What wakes her is this--
A weight on the air pressing down like stones, until even her lungs ache with how hard it is to breath. Smoke on her tongue days and weeks after the last plume of it has shed back itself from the moon. Her bow is glowing by the window and the light of it makes it feel like she's been blind for her entire life And she knows, oh with a terrible knowing, that there is a darkness in this world somewhere pressing closer and closer and closer against her world.
She does not pause to wonder if it's nothing more than the sense of a mother, of impending life, waking her so early. Isra only knows that something is coming and that it's easier to call it darkness than it is anything else. And Isra knows (or maybe it's only blind faith), that unlike the tide, this she can hold back. Darkness she can devour, and drown, and make all its bone to gold and ink to stain the walls of her castle. Isra has learned to make art of darkness, of suffering, off this rage blazing endless.
I am coming. Fable says and there are furious thoughts blazing through him. He is close enough that she knows to start running. Isra can taste Eik when Fable shares his message. I know. Isra replies and it's flavored with the winter, with wildness, with everything dangerous that lives in the black spaces of the ocean.
There is already a cage of gold around her when Fable arrives. Inside it Isra is waiting, and furious, and whispering things like today to her magic that has been waiting forever for her to find the bottom of it. She does not look up at her dragon when he scoops her up, she does not look anywhere but out towards what lays beyond her mountains. Fable flies faster than he has ever flown, and his wings make great shadows in the places they pass.
Today I will be terrible; we will be terrible, she tells Fable. He only roars in response, because he is tried and sorrow still has not learned a way to sit on his shoulders. Isra does not tell him that she will love him anyway, no matter what monster she finds waiting deep in either of them.
Soon it's the desert stretching out below them. Soon she can her the screams in the places between the howling wind. Isra can hear the shrieking of the beast, a basilisk the rumors said. Her magic rises up in a furious tolling in her chest and it beats slow and steady, horribly steady. Before she had thought her heart already knew the beat of war. But she was wrong, so wrong. Only know is her heart learning that way to beat, to say in blood and cell, I am winter. I am calm. I am the reaper.
The two stars in her womb do nothing more than tangle their legs together and welcome that deadly magic into their hearts. The song of war lulls them to sleep.
The stone statues below are rising like clusters of soldiers in her vision. Each of their poses is stranger than the last. One is stretched up towards the sky like they are hoping for rain. Another is frozen in a belly-low run that never moves. With a sickening realization she knows, oh she knows, that this is no army. And they are more than stone-- or at least they were.
She does not scream, she is too cold, too furious, to calm. Isra is too ready to kill, to maim, to taste gore between her teeth to scream. So she only inhales when she spots Raum, and Seraphina, and Eik (Eik!). Fable flies over them all, he's looking at the beast with all the hate of the storm sea.
Isra does not care about the man, he is flesh, bone and weakness. She does not want him. Raum did not make the stone sentries. Eik and Seraphina can have Raum, she knows they want his death almost more than she does.
Isra wants the beast with the deadly eyes and his dripping fangs
She does not warn Eik, her mind is open enough now in rage, that she knows he can sense the determination running electric though her.
When Fable swoops low and places her cage in the path the beast is taking but has not reached Isra smiles. The light of her bow, and her arrows makes her teeth shine like pearls, like fangs in the night, like hungry pits of stone between her cheeks. It makes her look as monstrous and she feels. Today, she tells that roiling pit of magic in her bones (and below that) today we will find the bottom of us. Her cage dissolves to seed and sand, and she walks out of it with nothing more than that terrible, awful smile to give away all the want moving like a snake through her.
“Basilisk,” the story-teller turned hero yells to the beast destroying the city by way of stone and snake-tail. She not care that it wont understand her, rage is universal and it needs a sound.“I know what you are. I know your death.” Isra draws and arrow and the desert around her turns to a small jungle for the survivors to run into. She watches them pass her with each step she takes towards that which they are running from. Fable flies over head and she can feel the ocean rising in him with all that fury, and sorrow, and wildness.
Do not look at the eyes, she tells Fable. All she gets in reply is the thought that a lion does not look into the eyes of a rabbit when it kills it and starts to strip fur from bone. It's terrible and awful, but Isra almost laughs at the thought.
Isra does not pass the edge of her jungle, but she watches the beast move, and wonders if it's brave enough to come find the story-teller in trees. She hopes it is, because like all good story-tellers and knights she knows the only way to kill a monster is to cut off the head.
And she loves a good story.
@Raum @
