Isra turns away from the boat and she comes to him. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is. She turns-- she turns-- the moonlight caught on all her soft edges-- to him. All the rage and all the sorrow digs into the love between them like talons, and in some places they sink deep. But, to his perpetual awe, love is always deeper.
When she says “yes” it feels like the ocean when it comes and sweeps the sand from beneath your feet. Not enough to fell you, but. Enough to give you a taste of the world slipping away beneath you. How easy it is. When she says “yes” every atom in his body leans in to hers. It begs to be taken from, drunken, folded and carried away to wherever it is she goes. “Our children…” He repeats quietly. It was the only part of all this that really hurt. He couldn’t bear to be apart from them. He also could not bear to bring them to a dangerous place. He lost either way.
He doesn’t finish the thought. She knots a promise into his mane, and all the demons in him screech that it is a ball, and she is the chain.
(You must always remember the taste and feel of ash beneath your tongue, in your lungs, on your skin.
You will never deserve peace. You will never deserve joy.
It’s all too much.
Kindness will be the straw that breaks your back. Love will run you over.
You will let it, because you are weak.)
But he doesn’t feel like a prisoner to love, and he doesn’t feel weak. The promise she knots in his hair feels like winter giving way to summer. It is as easy and as inevitable as the changing of the seasons. Close your eyes, float downstream. Wasn’t he built for war, in all the ways she wasn’t? Wasn’t he born to always chase that horizon? She was always going toward something, and he was always going away from another. How miraculous it was they went the same way. Just a degree of difference and their paths would only cross once. Instead they wind and weave, lead and follow.
(maybe you’re the ball, and you’re the chain, and you’re drowning her with you)
He doesn’t want to go either. Yet he doesn’t want to stay. He hates the war that blooms and bristles and bleeds in her, almost as much as he loves it.
“I know.” He understands. She never had a choice. Like finding each other, like loving each other, like twisting together, the roots of an ancient tree. (when he closes his eyes at night he can feel the dark soil cradle them, and the slick earthworms wriggle below. he can almost smell the humus they create as they live and die, over and over again, tangled so close her skin is his skin, her breath his breath. And deeper they dig, and higher they climb, and it always hurts to be alive.)
He reaches up to press his cheek against the proud curl of her horn. “Will you make me a weapon?” So often he had seen her handiwork (a blue scarf, a golden scar, glass walls that held up the lake. In the streets, a winding trail of rubies, silk that shimmered like moonlight, walls of flowers weeping blood) but he had never considered asking her for something. He had never wanted anything, for he preferred to keep all trace of her in his heart. He thought it might be safer there.
Before, hoof and tooth had been the only weapons he needed.
Before, there was no such thing as magic, or love, or even unicorns. Before, he was young and had nothing to lose. Everything was different now. “Something to break chains,” he lowers his muzzle to her neck, where he breathes the words into her skin, “and always show me the way back to you.”
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
E I K
but I have promises to keep
Time makes fools of us all
