"What was it like to love him? Asked Gratitude.
It was like being exhumed, I answered, and brought to life in a flash of brilliance."
There is something about seeing him so empty of sweet clover and so full of anger that makes her feel wrong. The look of him crawls under her skin and through the muscle. It devours her marrow and eats up every drop of blood until her veins are aching with a billion sickle moons flowing wrongly through her. When he touches his hip to her, she can feel only sharp bones like teeth stabbing at her skin.
All of it makes Isra want to howl, and bellow, and shake down the moon and the sun with her rage. She wonders, oh she wonders, if she could scream loud enough that the chewed out stars would fall down upon this desert like holy fire. Could she open up her mouth then and turn the air to arrows with the gnashing of her angry, angry teeth?
And maybe, if his breath wasn't fanning across her cheek like a flame, she would have grown cold and furious. Maybe Isra, queen of the night, would have chewed out pieces of her own skin and become another white-hot nebula in the inky black sky. But Eik is there and he's painting a sky only they can see and each billowing cloud is rose-gold and fat with water (or is it salt-tears bloating them?). Isra is there with him and she's closing her eyes and falling down, down, down into the sky.
Whenever Eik touches her she forgets foolish things like gravity, and reality, and crowns.
“Eik.” She says, but not because it makes sense in that moment. Isra says his name because she's drowning in a gold sky, and the sickle moons in her blood hurt, and because every inch of her is screaming his name. If she didn't say it a hundred terrible, beastly things would have come out instead like the tide pouring out from dark caverns. She's afraid to tell him that she wants to feel blood rushing between her teeth instead of clover and lavender.
So she paints his skin with a name and each note of it sounds like love and don't let me drown. Isra presses their sides together until she can feel each of his jutting bones dig into the crevices between her rib-cage. And even then she keeps pressing, and pressing, and pressing. She's desperate, and desolate, and hollow. She needs Eik to fill up those places until she's full of heavy stones that she wants to call love. Isra does not want to drown in the sky too long.
She wants the fire.
His spine tastes like dust when she drags her lips across it (dust and ghosts, specters and bones). It goes down like salvation and her monster of magic coos and chants and says come closer. “I needed to see it.” Those words go down too like salt and sword-- they cut her up as they run up her throat and across her tongue.
More words boil up like lava from the molten core of her.
Isra doesn't say them but they wrap around the map of roots between them. It's made me dangerous, and then, and then, and oh, I welcome it. Each word is a thorn in the drowning sky she's falling into. They cut. She wonders if Eik can taste the blood that no one else but him would ever see.
She wonders if she tastes like metal or like a burning, almost exploding star.
And when she presses closer (can she get closer?) her body sings back to him. It sings and chants and twists more roots and thorns between them. Then never leave me again. She dashes herself upon the shore of thorns, takes those roots between her teeth, and then, and then--
She pulls.
@
