“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”
The darkness around her feels like a religion, ink and pages charred at the edges. Everything is hushed in the blackness, and the shadows are thicker when there are only trees to fold around instead of art. It's a blessing, she thinks, darkness and silence broken up by the hum of her lungs and the sound of water in Fable's lungs.
Each leaf of a low branch turns to pearl and glass when it touches her side. And when the wind blows they sing like a dream-catcher. It chimes like a bell in the darkness, taunting and sweet and something that Isra cannot catch even when she licks her dry lips. But she tries.
She tires so hard she aches.
It's not until the child joins her that she stops trying to catch songs and thoughts and dreams. Fable is the first to notice him and perhaps if it wasn't for the sea-scales drifting like clouds up his flank the dragon would have done something other than chuff to see the boy. Maybe it's the nature of sea-creatures to find each other, to blink at sea salt drenched in light and fragmented blue. Maybe it's in their nature to find each-other.
It wasn't so long ago that his touch would have made her shiver and stray back to the shadows and the cobwebs of solitude. It's that ache on her throat that makes her see a touch for a touch instead of a call to war. And so she smiles at the white and green-scaled colt,and her teeth look like stars in the darkness (straight enough to lead a clear path in the darkness). “There is no one in Novus that believes in fairies more than I do.” Isra turns to looks at him and something in the lost look in his eyes and the forever hope in his eyes breaks her heart as much as it heals it.
At her hooves each blade of grass turns to birch bark and ribbons and gold. They clatter and whisper in the breeze and the gold catches the starlight like a trap.
Fable leaves his bed of leaves and darkness and twines about her legs. His eyes, when he looks at the boy, are the brightest thing in the mountain pass. And if Isra had to name that look it would be simply the look of youth to youth, hope to hope.
“Who are you?” She says because she's unicorn and unicorns are forever trapped by the sweetness of innocence.
@Pan
