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

She had not expected sleep to find her; she had no reason to think that it would. Sleep had become an elusive and wild thing, teasing the edges of her vision, dancing upon the fault lines in her heart, but never reaching forth and claiming her. She spent her nights lost in the graceful sweep of the ocean, losing her thought, but never truly finding peace. When exhaustion finally claimed her, it was fitful and thin, and when she woke, she felt as tired as if she had never rested at all—her glacial eyes full of grit and fatigue.

So the fact that it had come to her in the night, as simple as a breath, the waves of it lapping over the edges and pulling her down into its murky depths, was a surprise. Still, she had not fought it, had simply sighed, exhaling all of her sorrow and let her body go lax, her mind had given itself over to the darkness that had crept towards hers.

It is early, so early that stars still cling to the indigo sky, the sun slowly highlighting the cliffside 

She dreams now of things that are in the past. 
She dreams of her glass heart, of it breaking in a dozen different ways (smashed, shattered, chipped). She dreams of their death, of a snarl, of a woman crying when she didn't think her daughter could hear her. 

She has always been a daydreamer. She had spent hours on the subject matter when she had been small, her mind drifting upward and outward in thought, chasing after spiderweb dreams, hours lingering over the impossibility of them, the fragility that left them caught on fingers and then gone without a trace. It was something she held close to her chest; a silly pastime for an otherwise practical, grounded girl.

Icy blue eyes blink away the last of her dreamland. 

But there is still a part of her that holds onto the dream, when her heart had still been glass, but pristine as she stood arm and arm with her parents before life took everything away from her. “Vengeance and justice make eager bedfellows,” her blue-eyed mother had told her once after one of the colts in Windskeep had kicked sand in her face and brought big tears to those then amber eyes. And Elena, she knows how right these words are, no matter how heart breaking it is. Elena would take what was given and turn her cheek for another. 

She pushes up from her bed of sand, tucked beside some trees just off the coast, a place that has become a sanctuary to the blonde girl. She begins to walk into the city, it was quiet still, as the sun cannot quite decide if it should rise or slumber for a few more moments. Some stars still stand stubborn against their navy backdrop, resilient they may be, but in the end, it is useless of them to be so. 

The city hardly stirs, all that remains is the distant soft sound of a girl walking. 
Walking…

Walking…

Walking where, Elena? She shrugs her shoulders because she doesn't know, because her head has found its way into the clouds once more as she skirts the edge of the capital, interested in things that feel so long ago, rather than those that are moving towards her.



* 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.