[P] fallen barefoot past the treeline;

[Isra]

The mountains rise like towers of salvation in the moment night fully turns to day. Or at least Isra thinks of them so as she makes her way down, down, down the slopes. There is a certainly laziness to the way she moves, a grace that lingers in the shadows of her form like a story that's not yet finished. The mountains this night have brought no fires, no suffering and so she's lost to the story floating like gossamer silk across the ocean waves of her thoughts. A stars falls from the sky, a comet of fire hot enough burn to white and a hollow rock core that wants only to dream, to love. The star falls and falls and falls and it feels like her bones are an earthquake when it that star lands between the canyons of her imagination. Oh, Isra imagines the star whispering only the single word. She would blink and open her new eyes wide with shock as she  discovered that she was no longer a star, but a horse. The only one of her kind. Ahead something bright sways like a sick thing between the trees and the morning dew and Isra thinks it only a teasing game the story in her heart has decided to play. Until she walks closer, dreaming of the way the star will walk as if her legs are made of dragonfly wings, and smells the blood that brightness wavering in the early light is suddenly no grand story that she's given life to. This is no story, no adventure where two soul-mates find one another through a million trials and sufferings. This is a horror, a nightmare dredged up from her memories to make her fear the mountain-side again. “No.” She whispers a lament and her lungs feel ice cold and the air feels like not enough to fill those icy organs. Her eyes sting where she presses them together and her legs quiver to scramble back, back, back from this horse she almost knows and the way he gleams sallow with death and the air smells like iron thick enough to taste. But below her fear, her horror is the fragile butterfly beat of his heart and the way the blood running from his side still runs like a slow, muddy river. There is not a thing in these mountains Isra would see and pray to the gods to make it die. The man before her, broken and dying and as still as stone, is in her mountains where she has just buried her dead. “You will not die, not here.” The mountains are full of dead up high and she will add no more to them. Isra moves close enough to press her lips to the place where his brow meets the arch of his eyelids. It's a kiss of strength and when she leaves him she moves quickly through the mountain forest to gather up yucca and stagger-weed.   Her summer in the mountains made her fimilar with the forest and she moves swifter than any deer below the bending branches to the place where the thick treeline meets a meadow. Quickly she gathers up what she needs and on her way back she grabs a small bloom of foxglove that's held on just past its season. And when she returns she uses her teeth to turn the yucca and weed into a paste, thick and strong enough that the smell of it burns and her tongue starts to feel a little numb. She's careful when she smears it onto the tears of flesh between his ribs with her lips. In her horror she's forgotten that she has slight magic here, she only remembers that when she was a slave they only had lips and smiles and touches to heal each other. “I need you to wake up.” At her hooves the foxglove rests, purple against the green and stone, tucked into the shadows they make where she lays down beside him. A blade of light hits her horn, their bodies as if the sun has come to find them and them alone with the blazing life of it's heat. When she places her nose to his he smells like death and Isra could cry for the way she knows too well how that smell feels like a stone heavy enough to break every bone in her body. * * * * * you told me I was like the dead sea @Lysander