"and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise "
This is not the first time she has seen death, nor the first time her tears have run in tracks of diamonds down the soot-back creases of her face. Each time she looks at Metaphor or Katniss she can still feel drops of blood falling on her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids. When she swallows the air tastes like iron and brine. Isra would tear down the world, devour it, just to know she would never have to see sorrow and inhale blood again.
Fable can feel it too, the need to do something (do anything), if only to feel something other than this ache in his throat. He cannot seem to stop keening, or lowing at the dead moon, or anything other than feel like this world he's been born to rule seems like nothing more than a cruel trick. Like Isra he doesn't know which way to point his emotions. The scale of them is tipping back and forth between sorrow and rage. Each time a stone is dropped in it there is a hollow sound that no one but him and his unicorn can hear.
And woe! Woe to the world if all the stones decide to fall to rage. There would not be a world left by the time they are done wiping it clean.
“I promise.” She says, and those words sound as hollow as the diamonds falling from her face. Isra doesn't know if she's promising to find whoever killed Metaphor, or if she's promising to remake the world into one where things like this do not happen. Either way she knows she's promising something terrible, and her magic is picking up a dull roar in its cage. It's waiting for that scale to tip.
Her magic creeps out as she gets close enough to see the exhaustion on Katniss, and the redness, and the heartbreak. “Let me help you.” Every path of brick and stone around them turns to a log. The horses around them back up as a flag above them turns to a silken white shroud that flickers in the wind like a cloud of doom. More move back as Fable lands and starts piling more logs together. Isra can hardly hear the sound their hooves make. All she can hear is that thud, thud, thud of stones hitting the scale. All she can feel is this horrible pull to do both great and terrible things.
“There is no one who will not know how hard he fought and how much he loved you.” Isra brushes her nose across Katniss's shoulder, because she can't help the need to push whatever pieces of her friend she can back together. Behind the pyre Fable is still building a sculpture of a crescent moon turns to the golden figure of a horse and at his hooves a shining ball of moonstone. This, at least, is something, Isra knows she can do now.
Later the terrible things will come.
And then her magic will not just roar in her skin.
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