leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
There, the question again. What are you? But Isakov does not feel whatever glimmer of irritation he’d felt the first time Tarian had asked it. Instead, he feels on the precipice of something. He feels like there is something he must learn about himself and this will be where he learns it. He blinks up at the older stallion but does not respond. He feels no overwhelming urge to admit there is some part of himself with which he is not well-acquainted. Even if he would be forgiven for it on the basis of his youth.
He draws in a long breath and listens and cannot help but be troubled by what the winged stallion tells him. He had taken a shape not his own. The boy does not know what this means and it strikes a deep chord of fear in him to think that there is some magic that belongs to him that he does not know how to control. That he does not even know how to identify.
He has never been anyone else, he wants to argue, he has always been Isakov. But he thinks, too, of the shimmer. The thing he has always thought to be the soul. The thing he has always been able to see in others, even if he has never known what to do with it.
He takes another troubled breath and looks from Tarian’s face to his chest, the place where the shimmer lives. Tucked away in the meat of the heart. Invisible to almost everyone. He concentrates hard, trying to call upon it on purpose for the first time. He sees it there in the older stallion and the magic responds to it without Isakov having to ask it to.
He had surrounded Sleaze with the illusion of quiet that day in the river. And now. Now he projects, again, the illusion of the winged stallion’s star. Nothing about the boy changes but the air shifts around them. It is merely an illusion. She is not here and he has not changed but there she is, blinking back at Tarian. And the boy can see her in the older stallion’s chest, his star, the beautiful thing that Tarian sees standing before him.
@[Tarian]