hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She is so little like her family, different than her mother and her sisters before her, and it is a blessing. She does not taste the darkness in his mind and the trace the shadows stretched across bottomless eyes and feel a rush of adrenaline coaxing her forward. She does not see the cracks in his skin, bright lines of molten devastation bleeding ash and smoke and soot into the air and think, I need to understand, I need to touch and see if it burns, if it’s the best pain I’ll ever know.
Instead she watches him come closer and there are knots in her belly, tying and untying, thrashing like worms halved by a blade. There is fear, and it is cold and heavy and racing like ice over her lungs, but the dread is worse, like a shadow in her chest telling her not to breathe. Her face darkens, bright lines of brown and white thrown together and held by a beautifully flawed asymmetry. There is an instinct that urges her to speak, a reflex of social propriety, but the voice in her head is telling her that the rules are different here.
She holds her tongue.
She holds her heart in a fist clenched so impossibly tight.
The closer he comes the further she drifts, and when he stops, so does she. But they are still so close, and the acrid smoke drifts to her, adheres to her skin and follows each curve and dip and hollowed out plain of a small body fighting uselessly for a sense of composure. The smoke fills her nose, it tickles like feathers in her lungs and she can feel her breaths coming shorter, more ragged, a cough gathering like a cloud in her chest but she denies it because she must, because when she looks into his eyes she finds she doesn’t want to give him anything.
“I don’t like you.” She tells him finally, a little breathlessly from the shuddering of her quailing lungs, and her voice is small but it does not shake, her eyes wide but they do not waver.
Isle
