' now and at the hour of our death '
Isra walks the halls in the shadows that thrive between the specks of moonlight and starlight filtering in through the windows, where the sea-water is still nothing more than a distant nightmare to the stones at her hooves. Everything around her is winter-dry and it feels strange to inhale and taste salt and exhale and taste brine. The silence too feels strange. The heavy, silent shadows feel like more than silence and more than night and more than the things that live between those places of quiet and darkness.
It feels like a baptism of solitude, silence deep enough to drown and shadows cold enough to burn. The air is weighty enough to make her bones feel like porcelain as she wanders the hallways. She's aimless and wonders in her lazy exploration what stories the mortar might tell of the old leaders and their dragons, what secrets the stones might bare if they were turned to dust.
Everything is silver-light and moon-light and the stones look like sapphires where the two lights meet the shadows and reflect queerly off her scale-dusted belly. All the castle is gilded until she lifts her eyes and watches that golden speck of sun break through the shadows like a slow moving comet. Isra feels blinded by the bright and she feels sad to see how slowly all his body moves though hallways full of reverie.
“Acton.” His name sounds like a prayer on the silence, a whisper thin thing that might float through the darkness like a mote of dust dancing on the gales of their lungs. Isra offers her nose to him as she had so very long ago when her ribs were hollow things between the atrophy of her hunger.
She doesn't tell him that she still feels like a thief, stealing away crowns from horses with more fire than she and crawling over the bones of suffering with nothing more than the blinking of her dreamer gaze. Instead she only smiles sadly and her teeth look like a string of periwinkle pearls where the moonlight reflects on her as she pauses before a window. The freezing winter wind feels like an absolution when it cools the fire of her salted skin that still warm from hours and hours of tending to fevers and broken bones.
“I wonder what they would think to know their queen walked the streets like a ghost, hungry and praying only to be forgotten in the dark and dusted shadows.” This too feels like an absolution of all the things buried like silt and rot instead the dark places of her soul. She's a queen that knows how to be made an altar of men and how to starve on the disease of memories that dance like moths and feed on the light around the darkness in which they thrive.
Isra knows so many things, more dark things than bones and flesh and dreams can hold.
And all those things live in the weight of her words she she brushes her lips across his cheek and whispers like a secret that she hopes the stone will hold like a grave. “I'm afraid.” Tonight it seems is for confessions and secrets and worries whispered in the moonlight where there is only dust and fireflies to hear.
@Acton
