[P] let rid my bones from you

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

Home exists for Elena as a feeling more than an actual place. It is the way Marcelo frets over any bump or scrape in the tall grass of Murmuring Rivers, or the feeling of her cousin tucked beside her underneath a Taiga tree. Or it the feeling of mist capturing her pale tendrils as Paraiso’s waterfall eternally plummets towards earth. She has grown less attached to places and more in love with the feelings that she finds.

Elena likes to think that she has learned to live with grief, that she is an expert at how it is supposed to be, what you are supposed to do. But, in truth, Elena has merely learned how to move forwards, to fight the battles that would come to her. Some are bloody and dark, that leave her aching and trembling, while others are calm and Elena manages to escape with her head high and her chest proud, heart unscathed. There are times when she can cast aside her mistakes, others where she lets them live alongside her. And still there others that condemn her and Elena takes her punishment with grace before turning her cheek. It has worn on her, all this time, Elena feels older than what she is, but there is a certain lightness that she finds as the flowers bloom through the snow. 

The feelings of spring causes her heart to flutter with the grace and lightness of hummingbird wings. She is golden in this new sun, like Midas’s breath rolling over her skin. She is smiling, and his time, it is not because of spring.

She shared a dream with Lilli last night. 

“It was a place where it was always sunset and the sky is always painted in blues and pinks and purples. You could wait all day for the colors to fade but they never do. If anything, they become brighter.”

That is what she had told her.
And so that is what Elena had dreamed. 

A world of sunsets, with her family beside her, and Lilli comes up behind her. “See cousin? I told you this place was magical.” And Elena smiles, because she is right, this place was magic, and this was how Elena knew it was a dream, and that eventually, it would end, but for the moment, she had been able to enjoy it. It was a gift from Lilli, and Elena was grateful. 

She travels to Dawn, a place not unfamiliar to her, she had gone once before, met Icarus, seen their capital, and their books. But, this time, Elena seeks a beautiful flower that is often seen rising through the snow: tulips. She needs them not for healing or for medicine, but for the simple act of seeing and admiring their beauty, and she had heard they grow within the forest of Delumine. So it is in the forest of Delumine that Elena finds herself today. 

The snow has melted, but the ground feels slick and wet, the sun is warm, but without the ferocity of a summer blaze. She feels bright and golden as the sunlight dapples her hide trying to peek through the trees. There is a noisy silence in the forest, as the sound of light breezes tickles the leaves on the trees and finds it space through arching gaps of greens and browns. But it is in the quiet that Elena hears a creaking, as if the trees were moving in a heavy breeze, or as if something were moving them. Tunnel, she thinks because she had met him in a forest and had promised to find her. Frostbane, she thinks because she feels a chill up her spine. Lilli, she thinks because she so desperately wants it to be her.

You are alone, she tells herself.
Though this could not be further from the truth.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.

@Cernunnos