“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
Isra sails away on his words. It's a ship made of magic and words sailing on a sea of memories. She can feel his homesickness through his words. But she can also feel how much he loves his home and his clan of lost boys. Perhaps it's why she closes the distance between them and brushes her muzzle across his cheek.
She turns the air against her lips to salt and brine, hoping that perhaps it might remind him of home.
“Do you miss your lost boys?” When she asks the question she thinks of crows and orphans and all the fragility of youth. She feels a shard of fury running through her veins at the thought, but there is nothing to do for it but look him in the eye and promise herself later, there will be time later.
Fable feels all the things roiling like waves inside her and he presses his nose to her chest. That touch is all it takes for her to stop thinking of lost things and start thinking of boys with hope in their eyes and dreams in their hearts. She thinks of mermaids too and this time when she speaks there is a bright, youthful smile on her lips. “Someday we will have to see if there are other mermaids here too.” And when she winks at him something in her gaze suggests that she knows more secrets of the sea than that.
Isra might be a queen but she's still a unicorn who never had a childhood. All she had were nightmares.
Talk turns to Caligo and Isra, for a moment, isn't sure how to reply. She still remembers the cracking of her heart when her goddess left them in a field full of bones beneath a sky of thunder birds. There is still a sliver of worry in her that they birds aren't gone forever, and that her city hasn't seen the last of the sea.
“She is,” Isra hedges, pauses and looks away towards the bottom of the mountain. “I met her once but she left without saying where she was headed. They say the gods are still walking among us.” Her voice suggests that while Isra knows they are somewhere she has no interest in meeting any of them again.
The gods of Novus brought only destruction when they awoke from their stone statues.
@Pan
