“It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us."
If he had been any color at all, any color but golden, she would not have hated him. Or maybe if it had been any night but this one with the blackness thick enough to drown. Maybe later she'll tell herself it was all the edges of her laid bare that made her so monstrous.
Maybe.
But he's there when she turns to see what foolish thing followed her into this first garden of weapons. He's there-- golden enough that she can see the way dapples blossom across his sides like small hearts. And she can't see it, but she can taste it in the air, his blood clawing its way through his skin. She hopes her flowers took it from him, reached out their petals like roots and whispered to him come closer. The taste of it, faint but there, gnaws like a hundred ants at all her sharp places.
Her magic rises to meet them (all those ants). It gnashes its teeth and foams white (frothy white) at the mouth. Isra's own teeth flash like a bear that's been backed against a cliff by a pack of starving wolves. Everything in her is telling her that she has to survive, that she has to be a god, that she needs to be anything at all but dead in the grass with blood around her throat like a string of pearls. The stems around them turn into pure, soft gold-- soft enough that the petals hungry and dotted black start to drop towards them.
Isra does not need to look up to know that each flower, each golden flower, looks like a lotus face watching them in the place of scripture.
She does not correct him when he calls her Caligo, although that names makes her think of a goddess that let her religion be washed away by the sea. Isra feels enough like the goddess, like a devil that cursed the world to die in the darkness once, she doesn't want her own name tonight.
Her own name is for love, for Eik, for her children and her dragon.
Tonight she is for the black sea.
Tonight she is the sea.
And oh! Oh she's deadly when she moves towards him with those gnashing teeth of magic below the tight curl of her neck. He starts to glow and she only smiles enough that the soft silver light will do nothing more than make her teeth glare in a cut of bone through her black lips. “And if I said no?” She steps closer-- like a lion, like she has seven heads and all of them are rising up from the sea all at once. “What if I preferred the darkness?”
If he has a sea whispering to hers, her own is whispering back, I could devour you.
@orestes
