[P] I'll Crawl Home To Her

[Blyse]

one sword out of many.

Why did he always dream of darkness?
 
He almost longed for the nightmares of his foalhood, where at least he could process his anxious days away.  Now, it was nothingness that he saw from the time his eyes closed until they crept back open, fighting heaviness that proclaimed his restlessness.  One might argue that he was simply forgetting, but he would argue back for they were vividly dark and lasting and holding him hostage in his sleep.  He tried to contrive meaning from them, but reason failed to explain one.  Reason failed him more and more these days.  It was not the old, reliable friend he was used to.
 
These were the sullen thoughts he tried to ban as he roused for the day.  Blyse inhaled deeply as he rolled his shoulders back, little pops and cracks rewarding his stretch and flooding his limbs with warmth and comfort.  Then he exhaled and clouds of his warm breath turned white as they greeted the cool morning air.  Now that was an old friend come home—the cold.  Even though the buds were in bloom, the mornings still had a biting chill this high in the mountains to remind you of the altitude.  He welcomed its bite.  After all, he had to cross that blasted desert for the first (and he sincerely hoped only) time the days before.  He could stand to never see sand for what remain of his part-lived life.  In fact, he was especially resentful towards the sun for bearing down on his back so relentless all that time.  Perhaps it wasn’t all that strange he dreamed of darkness.
 
He has almost gathered enough senses to begin his day when the crack of a limb put him on guard. He snapped his eyes toward the sound and peered untrustingly in to the thicket.  He quietly squared himself, ivory hooves as gentle on the earth as his steady breath.  He stayed silent, beckoning the sound to come again. 
 
@Isra // ugh, I chose.  We’re not too far from home, at least.
 

[Isra]

Isra of the rose gold

“And it's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.”


When the sun finally crests over the horizon Isra is overjoyed. She smiles to watch it paint the world in rose gold hues with a touch of rainbow color when she tilts her head and looks at the clouds. Today feels like a dream, a golden torch blazing against the nightmares of the sea and all the storms. And she thinks perhaps it is more splendid for the terrifying thought that the night will once again bring some struggle, some reaper knocking on their skin and saying, open up, open up, I've come for all your bones.

Isra hates that she's sometimes terrified now of what the night might bring. It brings wonder but it brings beasts of thunder too, and she welcomes only of those things. She wants only all those bright worlds of stags and spiders, seas and pearls,  and forests made of emeralds.

She wants her dreams back, her love of strangeness and mystery.

And so she watches the sun rise and rise until the world is bright with gold instead of moonbeams and silver hue.   It feels like a revelation, watching the day come undaunted by the horrors of the night. Isra soaks up a little of that gold and all of the warmth before she turns to start the almost endless walk home.

Each of her steps in faster and lighter than the last. Soon she's running, sprinting through the copse and the lingering gloam of the morning mist where the shadows cling the strongest to the night. Isra feels the most like a unicorn when she runs and the pine-needle forest floor feels like silk and clouds and dreams beneath her hooves. Part of her longs for this wildness, when the only things tangled in her mane are thorns and spring blooms and she's too disheveled and feral looking to be called 'queen'.

Perhaps she's too lost in clinging rabidly to her freedom to notice the stallion in her path. Perhaps, though, she's just wild enough here to see him and not care. And when she slides to a stop, a strangely bold smile on her face, Isra could not say why she stopped at all. Her chain when she stops, for the space it takes her to speak is the loudest thing on the mountain when it rings and rings in complaint of the stillness.

“Hello. Did I startle you?” She says, as breathless as a unicorn should sound on the cusp of some great revelation. The silence when it descends again seems as golden as the sun and nothing like a shadow. Isra welcomes that too, as she catches her breath and watches him with eyes as deep and endless as a dreaming sea.


@Blyse

Art

[Blyse]

one sword out of many.

It was an ocean wave that bound toward him, sliding in to his stone-walled shores with a spray of dirt like when the sea meets the towering cliff coasts.  That was his very first impression of her, before he even had a sense of what she truly was.  A mare, he soon saw that much, rattling in chains that did not bind her.  But that was not the element of her slender figure that would hold his gaze.  No, until she uttered her first words, it was the horn that held him—the most elegant of weapons but hardly any less lethal.  A mare with her sword always drawn is either reckless or on a war path. 
 
Blyse had quite the preference for the former.
 
Now, he had always been a stallion’s stallion, at ease among the ranks of the military where copious masculinity was commonplace.  But the kind of dames he did come to know would only paint their faces with war paint and had a battle cry to make the barbarians weep.  They were the kind you would be a fool to underestimate.  Yet, they had a different way about them, both in politics and in war.  Instead of thunder and steel, they were embers and silk.  Softly burning, hinged on desires that were driven by either fury or fervor.  An asset in warfare but a liability nearer to the throne so the noble matrons were encouraged to be much less impassioned.  That was why the very notion of female royalty was so foreign to him that he would never even consider that the mare before him might be just that.  He only saw an equal.
 
Her question drew down his gaze and his eyes fell to hers, emeralds to sapphires in a wordless negotiation.  Oh, he was used to being leery of strangers.  But that was when there were not so many of them.  Strangers were all this new land had to offer him and he could either choose to make himself a people out of them or drown in isolation for the rest of his days.  He made his choice with a well-intended retort.
 
“You did…”   He shifted his weight toward her, the volume of blood-red feathers at his back swimming alongside the subtle motions of his body. “I would suppose I’m not used to strange beasts barreling out at me from the forests quite so early in the morning.”  His tone was playful, even if his expression was not.  He trained his face well, fixed in a state of indifference lest the ghost of his ambitions be seen.  Then Blyse tilted back his head in arrogant inquisition, colorless waves trailing away from his face. “Habit of yours?”
 
 
@Isra
 

[Isra]

Isra the beast of the cobwebs

“ she whispers to us of wind and forest—and she tells us stories, ”


Her laughter when it comes feels like a cleansing as it blooms from bind her smile. It rings both louder and softer than her chain, louder the the song of his feathers. The song of her rings through the forest and the wind and like all beautiful things she's both more and less than that fragile laughter living inside her. “I have never been called a beast before.” Isra whispers between her bell-chime amusement and everything about her suggests that she finds it wonderful to be a 'beast'.

“What sort of beast shall I be then?” She tosses her horn and watches the way the dappled morning sun reflects off her spindle bone and casts around them strange colors and lights. When he hooves dance closer there is something both deer-like and bird-like in the movement, as if the places where she sets her gaze seem to tremble and turn to dream-stuff.

Isra imagines what it might mean to be a terrible beast, a dragon or that thing that circled and circled over her head in a storm. She wonders if she could ever make a world burn and smolder and freeze before her rage. Or perhaps, she thinks, it is better to be a sad sort of beast. She could be lonely in a cave with only shadows and moss and mold to keep her company. The shadows, she knows, are friends to the story-tellers, they listen for years and years and never shift away.

Sometimes she still feels like the lonely sort, the type to suffer endlessly because happiness seems like a dream as delicate and fragile as silk spider webs.

And for a moment, when the light reflects off her horn onto this feathers she's enthralled with the way the spaces between his wings seem to swallow up even that small burst of light. What a wonderful thing it must be to fly? The sea gave her a horn, scales, a chain and a form made not for exploring but surviving. So with a soft sigh of longing she looks away from his wings and smiles to meet together their gazes again.

“Lately it seems to be a habit.” Her eyes when they shift overhead seems searching, as if she's looking for another dragon, a beast more fearsome than she could ever been. “The mountains have been full of danger.” And when her horn dances in the light it's clear that she has rarely though of it as a weapon. It's nothing more than another part of this strange new skin of hers (as strange as the crown she never wears).


@Blyse

Art

[Blyse]

one sword out of many.

If there was one way in which he was less clever, it was that he did not know his own opinion from an insult at least half of the time.  But it did seem to tickle the mare to be called a beast, despite being laden in weapons and chains and beastly as mares come.  He was surprised by the laughter that fell from her lips, more so in the how than in the why.  Each subtle note was laced in guiltless, girlish joy that seemed so unlikely by her presence.  He did not see that she was anything fragile or deeply feeling, but then he did not really see her, did he?.  Blyse was a quiet observer with a confined vantage, like one can only see the same few stars from the earth and witness only a small fraction of the way they dare align.  Just the same he did not capture her joy or share in it, but intrigued, he still made an effort to embolden it.  

“Well now you have…”  He replied. His voice, softly commanding, paused just a moment before offering her an answer.  “I would suppose the kind of beast that must be kept in chains, wouldn’t you?”  He made a slight gesture toward the things he spoke of, as if she would be unaware of the rattling shackles that clung to her like millstones.  Mostly, he was curious, and pitting her against his own observations seemed an easy way to satisfy this.  He could see her drifting then and something about her eyes told him she wasn’t entirely there for a fleeting, stolen moment.  He thought he could follow her gaze, but they drift back in to his own curious eyes and come alive and connected once more before he could. 

And when they leave again, she shares soft rumors of danger in the mountains.  As he heard this, he felt a twinge of his own joy.  It was in the irony of her words, the words of a dangerous creature that laughs at passive insults and wields a twisted, glimmering dagger for a crown. “Danger?” He scoffs at her and then casts his eyes from side to side, falsely performing. “You are the most dangerous thing in these mountains that I can see.”   He was not one to flatter, truly.  He did not care if what he said made her feel good, he was simply aware of her worth and telling it to her whether she was aware herself.  His only natural weapon was his words, and though they might cut deep they draw no blood like her twisted dagger could.  Silly mortals, always coveting what they do not have.  ”Are you not?”  He urged her to confess her sins, pointedly and half-convinced that she would still strike him dead if he let her.
 
@Isra

[Isra]

Isra who devours and becomes

“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.”  


“Oh,” She says and her joy slips away on a sigh like the sea slips away from the shore. Isra shivers with the coldness of it's loss and her gaze slides away to the bows of branches curling above their heads. Each leaf, when it dances belly up on the breeze, seems to be a ghost. They all chime their soft edges against each other and against the branches and they taunt out her memories.

“If only--” Her words are almost strange sounds, each an inhale and exhale of her lungs and she almost tumbles over the syllables like they are stones and she a weak summer creek. Around her leg that chain sings and chimes a sad song as she drags her hooves through the loam and the pine-needles. The bits of kelp sound like harp strings made of satin when they coo against the steel and sigh against the dark skin of her legs. “I fear my chains have a much sadder tale to tell than that of a beast. But sometimes--” Each of her words is softer than the chain-song, softer than the birdsong chorus deep in the canopy. “sometimes I wish to be a beast, to be fearless and bold.”

Her sorrow is the only loud thing about her.  

Isra inhales and shakes off as much of the sorrow as she can. Her smile though, seems a sadder thing in the wake of it, as if all of her is suddenly just a little bit less. And when she closes the distance between them there is no part of her that looks dangerous (but for the point of her spindle horn). She looks only like a unicorn of old, a throw back to time when magic lived in their bones and their horns healed and never tasted of blood. If it were not for the darkness of her skin she could be an old ghost, a specter of a dead thing.

But the sunlight shifts and it does strange things to the shine of scales at her belly. They look to be bits of stars made not with fire but saltwater and sea-foam. Isra wonders then, as she watches the sun do strange things to him too, if he can see how she doesn't sit in her skin quite the right way, how bits of her seem darker than her shadow that stretches out like a lazy hound below her.

She says nothing more about danger as the sun glints over the scar across her hip. Her body shivers to feel any heat (even distant warmth) against that mark on her.

“Where were you headed?” Only then does her delicate shiver turn to something that almost burns through her like excitement. Her breath pauses in her lungs as a story-teller's breaths often do. Sometimes Isra thinks that every direction here in the mountains leads to a story, an adventure, the first step of a grand legend.

And Oh! Oh! Oh, how she wants all his stories. Perhaps that is the danger of Isra.  She eats the adventures of others greater than she and recreates it into something eternal. Maybe she is a beast after all one who eats and eats and eats of words instead of muscle.


@Blyse

Art

[Blyse]

one sword out of many.

 
Quite suddenly it was there, this fragility he hadn’t seen.  It played upon her face as her gaze slipped in and out of the here and now, and he was admittedly curious about where she kept going.  He did not like his mind so much to spend a lot of time there.  It housed only worthless memories, which grew more bitter and less comforting with each day that he stood to distance himself from it.  Oh how hard new paths were to forge, especially when one had previously been so deeply immersed in the path they had long since walked on.  He cared most for the future and the present that paved his way to it.  In that present, the wind blew and the sun climbed in the sky and a darkened creature stood before him with her own purpose, as unknown to him as his to her.
 
She shared with him fraction of this purpose as she spoke to him, her words laced with personal mysteries yet to be uncovered.  He mulled over her words, trying to understand her point of view on the notion of beasts and their finer attributes.  Fearless and Bold, she called them.  Perhaps the beasts he knew of could be described as such, but then that implied that there was a part of them worth celebrating and he knew that to be untrue.  Beasts are callous and cruel and now he realized where her sudden sadness had come from as he was reminded that he had compared her to such things.
 
He was not soft, he might not ever be.  But he was a conscious being that knew at the very least, how to be equine.  He adjusted, redefining his opinion of her with every moment of their meeting. 
“There is no such thing as fearless, Unicorn.  We are all afraid.  There are only those that stand to persevere despite being afraid.  And as for boldness..” A single breath of laughter slipped through as he spoke “…boldness is just stupidity that manages not to fail by a narrow margin.  You should not want to be either of those things.” His retort comes with an evenly matched step to hers, and suddenly he is dangerously close to the sword she has drawn, enough they he can see the silky smooth texture of its curves and the subtle cerulean reflection from her clear ocean eyes.  He did not mind the closeness, it made better for speaking and he thought there were a few good words yet to share.  It also meant that he was a bit more at ease in her presence, if by a margin.
 
But now she is curious, she asks about his heading.  He was cordial, of course, but far from that trusting.  Internally, he recoiled and his brows furrowed for just a moment.  His guard regained its bearings and it commanded him to elude her.  “Now about those chains…you have my curiosity now.  Dare I ask just how you got them?”  He redirected, though not pointlessly—he was genuinely curious.  He certainly liked to be in the know.  After all, no telling what equine might cross his path that may one day be an asset.  For that reason, and for the best of measures, he fired at her one more thought. 
 
“And while I’m at it, a name would not be such a bad thing to know.”

@Isra //

[Isra]

Isra who asked for death

“Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”  


Unease creeps over her like a claw of winter scraped down her spine just once. She shivers from the uneasiness, the way her skin crawls both with a small ember of boldness and a snowflake of fear. It is one thing when she closes the distance between then, another when he talks of beasts that are less than grand like she might talk about the stars. This close the ozone smell of his feathers seems almost cloying, almost sweet, almost terrifying.

The breeze plays a song through the hollow of her horn and another through the gaps where her chain links and spirals down her leg. And when she speaks the words seem as if they too are part of that melancholy song. “I wonder though, Her sigh is a poem laced in sorrow and brine. “if you fail boldly does it feel less like failing and more like learning? Just once I would like to try it I think.” Isra chuckles then and the sound if low and sweet like a rose that dares to bloom on a dark, forest floor (feed by the moon instead of the sun).

She notices how he gives her no answer at all but a question. Only the lift of her horn and the way her gaze darkens as if to say, do not think I have not noticed you ask for this thing from me and give nothing, shows that she caught his redirection at all.

But she is a story-teller do the very core of her soul and she can no more swallow the words that boil to her lips than she can sprout wings to fly. So her gaze shifts away and her soul blossoms like a new dimension inside the cavity of her chest and she begins on a sad inhale that sounds a little like a sob. “This is not my skin, not really, not in the way it counts. I was not born a unicorn. My first breaths were taken with lungs encased in gold and a body swaddled in chains and leather.” Her eyes lower back to him and her smile waivers as she wonders if he regrets asking such a thing of her now, if he knew the river he begged to rush.

“My true body is that of a slave who knew nothing of boldness and bravery and fearlessness. I knew only dreaming and pain, blood and books. Suffering was all I had that and the idea that death perhaps might be this glorious  story just waiting for me to turn just the first page. I thought dying would be the first page of my story and in a way I was right but I was also so very long.”

The air in her lungs flutters and flies through her lips like a hundred moths and her tongue feels dry with dust and salt. She swallows and the cool mountain air hurts a little on the way down. “And so I went to the sea and told the waves story after story in hopes that they would see it as payment enough for the start of my story. But when I asked the sea for death it denied me. It took my skin, my golden silken body, and gave me darkness, scales and this horn spiraling out from my brow.” She doesn't move closer but her skin ripples with fine cracks of trembling until she seems almost alive with burst of life crawling across her muscles like worms. “My chain comes only from slavery and the trickery of the sea, nothing more. Do you see now? Can you see how I cannot wear my skin as boldly as a beast might wear their teeth, claws or fangs?”

Her eyes seem to ask to over and over again as the light trickles through like mist to them. Do you see? Do you see? Do you see?

In the silence of her story that feels heavier than it did before, as heavy an a anvil dropping like a stone from the sky, Isra reopens that space between them. She only gives herself just enough space to breathe deep without the cloying ozone smell of his feathers. “I am Isra.” She says. “I have always been Isra just as I have always had my chain and those are the only two true things about me.”

“And now,” Her smile seems almost fragile when it returns to the dark dryness of her lips. “Will you share a truth with me?” Perhaps though, Isra bargains like a beast, just like the sea once traded with her.


@Blyse

Art

[Blyse]

one sword out of many.

If not for the wind, their presence would seem like the only thing in existence.  The mountains seemed to go flat as the trees went quiet—and since when did the songbirds let the sun rise without greeting him with their melody?  Or maybe the world lived and breathed around him and it was his focus that became so narrow he did not see or hear them.  

In his focus was the melancholy marvel, it’s subtlety shattering within the poetic response he had provoked from the mare.  It poured sadness.  He wondered if she felt as deeply as she thought and if so, did she get lost in what surely must be agony?  He did not like to think so deeply.  He knew what dark and vicious thoughts lie in his own mind and so he made a point not to spend his time there.  He desired, strangely, to get her out of hers.

“That sounds a bit like a riddle to me and one I can’t solve for you at that.  I find it far more preferable not to fail at all and never find out.”   He washed her words away with his own, starving her ponderings when he probably should have fed it with musings of his own.  But he was not the musing type.  Even as she went on to share her tale, he could only listen to her words, understanding them without the help of imagination.  He had always seen things two-dimensionally.  It made easy for solving problems and exploiting tactical failures, but rather poor for visualizing the immense imagery which she tried to paint for him with her words.  Still he lent her his ear, understanding more of who she was with not only each line of her speech but the very underlying implications of the things that she said.  

“I can only see a Unicorn.” His answer to her was almost child-like in its simplicity, but then he was not a very complex man and that was one defining trait that kept him grounded all these years. “But riddle me this:” He continued, and as he did he rolled his shoulders back so that his wings ruffled and drew her eyes. “If I lost my wings, would you call me a Pegasus without wings or just call me a horse?” Perhaps he could be thought-provoking after all?  At least that was his intent, although he studied her for only a moment before offering a softly spoken justification for his question

“Because if I were to believe your story—no to say that I do—but if I did, then I would like to think that the sea gave you the very thing that you asked for and now you are simply reborn anew.  As for your chain…”  He exhaled, cocking his head to the side and turning his ears about in a way that mocked a puzzled expression.  “I would surmise that is a metaphor for something that you’re meant to unravel.“ The half-smile that only appeared for a moment as he spoke implied more than what was actually said.  Maybe he did believe her?  But then, he had too many unbelievable things to decide for or against and he wasn’t prepared to burden himself with another.

When she offered her name, he tried it on his own tongue as if to bid his own memory to hold on to it.  “Isra…”  His voice was pale as he spoke her name, but came alive again as she posed a question of her own.    “A truth?  We are quite different, Isra—I’m not the sharing type.  What bit of honesty do you intend to ask of me?”  He anticipated the same question as before and already pulled back the hammer on his next evasion, he only needed to pull the trigger.  It was a game in which he intended to win or force her to forfeit—the means were trivial so long as the end was the same.

@Isra //  

[Isra]

Isra who sprouted chain roots

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.”  


“A unicorn is all anyone can see.” She both laments and rejoices and her words drip sorrow as much as they float upwards in joyous mist. Something loosens in her though, to know he looks at her and sees only flesh and bone. He sees nothing of the crown and there's no expectation in his gaze when she meets it, nothing of dreamy wonder for the world around them.

Later she will tell herself that is why her magic bubbled up in her like a wellspring of ink and wonder. Later—

He ruffles his feathers and she frowns to imagine them as no more than open gashes across his shoulder, blood whispering in silken song to hear instead of feathers. And for a moment the wind stops slipping through the hollows of her horn. In that moment Isra imagines it torn off by the rage of a beast, or turned to ice and shattered into diamond dust. She shivers lamely for the horror of the thought.

“You would be you.” She answers both his question and the one she wasn't courageous enough to ask. That loosened up thing in her smiles then, bright as a string of stars against the night. And you,” A pause hangs on her smile and a burst of something, lighter than the weak joy in her, dances like sparks on the wind in her eyes. “would still be nameless.” Her smile flickers, just a little, but she doesn't ask doesn't press. She already learned that lesson.

“But,” She says while her magic starts to rise in her veins like a wave gilded in moonlight. Isra dances pass him on those doe legs of hers and that 'but' drags on and on in the silence like an hour. “If a chain is a metaphor and skin might be more skin who is to say what is real? How do you know what it is that you are?” And oh! How lovely it feels to let her mind wander like a strange river through a desert, crooked  and over a bed of shells instead of rock.

That river of silver magic in her blood runs over her skin and pools in eddies about her feet. Flowers rise like ivy from the soil around her on stems of chains with petals made not a silk but scale. The soil turns to glitz and gold and it catches on the sunlight and the shadows in a chorus of color and glare. All the world around her shifts and changes and flickers from one thing to the next. Do what you will magic, do what you will. She whispers to that wave of rabid magic and sighs almost wildly as it crests over her.

In the space between the shift of stone to diamond and the root of an alder tree to steel, Isra lifts her horn into the  wind so it sings again. Her smile is deeper then and it seems almost as if all her teeth are opals and magic-dust. “I was heading towards Denocte. Perhaps if you walk with me for just a little while you might decide to pick your own truth to share?” She waits and watches him with that strange look that suggests more wonders than any one world can hold.

Isra learned her lesson well but her magic has not and it dances in her now like a feral wolf around a maypole.

Yet in the end her offers falls on dead silence as the stallion leaves. She walks home alone.


@Blyse

Art