Whenever Isra told the story of the Leafy Lady, she made it a wondrous tale of adventure.
She’d tell it with grand gestures, maybe climbed on the table at some point, and then she’d act half the scenes out, sometimes with Ruya as a partner. She would look into her audience’s eyes and revel in the way they would lean forward, only to jerk back whenever she sprung her next surprise at them, the next struggle, the next twist, the next creature lunging from the dark when her listeners least expected it. She would make it outlandish, push the boundaries of everyone’s imagination, and when she reached a point where she’d thought things couldn’t be taken any further, Ruya would appear next to her, and the words he would use to carry on the tale would make even her head spin.
But really, half the time they barely had to exaggerate. They had every right to make the tales sound like this, one might call it an obligation even - it would be criminal to waste all the material they had.
There was the world of floating islands, with its hybrid people and the blind feathered snakes whose nests they had slept in, safe between the eggs under the creatures’ warm bellies, and where Isra had snatched the secret to summoning death for the undying from the hands of a woman who didn’t know she had long stopped being one of the living herself.
There was the world that knew no land, where the Empress of the Sun and the Emperor of the Moon each reigned on giant creatures circling the planet on the sea’s surface, one always on it’s light and one always on its dark side, and the Emperor’s sorrow that had almost started a war, had Isra not come to find the one man who could mend his broken soul.
There was the world where time stood still, and Isra had had to stop an agent not unlike herself from setting it running again, for between the immobile animals, the unmoving clouds and the frozen leaves carried by winds that hadn’t blown in centuries, there had been new life forming, silvery and see-through little things, and they had started to re-invent the entire idea of what time even was in the process.
Isra told the story of the Leafy Lady, who wasn’t quite ship and wasn’t quite creature, and she told the stories of the places she had taken them to in order to change the course of fate.
The stories that remained untold were those between the lines.
Sometimes, those were Ruya’s stories.
Ruya had, of course, been there with her on all her adventures. He was her shadow, her reflection, her guardian, and in times of despair, he was the one whose cunning mind and silver tongue had saved her too many times to not be mentioned when Isra’s tales were spun in front of an audience.
But the stories that were truly his were those that happened at the times they hadn’t exchanged quips or instructions or heated shouts about how to get out of whatever danger they had gotten into.
They didn’t talk about the morning in the nest beneath the snakes, when Ruya had spent hours lying still so Isra wouldn’t wake after she’d spent all night tossing and turning, without ever uttering a word of complaint.
They didn’t talk about how they had spent hours simply staring at the sea and the horizon after weeks of dwelling inside the Lady, on a balcony away from the Sun Empress’ great hall, and how Ruya had sweet-talked the nobles endlessly until they could slip away.
They also didn’t talk about No-Trousers-Fridays, and about how a very bored Ruya had invented those just on the day they ended up meeting another soul that wasn’t trapped in frozen still time.
Isra could grow tall and strong enough to reach out and pull a whole world back from the brink of collapse, which, when spoken about, made for great entertainment - but Ruya was the one who made her small again, so she didn’t rip at the seams and drift apart.
It was a harder story to tell right.
And then, there was Prabodh.
And him, they left out altogether.
They never once let people know how No-Trousers-Fridays had flustered Prabodh, the onyx golem with the fiery eyes who had become one with the Leafy Lady in all his years as her pilot, and how Ruya had argued a full hour with him until Prabodh had given up and told them they could do whatever they wanted, just so long as they didn’t make him join in.
They never mentioned how neither Ruya nor Isra were able to pronounce Prabodh’s name at first, and how they had only learned to do it after the golem had repeatedly rejected any nicknames they had come up with, especially after he had almost lost it at “P-Boo”.
They skipped Prabodh’s efforts to always, always know where they were, and how, when he picked them up after their tasks were done, there would be steaming food, and hot water to wash, and clean pillows waiting in their cabin.
They never brought up how Prabodh had outwitted the Lady to find out where they had come from, where she had found them, and how he had resisted her displeasure when he had told Isra and Ruya that, among the vast number of stars and worlds, there was one that they once called home.
In fact, whenever anyone asked how they had managed to return, how they had found their way back, they fell silent and, if anything, simply gave wistful and mysterious smiles.
And they kept their mouths shut about the pulsing black stone around Isra’s neck.
They didn’t talk about Prabodh.
But when they told their stories, grand and colourful as they were, they stole glances at each other that no one could quite decipher.
And when they finished their stories for the night, and the crowd scattered, they would each raise a glass at the night sky, and the stone on Isra’s neck would grow a little warmer than it did at any other time of day.
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