[P] we are made of the moon [winter]

[Isra]

Isra who is not a howling wolf
“The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.” 

W

inter is a wolf across the meadow. Isra, as she waits fetlock deep in the snow, wonders if the eclipse is bringing it upon them like the moon brings saltwater to the shore. The wind is whipping against her skin even as the red moon is calling up something that lashes against her bones. Whatever it is needs distance and it needs it fast.

Isra looking at that smear of blood across the black, feels like she could step out of her skin and make her way to the moon. She feels like she could walk across a staircase of snowflakes to a balcony of wind and pull that red orb down from the sky until everything is silver and shining again.

She's so sick of red, blood-red. Nothing good has ever come for her with only red over its spine.

So she watches the stars dance and chant from a distance and she tries so very hard to feel a little bit of wonder and religion. But all she can feel is winter on her back and icy snow cutting sharply at her skin and she thinks that she's used up all her wonder for the night already.

But then her dragon lands upon the snow and the wind whips at her harder where he's shoved it out of his way like a wave shoving a stone. Isra smiles and cants her head back a little further until it's not blood-red that she sees but green frothed and dipped and pearl. I bet I could go to the moon. Fable smiles as dragons do, all teeth and scale, but Isra is blind to the sharpness of his teeth and the way his eyes glow like sick moons in their sockets. All she can see is love draping a wing over her until the snow is falling all around her instead of across her back.

The wind that reaches her smells like brine then. That lashing thing quivers and settles against her marrow. And this time when she looks at the moon shining like blood in the sky, she sees fire instead of death, and the moon swallowing the sun bleeding it dry.

“Someday.” She tells her dragon as she lays her cheek across his shoulder. Someday

Isra is still thinking of that someday when she turns at the flash of Moira against the snow. Fable lifts his wing even as Isra waves her horn until her hole body is saying, Come closer, sister. The snow cuts at her skin a little less when she pulls away from her dragon and towards another name etched across her heart. “I missed you.” Isra lets her voice be swallowed up by the wolf of winter howling below the moon.

She knows that there are not enough words known by her tongue and her teeth to say all the ways in which she has missed Moira. And so she lets the howling wind say all the words with a fierceness she could never possess.

---

@Moira | "speaks" | notes: I have also missed all your words

rallidae

[Moira]

Moira Tonnerre

i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely

The world cried when Isra lied and said she would return. Ancestors that walk among the stars hissed as their Tonnerre child was told and untruth and then shattered when the thief took her sister-kin. And how Moira Tonnerre burned then, burned like the phoenix she resembled so, burned like a star exploding, burned and was born and forged again until she was ready for war and retribution.

But it was to protect Denocte as Moira has done the long days since Isra had left. Not even the sea witnessed the tears that fell and simmered from the phoenix' eyes in the dead of night where only orange and black and white fur comforted her with the rasping kiss of a tiger and soft humming of the jungle. Now, those tears are gone: dried and burned away as a light broke through the eternal darkness stretching within. It faded like the sun at the end of the day, it retreated as pillars of purifying white were erected within, as that darkness was expunged bit by bit. Only traces are left in the nooks and crannies, only shadows are left to flicker weakly along the edges.

She is a pyre, she is hope.

It is hope that sings in her blood, weeps in the smile and anguish on her face as she darts over the ground faster than even Neerja. On her tail the tiger trails, feeling the elation that floats higher and higher, screams and rejoices louder and louder, the melody that is as endless as time playing as birdsong and jungle heat between them.

Her cub is happy, and she knows no danger will come.

Lighter than the clouds, she is weightless until she crashes into Isra, slowing only enough so that they won't go tumbling into the remnants of snow Fable has left on the ground. Dragons do not scare her as they should have, for she remembers the sweet, small sea dragon that wound about them as a blessing when they claimed each other as their own.

That was before Neerja. Before the tigress that growls playfully up to Fable and swats snow at his wing.

Howling about them, the wind echoes every emotion since their parting. But the phoenix has learned to speak even when words do not wish to come. "I'd wait until eternity claims me for your return, Isra," the unicorn's name is a prayer said in smoke. "Have you come home to me at last?"

---

@Isra| "moira" "neerja" | notes: shorter than intended, i hope it's ok!

[Isra]

Isra who has come home
“It is a person. And we are finally home.”

I

sra feels like she has wings, like she is a wind, when she watches Moira come closer. Each of her steps is faster than the last and Isra wants to tell her to fly, fly, fly until the wind belongs to her instead of to the winter. Maybe then they would go to the moon together, as they should always be. Moira collapses into her. Then there is only laughter, weak and ringing like bluebells a summer meadow.

Snow moves around them in soft, wild flurries. Fable lifts his wing higher to cover the sisters beneath it. His unicorn is wild with joy, and even though they are close to falling, he knows he will say nothing to stop them. Instead he hums a happy song to see Moira beside them (where she belongs). A tiger flicks a paw at his wing, and his flicks his tail back at the large cat. He's gentle of course, because he does not want to send the tiger flying into the snow.

“You would have been very old and swaybacked if I waited an eternity.” Isra smiles, and laughs, and presses her nose into Moira's wings to smell the spice and night wafting off of them. She sighs for the familiarity of the gesture, of the way everything in her world seems like the axis of it has titled back to north. “I am glad it did not take that long.” Her nose brushes the path from wing, to mane, to cheek. She pauses before pulling away.

“Oh Moira,” Isra tries to swallow the shame growing like a vine in her heart. She tries to look at the eclipse and feel a bit of wonder, and hope again. Anything but shame would be better, because it's sitting like a stone in her chest. It feels like she could drown with it. But it still rises like a tide in her. “What are we going to do?” She's so tired of shame, of feeling like she's too late to stop evil from blooming like oil in the ocean.

Isra is tired and so when she presses her nose into Moira again she closes her eyes. The blood-red moon dies in that darkness.

---

@Moira | "speaks" | notes: <3

rallidae