Isra and iron wake
“I must down to the seas again,”
“I must down to the seas again,”
I
sra loves a still sea that's as smooth as glass running in shining planes out beyond the horizon. She does not miss the tempestuous waves with white crowns of froth upon their heads. This still sea has nothing in it that feels as primordial as that fathomless, hollow, sea-foam froth that waits deep in the core of her. This sea is not calling her home to the center of the black; it's not calling her to the cold-as-death waters. This sea is is only giving her two moons, and constellations tangling together on horizon. This sea is painted with silver, and when she looks to the left, a glowing blue that only makes her think of Fable and that sea she sailed once, in a half dream, with Eik. Isra thinks of love, instead of pale shoreline that is still turning to iron and steel at her hooves.
What she is not thinking about is the way that pathway of smelted down weaponry is stretching out both before her and in the wake of her as she walks towards the blue glow. It's as smooth as the glass-still sea but no moons and stars shine on the surface of it. It is only black and slick as snake-scales in a cave. She can almost fell the pulse of it, like a heart, beneath her hooves as she walks. But she tries not to think of that too.
Ahead she can see the gritty shine of the shore on wings and below that a hint of gold, made pale and faded by the silver moonlight. The magic in her blood hums a recognition against her ribs, a steady tap-tap-tap like a shovel against a gravestone. Isra wants to smile, she wonders if her lips remember the shape of it (more and more it's feeling like they have forgotten).
The pale shore gives way to black rock and her ore dies where it meets the already dark island. Isra almost sighs with relief when she chains enough of her magic to keep the shining blue in the sea nothing more than shining, spectral blue something. She turns to the mare and that sand-dusted vulture and she still does not smile.
They don't need such things as smiles between then, not when Isra can see her own violence rippling down her wake in slick sheets of iron. She wonders what Seraphina would make if she could cut out her magic like a organ and give it to the once-queen. Part of her does not think it would be so different, in the end, although she hopes (oh, she hopes so viciously) that it would be.
"Seraphina.” Her words don't sound like the sigh of a sword even though Isra thinks that everything between them should sound like weapons cutting through the world. And even though the black rocks make no sound when Isra changes them all into mirrors, the way the blue intensifies until it devours the brightness of the moon seems a little like the suggestion of a blade swung towards a thing neither of them can see.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3
