“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
Each of the others bring with them an ache to her heart when they join her on the bed of grass and thunderbird feathers. Her words, when she continues, stumble through the chinks in her heart (cracks of fear and courage and love). “For years, the lion and the dragon battled. The world was covered in the corpses of all the other animals that tried to stop them. The rivers ran red when both of them discovered that they could fight and bleed over and over again and never die. Even the broken magic and time of their world could not survive all the violence and that too started to rot.” Isra lifts her eyes back to the gathering of birds and they flash as blue and green and golden as a tidal wave.
Caligo joins them then and that too brings with it both an ache and a new blossom on fear in her chest.
“And while they were warring neither the lion nor the dragon realized that both the home they had and the home they wanted were each ruined little by little. The mountain no longer shined with gold for it was dark with crusted blood. The darkness was broken up by wildfires and filled with smoke until it was gray instead of black.”
Isra looks then to the beasts still circling around and around them. Storms gather between their wings until the air feels thick and charged. All the hair on her back quivers upwards with the electric breeze and for a moment she thinks she heart must sound as loud as thunder as it throbs inside her chest. “Denocte could become like that world. We could be like lions and dragons.” And oh! Oh how her gaze burns like dragon-fire and lion-hate when she cocks her head and watches the few birds who have not landed clack their beaks in a battle-cry.
“Or we could all live like something other than lions and dragons.” Isra throws out the challenge with a shiver and drops her chin across Acton's back to hide the tremble in her gaze.
