elif
As she drinks she does so cautiously, aware of every movement from her peripheral vision, always watching for a predator. The desert is hungrier than Solis himself, even this green-and-blue part of it. But when a flash of motion catches her eye, draws her head up, it is no crocodile she sees.
For a moment she isn’t sure what she’s watching, for where are his wings? And then she catches a sweep of gold, a limn of light in the shape of flight-feathers, and like an optical illusion once she’s found them they don’t vanish again. Elif has never seen anything like those wings, strands of the sun shaped for flight.
He plunges like he’s trying to catch his shadow, plummets the way she had - and Elif watches with her heart half in her throat, cheering him on, and when he meets the ground she winces bodily as he goes to his knees. Almost she crosses to him - but the sunlight illuminates his face, each fierce line of private joy, and Elif knows that look.
She does, then, what she thinks her brother would have done, had that spectacular crash-landing been her - and glances away when he turns her direction, bending her head back to drink.
Elif only mocks those she knows deserve it.
Still she is secretly pleased when his shadow slants alongside hers, and this time does not look away when his gaze finds her. Instead she lifts her head, muzzle still dripping with water that shines like diamonds when caught by the light. She is as struck by the cold blue of his eyes as she had been by the first sight of his wings; it is a color she hasn’t seen much in Solterra, rare as ice.
“I thought you were Icarus at first,” she says then, her voice still as girlish as her frame is narrow. “That you flew too high and the sun melted your wings to nothing.” It’s with wonder that she looks to those wings, then, her nose reaching out, her curiosity as keen as the rest of her.
Of course she withdraws, and does not touch; she is a Day girl, and respect of personal space has been bred into her bones.
Instead she tilts her head at him, her alaja bright as blood around her throat, and smiles. “It’s the heat you have to account for, for the landing. It sits above the sand like a blanket and you have to adjust for it.”
