elif
There was an accident. Oh, it tells her all she needs to know (though her mind, ever insatiable with that cat’s curiosity, turns over a thousand questions in the span of a heartbeat). An accident - she knows those; there are so many of them possible in the desert! And she knows what goes unspoken, that accidents tended to end terribly, that sometimes they were not accidents at all.
Despite the heat of the day, she shivers. Despite her own sharp interest, she looks away even before he does, averting her gaze at the first tensing of his jaw. She thinks of her brother, and how he’d loved to fly (faster even than she, but then she was always racing to catch up no matter what he was doing). She does not think of anything happing to her own wings, because her youthful, proud mind cannot even fathom the thought.
So she only looks away, across the water where the trees are mirrored and the dunes behind them, where there are dozens of different tracks and she can guess at the locations of a dozen turtle-nests in the sand. Elif does not come here often enough; it feels strange, even, to stand in the green shade of a tree. It is somehow cooler than the shade from buildings, but maybe that is only the memory of the brackish water in her throat.
For once she says nothing, not even to admire his wings again. But at his advice her eyes flick back toward the shocking blue of his, and she nods, quite solemn. Elif isn’t normally the sort to take to heart (or even listen) to advice from her peers, but she thinks again of her brother, and lets the words sink down like thrown stones into the deep well of her heart, though she does not yet understand the full meaning.
She has yet avoided all her accidents.
Elif is glad, too, when the conversation moves onto Solterra, both because she is a creature so proud of the home that bore her and because she daren’t ask any of the questions that flooded up against the white dam of her teeth at all he left unsaid. Despite his ungainly landing, or that he has never been before to the desert, she respects him without question (and those golden djinn-wings still have her in more than a little awe).
“Welcome, then,” she says, and smiles broadly, pleased to be the first he has met. “I am Elif.” She follows his gaze across the water, missing the criticism there because it is so foreign to her. She would sooner think ill of her own mother (and sometimes does) than the desert. Even his word, different, does not make her bristle like a tomcat. “It does,” she says, and feels a hand-span taller at his praise. But then she sighs a little dreamily - like the young girl she so often tries not to be - and extends a wing-tip to test the breeze. “I sometimes wonder which came first, the hard people or the hard land. I know Solis formed Solterra as his own court, but…” and here her voice drops, almost shy, like a secret she is ashamed of (yet there is wonder, too, in the rain-washed green of her eyes). “I have found the shapes of fish in the canyons, pressed into the rocks.” She gives a little snort, as if disbelieving of her own tale, and tries to tell herself it is not blasphemy.
After all, here stood a man with wings spun of golden light; perhaps there were no limit to wonders.
@Aion
