“The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame.”
“I admire you for it.” She whispers softly below the hiss and crack of the fire before them. The sound of her voice is almost nothing more than another spiral of smoke reaching up to the stars, dreaming that it might be more than smoke dissipating into the darkness. Isra makes out strange shapes in the fire. There's an ash dragon above where a stray flame reaches up in a wicked point like a blade might reach for flesh. Somewhere in there, hidden in all that warmth and smoke, is a daisy withering between the piles of kindling.
It's the first time she's wanted to snuff out the bonfires of Denocte, to smother them all in blankets of darkness and steel (thick and heavy enough that nothing will ever break through). And in that moment she understands a little of what the old regime felt, as much as she saw it as evil, hollow violence.
Above them Fable promises, there is no fire in me, only the sea. and she takes as much comfort in that thought as she can.
“Perhaps one day you can teach me to fight.” That fury steams through the ice of her sorrow and the soft warmth of her joy. The horn upon her brow aches like an old wound and her throat throbs to the beat of her heart. Isra wants to spiral down, down, down to all that rage and impotence coiling like a snake just below the surface of her skin. She wants to split her jaw open like an ouroboros and swallow up every evil thing in this world.
Fable starts to twist over and over above their heads, a pledge that only Isra will understand. Someday soon he will be her dragon to swallow up the dark world and salt the soil in the places where rot has festered and spread.
But then Katniss breaks the drowning, melancholy of her thoughts and she blinks back any traces of sorrow and rage from her ocean eyes. “I don't think any of us are free from debts to pay.” She thinks of all the other mares left in her homeland, left to die and suffer while she tried to drown and found a crown, magic and a dragon instead.
Someday, she promises herself, I will sail back there and Fable and I shall free them all and kill every slaver in the world. The promise is the only way she can stay sane sleeping in her castle surrounded by silk instead of blood and chains.
Isra turns from the fire to brush her nose against Katniss's shoulder (as if all those scars are each a crown of their own). “If you need a place to start the defenses of our home are almost non-existent after the disasters and the changing of the regime.” That horn of hers still aches as she turns to go, following Fable back towards the sea. “Think about it.” She pauses like a deer, one hoof lifted above the stone.
“We need you Katniss.” Isra offers the last part like a prayer, inhaling once before her hooves kick up into a run. Fable's already half way to the ocean. “Come find me if you decide.” And then she's gone, another wisp of smoke and dust lost to the heavy darkness of the night.
@
<3 ending this one here, buts lets do another after her spar??
