[P] THE LAW OF ALL THINGS

[El Toro]

HE MAY KNOW THE LAW OF ALL THINGS, YET BE IGNORANT OF HOW-

For all his dedication to staying on his feet, El Toro had collapsed shortly after Raymond shrunk into the distance. He couldn't breathe, really, and he bled quite a bit, and it grew hotter as midday approached and - really, these weren't ideal conditions for anyone - he fainted. The pale stallion had awoken to the setting of the sun, on what day he did not know. After laying there a while he wiggled about, wincing and groaning and sort-of breathing, before forcing himself up onto wobbling legs like a newborn colt. Everything hurt.

With a respectable amount of determination, Toro hobbled off in search of sustenance, not realizing until it was far too late that he'd wandered into the mountains and not the fields. Hunger and exhaustion overtook him as cool night fell upon the world; he slid down against a rock, wheezing, and fell asleep.

@Isra
poem

"What I say,"

What I think,

CREDITS

[Isra]

The night does not settle easily for Isra and the last of autumn barely beats back the coming winter chill. All her fires of purpose have long turned to nothing more than ash and embers. Long gone is the sting of foxglove on her lips and the bitter tang of septic weeds is replaced by the cool sweetness of dusk. There is only the pull of dried blood on her cheeks and the tenderness of her knees to keep her company this night. Days have slipped by her as if the mountains have swallowed up the tick, tick, ticking of time that shifted around her. It feels as if she blinked and the dead were gone, the leaves turned to gray dust beneath her hooves and the Indian summer turned to the hint of first frosts. Perhaps her stories are a dangerous thing this high above the sea, as dangerous as all the broken and devilish stallions that found her deep in the forests and mountain-side cliffs. They devour time. Isra is lost in the remembering of her stories; when she spoke them and tasted blood and flowers on her tongue. She's lost to remembering a world made of spider-webs dusted with dew drops that held galaxies in their spherical edges. So lost is she that she doesn't notice the way the stallion unfolds before her gaze like a climax between leather covers and inked pages. Suddenly he is there, slumbering and bloodied and more golden that the last man that smelled like death in the mountains. Isra blinks and she feels a tendril of dark hate that these mountains (her mountains) are full of the dead and dying and she is perhaps the only thing left alive here that knows what it's like to really suffer and carry on across the rocks and towering trees. This one at least is closer to the meadows, to the flowers and weeds that offer life even when they feel like liquid lava along the nerves. “You are not dead.” She wishes, wishes, wishes her words to be true, to be more prophecy and magic than the weak bleating of her voice. Her knees, tender from the hours spent weaving her worlds over Lysander as he slept, sting when she folds herself down to lay in the space between him and the rest of the rocks around them. When she kisses a touch of her frown to his cheek her lips shiver for thinking that they must burn again so soon. “Wake up.” Oh how she wishes with the taste of blood in the air and the night settling like a tundra around them that his eyes will open and his lungs will carry on the weak rattle she can hear beneath his skin. The mountains cannot bear anymore dead. She's still weary from grave-digging and her horn is still crusted with dirt and ash from the nights before this one. And her wishes sound like prayers that she might bury no more dead things in the wild mountains. * * * * * we shiver but know nothing of the cold @El Toro

[El Toro]

WHEN THERE'S NO ONE LEFT TO FIGHT / BOYS LIKE HIM DON'T SHINE SO BRIGHT

Toro’s dignity had been successfully stripped for the moment; he’d been reduced to a half-dead pile of meat in some unfamiliar hellscape, bleeding all over the place and continuing on out of an intense desire to not die first. Now, he slept, his mind full of wavering colors, swirling, dipping in and out, red eyelids, blue sky, flesh, scarlet, sand, vermillion, aurora borealis and off-black. There was no pain in sleep.


He dreamt of a gentle breeze; when he awoke he thought he must have imagined it but there was darkness over his seeing eye, the other encrusted with rusting blood, and a twinge of fear pulled at his chest, but he smelled mare. And she was saying, “Wake up.” The white stallion tried to sigh but whatever came out of him was hardly an exhale at all. There was a sharp pain across his flank with each weak breath, but he tried very hard to raise his head just to look her in the eye. Toro opened his mouth and closed it again, hurting, crumpled paper in the wind. He pushed himself up, determined not to be flopped against the rocks like a death-pale corpse (even if he’d always be death-pale). Something split and blood trickled from his side as he moved, gingerly, but not gingerly enough. He was too tired to groan. After a bit of shifting about Toro gave up on moving and went almost still, but he focused his good idea on the brown mare and said, ”Hi.”
On any other day he would’ve flirted and made a show of himself, flouncing around and making grand gestures and elaborately wrought innuendos. Tonight...it was not one such night.

@Isra beats

"What I say,"

What I think,

credit

[Isra]

They rise together. She gathers her legs beneath herself and rises as he shakes off the slumber of the suffering and she the empathy of one who knows how to bleed rivers and oceans from her veins. The beat of her heart feels as thready as the flutter of air beneath his skin. “You should not have moved so much.” Her voice rings out like a story beneath the moon glow and starlight, it's full of stories and dreams and constellations. For a moment she only watches him like a deer might, poised and quivering. Isra wonders if he's the broken conquer or the victim left to rot and freeze when the night comes calling. She wonders until a teardrop of blood rains from his wounds and her fury rises like a comet across the darkness. There has been to much blood in this world of Novus, too much suffering of mortals. “Will you let me help you?” Her hooves are whispers across the grass and her breath rises in patterns of heat between the two of them. All her movements drip caution and empathy as she eats the distance between them as fire first devours a forest (slow and full of banked embers that have yet to spark and rage). For a moment it seems as if the world inhales around them and everything feels both great and frozen and almost not quite real. And then she touches her nose to his (white to black).   The world exhales and the seconds start to rush like a waterfall over them. “I'm Isra.” Her name echoes like a question and her lips tingle with the crusted antiseptics while bits of ivy still cling to the spaces between her teeth. ISRA OF THE AFTERMATH ; our wounds are deeper than truth

art

[El Toro]

question mark / the length of silence / after a loon’s call

”You should not have moved so much.” He eyes her with that one good opal and says, “Can’t help it,” but the words are breathless and fall short of those last ones he spoke to Raymond. They hurt. She is not quite mist on the moor like that other woman, no, something perching on a distant tree-branch, pine-branch, dripping sap, trapped bird with sticky feet. Not too sticky. Not trapped. He wasn’t sure. His pale head pounded.

Her words would be carried along the wind had she been any farther away, but he bows his head to her, muscles straining to hold that weighty skull up and says, “Yes.” The stallion’s eye drifts half-shut and then there’s something soft against his nose and he almost flinches, just a twitch, but there’s a flash of panic in that cracking rainbow and a flick of crumbling-dirt ears. He consents but dreads. His chest pinches; that lung cannot carry his fear. He remembers what it is to be touched kindly, mother, and her name is out: Isra.
Not mother.
The last time he was touched, he lost.
Most times he is touched, he hurts.
It is not a matter of abuse - never was - but a matter of always picking fights because what else could be done when you are the one they want to hurt, anyway, even if it’s only on the inside? Hurt them on the outside, too. They’ll never forget if it’s gouged out of their chest, and neither will anyone who sees the cavity.
He wants to be touched kindly. Softly. Without malice, without challenge, without thrill of battle and glory of victory and shame of defeat. Softly. Softly. Like Mother, Isra.

Toro’s lip struggles into something that was almost half a smile, maybe a quarter, and he exhales, “Toro,” death-pale and aching.

@Isra poem

"What I say,"

What I think,

credit

[Isra]

Her lungs feel as breathless as his, thin things of membrane that are frailer than a dead winter-leaf coated in ice.  Each breath feels like a struggle. Each hum of her heart is a battle-field and each of her organs quiver as his must. All the parts of her cry out (silent beneath that cage of bone and flesh) for something, something, something. And when she says, “Toro,” it rings out like an echo, echo, echo and it tastes like a pleading word instead of a name. His name. “I will not leave you then.” Isra swings her hips towards his, wondering if he can hear the breathlessness of her butterfly lungs or the hum of her heart as it trembles in her chest. She's ready to catch him if he stumbles and if she's too weak these new unicorn bones of hers do no know it. They only know empathy and her horn glitters in the moonlight when a cloud shifts and they seem suddenly to be in a place between the world and the wild. Around them the trees whisper in the wind. Isra shivers, wondering if the 'thing' that left Lysander dead could possibly be close-by. She knows enough of monsters and mortals to be leery, to look up at the stars and think of death and maybe only a little of beauty. Perhaps too he knows of fear, knows why it leaks into her voice like bits of sludge through the cracks in her innocence. “Can you tell me what hurts the most? Can you walk?” She's half afraid of the answers and she lets her nose drift upwards to bury in his mane. Isra acts as if she can smell the suffering on him, more than just the tang of his copper and iron blood.  It's almost easy now to act brave when she can no longer even trust the darkness and shadows to keep them safe anymore. Easier still to be so close to his horns and pretend that they are no more terrifying than the one spiraling out from her own skull. ISRA OF THE CRACKED LIGHT; I found the pieces and tried to fix it

art

[El Toro]

His figure resembles the terebinth;
his hair, grass; veins, arteries; rivers, canals;
and his bones, the mountains.

She says his name and something inside him goes a little funny, if it wasn’t already, he’s not sure and he wants to hear her voice forever. It’s not the voice of a pretty girl (well, maybe), it is soothing and soft as a breeze on the night and he thanks her silently when she pledges to stay. He leans against her, not as much as he needs to but his pride won’t let him make her a crutch. His legs might, soon. He cannot imagine why she is helping him, cannot form the slightest concept as to why a stranger in the dark would see him and think, “ah, this one deserves a second thought”. He is worth nothing like this, too weak to fight, to defend even himself, never mind one who is perhaps the second kindest soul in the world - the first is mother, remember - but the whisp of air pressing through his lungs keeps him going and so does the hope.

She asks two questions. He is slow to answer. Toro whispers, ”My lung.” His eyes only water at the soft nose in his mane, the soft kind touch of her. He can’t understand. He wants to answer the second question in action, and for all his might he tries. Weight on the legs away from her, widening space between them - he stumbles, throws himself back into her - he hopes not too hard - air knocked out, face hot, embarrassment burning fast from skull to skin. ”Sorry,” he wheezes, and he cannot recall the last time he apologized for anything.

@Isra René Descartes and the Clockwork Girl

"What I say,"

What I think,

credit

[Isra]

The first thing she feels is fear. It starts as a rattle in her lungs, an echo of his. Then it's a frost of ice over her bones. Higher and higher the ice creeps, bones then organs and skin. It rises, rises, rises until it explodes in bits of glittering snowflakes across her vision when the edges fade to black as the panic creeps in. When he collapses against her, her eyesight speckles and her bones groan with the weight of him. But she stands as firmly as a unicorn before the storm-sea and bares his weight with little more than a sigh of pain and heartbreak. For a moment she thinks all his wheezing will cease and he'll suffocate surrounded by the endless air of the mountain-side. Her touch turns a different kind of tender (the tenderness of sorrows and goodbyes) when she tucks it against his cheek and welcomes more and more of his weight. “We shall not walk then.”She coos against his skin and bends her knees to encourage him to collapse once more into the soft pine-needs and loam at their hooves. “Stay here a little longer and I will build us a shelter. Isra brushes the words across his brow before pulling away. Her smile seems to whisper to him as well, dream, dream, dream. Dream away the pain and I will build you a utopia of beauty. There is is something almost sad when she pulls away from him, something full of longing that dances in the dark star-flakes of her gaze. She doesn't wander far, just a few steps and her eyes never fully leave him (how could she?). Her telekinetic magic is almost fragile when she encourages the low pine branches to bend and the small ribbons of ivy to wind between the branches in a tight weave. The magic is shaky at best, weak from disuse from all the months she's spent living as wild things live in the mountains. Her voice though is as strong as a moonbeam cutting through the dark when she returns to his side and tucks her nose close enough to his horn to taste the strange desert smell on it. “Let me tell you a story.” Isra smiles at him then and blinks back the frost of her fear. “There once was a whale, a desert, a witch and a day that never ended....” Around them the night seems almost as endless as the start of her story. Overhead the stars flicker violently and more brightly than before over the two mortals tucked beneath the pine and ivy roof. ISRA OF THE WITCH; “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

art

@El Toro

[El Toro]

OH, TO BE HERE ON THE GROUND

She catches him, somehow, does not snap like the twigs at their feet and instead holds him up, like an ant a crumb, too many times her own weight but she manages nonetheless. Isra’s words are soft on his ears and his heart. She aids him in collapsing into the bed of needles, air forced from his lung as a too-heavy body hits the ground a little too hard. He shuffles, and adjusts himself, trying to be comfortable, as best he can, everything hurts; somehow even where he was not hit he aches like a broken heart. Some of her words are lost on him but her tone is not; she rings against his bones like wind on a chime and it twists him up. Toro watches the mare, eyes glazed, setting fire to branches and weaving a roof of wood and stem over their heads like sinews. 

”Let me tell you a story,” she is next to him now, soft and light but so strong and he still doesn’t understand. He imagines today is a day that never ended, if not for the fall of night. El Toro says, ”I don’t understand why you are kind to me.”
But he wants to know the rest of the story and wishes he never spoke.

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"What I say,"

What I think,

credit

[Isra]

“Because, Isra says as she drapes her throat carefully across his spine. “everyone deserves kindness.” The words feels sharper for the way they echo off his horn and off the boughs of branches over their heads. Every edge of her is warm where it presses against him, knees to rib, hip to tail, hock to hoof. It's almost peaceful here as the moonlight flickers between the branches and the shadows of the ivy look like butterfly wings as the breeze dances between them. If not for the rattle of his lungs and all his shallow sighs, the night would be perfect. And so she inhales, exhales and sets to drowning out the rattle of his chest with story-song. “There was once, in a sea far, far from here, a whale who was not very much like a whale at all. He was a dreamer who saw not schools of fish when he swam but stories written in the glitter of their scales as the fish swam in their circles and played all the games that fish are oft to play. He was a lonely whale at the bottom of the sea where the moonlight reaches further than the sunlight. All of him hated all the silver of ocean, how it made even sunken, golden treasure look gilded with chrome. He wanted gold, that whale. He wanted the sun and the warmth. He wanted to never swim in the deep again and feel salt in his teeth.” Her voice rises in pitches like the wind and almost glitters in the moonlight when her words echo against their makeshift forest-floor nest. The next breath of air she takes almost feels as weak as his when she pauses, and blinks back the creeping exhaustion from her eyes. “And so one day he followed a current that smelled like sulfur instead of brine. The current went on for miles and miles and months. He lost track of the time he spent swimming, the time he spent dreaming and the time he spent wanting things so much that his heart ached. He swam for two seasons, until the cold winter-sea warmed with spring. And before the seas heated under a summer sun the current he was following ended in a marsh.” Isra blinks again and thinks about how heavy her head feels (as heavy as a whale heart). Empathy and fear are heavy things, heavy enough that her unicorn heart almost stutters under the weight of everything this night has brought to her. These mountains feels like a trial instead of a salvation now, but she still loves him. Her eyes grow heavy, and she closes them before continuing. “And if you know anything about marshes you know that the thick, brackish water is shallow enough for cranes to walk though. There is hardly enough water for a whale to swim in.” She yawns, “so that dreamer of a whale thought his journey ended and his heart shattered in this mighty rib-cage.” Behind her eyelids her eyes flutter in dance in that strange between world, where the real is dream and the dream is real. “But there is something strange about heartbreak---” And then there is no more story, for Isra is asleep, tangled together with the desert-boy who aches with pain as much as she aches with sorrow. ISRA OF THE WHALE-SKIN; “Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”

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@El Toro