my tornado heart will hold your name to the smoke and
to the sky, glowing wicked until the blood in me is gone.
Eik has already seen that distant shore.
When Isra wakes in the middle of the night, chest heaving, and he presses his lips to her temple, he sees it-- crimson and grey, ash and blood, heavy with something far darker than sorrow. Something that stains, like mold. Something that stinks, like rot in the blood. And as she falls back asleep, brow furrowed as she walks the tightrope between dream and nightmare, he can see the arrow of her intention, cutting across the sea like the prow of a ship, taking her back, always back, to that crimson shore. Night after night the restlessness grows, their wild dreams (for her dreams were his too-- he did not have many of his own) grew darker, thicker. He hated the waiting, and the not-quite-dreaming, and the silent knowing that sat between them.
They never spoke about it but it was there, and it grew, and sometimes it became hard to breathe at night with the air in their room full of dead dreams. So, he was certainly not asleep when she called to him-- Eik-- in the way that only she could. His name, in her mind, on her tongue, chiseled on the inside of her bone, was completely different from the sound the rest of the world made when they said Eik.
He does not say anything when he arrives. Her back is to him as she works on the hull, where a kelpie's features are slowly morphing and reshaping. Ahead a dragon flies back and forth, restless.
Watching Isra at work was one of life’s simplest, sweetest pleasures. Magic flowed from her eagerly, and the look on her face as it did-- intensely focused, brow knit like it did in dreams-- the sight of her made his heart ache.
He’s thinking of the night they met when she turns to face him. There’s war in her eyes, but he doesn’t need magic to know that. It’s been growing in her like a rift, and anyone could see it. So they look at each other head-on like this, twin souls pondering the vast, unnecessary space between themselves, and Eik feels his blood warming like he’s already running toward that great endless horizon.
He flexes his jaw, looks at the boat. “Is Fable coming too?”
Coming,
not going.
@Isra mehh I forgot how to write him
Time makes fools of us all
