphina thinks, of what he did to her – the worst part – was cutting her into pieces, because she had always known herself, even when her name was taken from her, even when she became something that she should have never been able to, even when Solterra burned because of her, even when she was reduced to pitiful gratitude in the face of someone who might have seen her kingdom burned with dragon-fire, even when her own gods abandoned her. She has always worked for kindness, because she could not be kind. She has always longed for something softer, the capacity to be something more than the war-weapon that she was meant to be – and, when she was emissary, she really thought that she could be. When she became queen, she really thought that she could rule with something other than blood and fire, even when it felt as though she met blood and fire at every turn.
But, for the first time in her life, Seraphina does not long to be kind. She does not want to be loving, or to be loved. She wants to be many things: she wants to be bent like wreckage, like metal torn into shards; she wants to be ugly and full of edges, to be sharp to the touch; she wants to be ruined. She wants to ruin herself, so he can’t say that he did it to her. She wants to be terrible, and ruined, because she has to kill Raum, and he has a daughter. She has to be terrible, because she must kill Raum, and Rhoswen loved him. She has to be terrible, because she has to kill her own people, and she has loved them, and now she doesn’t know if she loves anything, or if she can love anything in a way that is not terrible – and if she wanted to love, the poison would drip into that too, and it wouldn’t be love anymore.
She glances at her reflection, and she knows that she has been driven too far – beyond a precipice, towards an inevitable collapse. Off a cliff. Into an abyss. Somewhere dark and empty, with nothing but the echo of her own voice like a lantern for guidance.
She is not sure if she will ever carve her way out – she is not sure if she wants to.
But she does not speak of that. It’s hardly the time, and she barely knows her, and she has never been especially good at baring her heart. “Are you well?” She knows that she isn’t, not while Raum is still king, not after her land was covered in ash and smoke, and it was god’s doing, and not here. If she were well, Seraphina thinks, wryly, she would not be standing in front of her. Nevertheless, there is something different in the Night Queen, and she does not know what it is – something in the way that she moves, in the way that she is formed.
@Isra ||me? write a short isra reply? a little subtle hint @her pregnancy, since you mentioned it being this season, but kept vague & ambiguous because it hasn't technically happened yet. || "seek" sophia holtz "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Isra who cannot sing a song “A war story is a black space.”
D
eep in the sea, under all that glowing blue and beyond the black-glass, Fable is singing her a song. She can hear each note of it in her soul, in the rush of her blood that is starting to sound like a wave when it echoes against her bones that feel so very hollow. Her skin is itching with the melody and it feels a little like salt has dried on her skin, as if she's nothing more than a bit of dead coral washed up on the shore of a cursed island.
She knows, deep down (deeper into the black than Fable is), that the song should feel like a storm sea. It should make her happy. Isra looks out towards the glowing blue, and the black, and the moon that seems paler than it should, and tries to tell herself that she is almost happy. There are still two small stars listening to Fable's song with her, two more hearts beating to the same drum-beat of her terrible magic and broken heart.
But there are glints of gold dancing off the glass in the corner of her gaze and Isra cannot bring herself to feel even a shred of anything other than sorrow, and hate. And still she does not look at Seraphina and tell her not to worry, that she's going to become monster enough for the two of them. Does she need too, when she can still feel Eik's touch weeks later?
So she only lets that silence between them drag out, broken up by the dull sound the sea makes against glass and by that song that only she can hear. And she tries to keep the storm out of her gaze when she turns back to Seraphina with her haunted eyes.
Isra does not tell her that she's going to save her, or that she can already feel the acid burn of all the blood she's going to drink. Instead she steps closer and turns the glass to smoothed down dead coral. Isra wants to brush their shoulders together so that she might remember that she is not the only dying rose in the garden growing thorns. But in the end she does nothing more than rest a single hoof against a sharp ridge of coral and inhale deep enough to taste brine and metal on her tongue.
And when she says, "Will we ever be well again?”, instead of giving an answer, that too feels as right between them as all that smooth, dead coral making a bone-white garden around them. Fable stops singing and her heart stops beating to a song she doesn't feel like hearing.
Isra looks up at the golden claw marks cleaving the darkness of Seraphina's face. She does not blink. “Have you come for Raum as well?” The space between her teeth feels hungry when she asks and her magic starts to snarl like a wildcat in her chest.
Fable starts to sing another song in the ocean only the two of them know. When he lifts his head from the sea and swims towards the blue iridescence, he thinks its looks like stars have been caught in the sea. Isra, when she inhales and tries not too feel so much like violence poised on a edge, agrees.
But she does not know if Seraphina would, even if she could hear the song.
As the queen and the once-queen, the two women who have each been unmade and remade, speak above the shoreline something in the water is listening.
Or rather it is many somethings, millions of them, little bits of life that the naked eye could never see - were they not lit like stars, like some far moon. There, buoyed along by the tides, organisms so numerous and bright paint the beach like a new constellation, like the birthplace of planets. On a normal night, in a normal place, they would simply wash out again like the tide, leaving no trace of their wonder -
but on this island it is magic, and not the moon, who shapes the meaning on its shores.
Somewhere in the deep a dragon is singing, a tongue unheard for such a long time, and the blue light swirls in patterns like sighs, like a firefly dance. At first it is only for the motion of the water and the joy of that dance that they move and shimmer, but then - oh then! - more patterns begin to flicker in the blackness and blue. It is their own silent music they dance to, now, and if they had voices they would all be crying out look, look! Shapes that shouldn’t be flicker sapphire bright and fade again to blackness. They look like an island, like a frothing volcano, like a horse. They look like a castle, like a bird. They look like stranger things, writhing shapes far below the surface of the sea, deeper than even a sea-dragon might dive. They look like secrets that have chosen to show themselves only to two queens, ever breaking, ever healing.
They tell the story of the island and the magic and all the beautiful things it is begging to make. And then the patterns fall to nothing more than nature and the sigh of bioluminescent organisms on a quiet midnight tide.
But maybe they wonder if they were seen at all. And maybe they hope they were.
@Seraphina and @Isra might notice that is more than their magic changing the glowing sea. Shapes are starting to reveal themselves in the tide that is not acting like any tide should. Do any of the shapes look familiar, or are all the organisms dancing for two mares that do not even notice them?
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I CONFESS, I TOO HAVE DREAMT MYSELF FLOWERED IN DEATH; annihilation was the easiest history I could write of myself; I immerse myself in refracted rivers, of chalk & blackboard - I construct arcadias to forget myself in every framework;
Her stare, she thinks, could be a storm at sea – with those eyes that are so blue, so horribly blue, and so fathomlessly deep. It occurs to Seraphina that she does not know what to say to her, or know her much at all. She knows what she is heard of her. She knows that she seen her broken, bloodied – and dragged her back from the dark arms of death, and she is not sure that she can imagine a more intimate act between two people. But she does not know her. There are ghosts in her eyes, countless ghosts, but she does not know what form they take, or why they haunt her.
She wonders if she will ever know them – if she will ever know her. All she knows is that she looks at her, and her eyes make her think of a lament when she asks her if they will ever be well again. Her shoulders slump, almost imperceptibly, and she looks out to the water, white tangles of mane fluttering on the salt-thick wind.
For her entire life, she has lived for Solterra. She doesn’t know how to live for anything else – not even herself. Will we ever be well again? Isra asks, and she doesn’t understand the question. It fumbles through her mind in a horrible, tangled way that makes her think of things that she does not want to consider. For example: what will she do when Raum is dead? What does she have, now that he has taken everything from her? Her kingdom is dying. If she lives, she lives dishonored; she had her trial, and she will never be fit to return to the throne, with this great and horrible failure gaping across her shoulders. She isn’t so much as fit to return to the court, even as a guard or a soldier – because she is alive and so many of them are dead, and she is not sure that she can stand to imagine the way that she knows they would look at her for it, like she is no longer one of them, like it would be better if she were dead. (Why is their daughter dead? Husband? Wife? Sister? Brother? Dearest, dearest friend? The man down the street, or grandfather, or that musician who always played in the bar, or mother – her, her, her, always her, because she could have prevented this, and she didn’t.) She can’t leave Solterra (the notion does not so much as cross her mind), but it does not feel like her home anymore. She has no legacy. She has no name. She is a dead thing on stilts, dragging herself forward like lead weight. Who did she love that remains? Her people are scattered like ashes on the wind. What does she love that remains? Can she still love it, now that he has his teeth in it?
She has always been able to love it, even when it has been ugly – but now, even that has been stolen from her. She doesn’t remember how. “I don’t know,” she admits, finally. There is something fragile in her voice, almost trembling – because she does not know. Seraphina has seen many things. She has watched her kingdom burn twice. When she was nothing more than a girl, she lost the only family she ever had and found herself enslaved and sent to war by a man who wanted nothing more to mold her in his image by snipping out the parts of her that disgusted him – her heart, her thoughts, her memory, her snow-white hair. She has been betrayed, beaten, looked down upon. Scarred. Bloodied. She has been held to account for someone else’s sins – over and over, as leaders always are. And she has seen death – she has seen death so often. She has stared into the pitch-black eyes of the abyss, into the glass-marble stares of those who are already gone. Nothing, she knows, will bring them back. (Nothing, she knows, will bring her back, but what does a solitary life matter, compared to all that has been lost? It seems unfair. Her life should not have been the metric so many of her people had died for.) Will she ever be well again? She has survived every terrible thing that has come her way in the past – but now that she is here, twisted reflection staring up at her from the black mirror below, she wonders if she will weather this, or if it will finally erode her down to nothing.
She has no future to speak of. She is wandering untethered, directionless but for the kill – once he is dead, she hopes that she dies too, because there is nothing left for her here, and she is so, so very tired. She has broken and broken and broken and forced her fragmented pieces back together again, but there was always some way back. In the most cynical way, she was always hopeful. She could always try again.
But she is out of attempts. Perhaps, she thinks, she will let herself disappear, like she should have disappeared when Raum killed her on the Steppe – she will wander into the desert and let herself be carried away by the sands, and she will become a cautionary tale, one of those things that parents tell their children so they don’t wander off at night and get eaten up by a sandwyrm or a stray teryr. A gold-scarred ghost across the dunes, haunting the world from a distance.
She is tired of her heart. All the things that it begs for. There’s no use, she tells it, in begging now, and then she smothers it down in her chest. “We’ll never be the same again,” she says, and it feels more right than just not knowing. Acceptance means condemnation; wellness was always something earned. Unfortunately, she is not sure that she has ever earned it – and, as she watches more and more of her people die, Seraphina is not sure that she will ever deserve anything but to ache, to suffer.
But Isra…
She feels unchained, now. Like a tempest wearing skin, some storm at sea. Seraphina does not know if she will ever be tender again; she doubts it. Tenderness can rarely be reclaimed once it is lost. (Doesn’t she know that? How many years did she spend trying to become something softer? All that came from that was foolishness and naivete and the chance to break like a wave against the shore, over and over again; she should have been crueler.) But she does not feel like her, either, and that is why envy threatens to burn a black hole in her stomach whenever she sees her. When she speaks, with her great promises and a war on her tongue, Seraphina knows that she means it. And she knows that she is loved, still loved – and loved even more, perhaps, for the parts of her that are still vulnerable. Solterra would never be so kind.
But she does not speak of the way that she envies her, or the way that she hates herself for it. Instead, she says, “Leadership is a heavy burden, and rarely a kind one. It seems that it is less often about success than survival.” She looks away from their mirror-image, turning her gaze out towards the tide; she thinks that she sees her dragon, out in the distance. There is something more that she wants to say, but the words all die out on her tongue. Once, she would have been reassuring. Now, she simply feels lost.
However, she is not entirely without defiance; if she were, she would not be here. “But – if we are never well again, he’ll win.” The hardest-fought battles, she knows, are the psychological ones. (Denocte was always adept at them, during the war, with their nightmare-king; she never encountered the Night King, but she heard stories of what happened to the soldiers who were caught up in the throes of his magic.)
Raum has ruined. Raum has killed. Raum has done the unthinkable, and there is no way to undo the damage he has caused.
She does not want to give him the satisfaction of ruining her.
When Isra asks her if she is hunting Raum, too, with a voice like blood-stains and sharp spear-tips, Seraphina simply nods, and gives her affirmation as a single word. “Yes.” There is not war in her voice; if anything, it is the frightening chill of inevitability, for Seraphina knows that all tyrants will – must – die, and Raum will too, once they catch him. (She does not say and Tempus, too, but she thinks it. She still has questions, and she knows that only god can answer them.) On her shoulder, Ereshkigal shifts like a changing wind, turning her violent-red eyes on the Night Queen, and she clacks her jaw thoughtfully, but, to Seraphina’s relief, she does not speak.
She thinks of Raum and hunting (and, with it, a teryr in the canyon, Maxence, the tip of Avdotya’s spear-), and she turns to look at Isra again. The gold of her scar darts on the obsidian mirror below their hooves, fragments like a fallen star. Seraphina opens her mouth to speak, a question brimming on the tip of her tongue, but it never passes her lips, because the water moves.
Not the water, she realizes, as she inclines her head to look towards that tantalizing, nebulous blue glow. For a moment, she thinks that the motion is little more than a change in tides – that the wind has simply blown it one strange way or another. However, the simple swirl does not linger long, replaced by familiar shapes – of islands, volcanoes, horses, birds, high castle spires, the gnarled branches of trees, strange creatures so deep below the surface that they have never seen the light of day.
And then they are dark – disappearing. Lost to the bob of the waves, now nothing more magical than a mass of small things clung together. She glances to Isra. “I’ve heard,” she says, somewhat reluctantly – because she does not know how to speak to the Night Queen of things that do not taste like blood and death -, “that you are a storyteller, Isra. Did that feel like a story to you?”
It did to her, in the unstable, intimate design of the runes carved into the Elatus Canyon, cave paintings that had lingered for hundreds of years. A wordless story, lost but for its residue – a story you felt, rather than understood.
@Isra || the theme of me being literally incapable of writing a short reply to Isra continues in full force, I see || “Still Life with the Physicists’ Scarred Forearms" george abraham "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Isra and a salt story “She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”
F
or a moment, nothing longer than a blink of her eyes and the thrum of her broken heart, Isra debates telling Seraphina all the ways in which she knows that her soul has been forever changed. She thinks about telling her how there have been too many days to count in which she debated storming the desert alone. Or how she imagined letting Fable flood the castle until all the ghosts were fat and bloated with saltwater. Isra wants to tell her how the tender parts of her are all the only ones that saved her people from the monster her magic wants her to become.
In the end what else but that was stopping her from turning the desert into a jungle and mice into wildcats to feast on the horses that were left behind?
Isra should be grateful for the parts of her that haven't torn through all the ink and paper of her storyteller heart. She should be grateful for all the ways in which she knows she is loved. And most times she is grateful; most times she's happy for it. But looking at Seraphina, with her bloodshot eyes and her tangled mane, makes Isra wonder if the once queen would be happier with no choices left to make.
And when the creature upon Seraphina's shoulders turns to meet her gaze, with eyes redder than a blood moon, Isra only looks back and dares the creature to read all the terrible thoughts floating there on a shallow sea of tenderness. She half hopes the Vulture will starting screaming, monster, monster, monster so that at least one creature in the world can see how monstrous she wants to be sometimes.
Fable rises from the sea and she looks away from those two blood colored holes to look at her dragon. In the end, in all the ends, it's only love that saves Isra-- love of the sea, of Eik, of her city, of innocence, of the twin stars growing inside of her. And maybe it's all the ends that make her a unicorn that is forgetting how to live in any skin but this one. “I refuse to let it be only about survival. Leadership should be about love.” She says and still her eyes to not leave the dragon peeking his head out from between constellations of bright organisms.
Isra is thinking about Eik, and Asterion, and how it felt to touch her skin to theirs and promise that the world could be anything they wanted it to be. And there are those terrible thoughts again--
What is stopping her from remaking it all?
Later she'll tell herself that is was only the water forming shapes around Fable's neck that stopped her from saying how the world is could be only a suggestion. Later she will make up a story to fit all those images to all the ways in which is she changing, and changing and becoming. Now all she does is smile when the shapes dissolve in deep water she remembers the flavor of. “I am a story-teller.” Isra wields those words like five small sharp blades against all the darkness of the world pressing in against the four of them standing on their garden of dead coral.
Each words cuts her open, cleaving all the ways in which she's wondering about terrible, terrible things. And yet it doesn't feel like she's bleeding when she takes a story between her teeth and pulls (the same way she's pulling at everything in this world now). “And that was a story in which all the things we thing we see are really just something else waiting to become.” Just like a queen waiting to become bones, and one waiting to become a weapon of a mother.
And maybe, just maybe, it's a story about a ghost waiting to become blood scattered across the earth like seeds.
