Whisper, whisper, whisper.

Her nights have never been silent. Whoever said the stars glisten without a sound in their obsidian sky has never lived in Elliana’s skin, has never experienced what she has experienced. Because they do not only whisper, they cry and shout and they laugh and shriek. She doesn't know what silent woods are when someone says they are alone, she knows only the way the trees call as the spirits come from them. 

There is a wildness in her that drives her from her small cottage and her mother’s golden side.

It is trapped in her throat, wings that flutter and thrash in her veins, her breath caught and released from her lungs as she raises her young face forward. She is young, too young, to be leaving the safe confines of her home, where mother’s fierce eye keeps watch and her steady  presence can be seen from all angles. But she does not care, cannot stay another day without stretching those legs that so itch to wander, and a hand that cries to paint .

She leaves early, early enough that she is not caught, although she knows that she will have to apologize later. Her mother will know instant that she is gone, she has taken her paint and her brushes. The air grows less salty and more fragrant as she moves away and away from the ocean. She breathes it in, her heart pounding with love of the familiar sight, but it is not enough to keep her; in truth, it would never be enough to hold her. She was made for more things that sea and sand. 

She does not stop until she passes through the trees, the trees jutting upward and outward, the pine of it fascinating. Grinning, she presses her face into its branches, ignoring the thin scratches it imparted on her face. Breathing deep, she felt her pulse race in her veins. Today, she would have adventure.

She just knew it.

It  feels like adventure when those spidery legs step out into the long grass of the field. Elliana doesn't look out of place here. She has the lovely lines in her face from her mother, those same eyes as her, large and expressive. She looks like her mother’s daughter. 

But the moment that paint brush reaches out and touches against a large stone, she looks so entirely like her father that is could break his heart if he knew she even existed. If she knew he was her real father and not the man she calls papa underneath evening stars. 

But, like many things, there is very little Elliana knows. 

And so she paints.

dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side

These are the things he knows: 

The smell of salt and leather on his mother’s skin. The desert sage of his father. The way, to the touch, he always feels like the soil in the sun. 

The scholars of his studies. Their lulling voices as they educate him on music, weaponry, history—

Novus.

Vespera. 

Solis.

The corner of Terrastella’s citadel his window overlooks; the ivy that might creep upon the wall during the summer (but he does not yet know, not that) hanging dead on the stone.

The Halcyon when they practice upon Praistigia cliffs, diving, sparring, flying. Their hard angles. Their noble lines. 

The picture books he reads before bed, full of knights and victors, tyrants and villains, monsters and men.

Aeneas knows, too, the way winter seeps into his bones. The way he closes his eyes at night and sees a thousand, trillion stars and dreams of a white stallion on a black beach.

He does not know Susurro fields. Upon pleading and persuading, his mother agrees to let him leave the citadel to play in the field. He might have asked Hilde to come, but could not find her; and so he leaves at daybreak through the city, running along the cobblestones with a child’s unabashed rush, until he is out of Terrastella’s gates and into the field like a sea. 

Aeneas isn’t looking for anything when he finds her.

(But, maybe he will learn one day, that is how all things are found).

“Hey—“ Aeneas calls. He is barely tall enough to see over the golden stalks of grass. Through them, he sees only how golden she is, how long-legged. He feels like he should know her. “What… what are you doing?” Aeneas finishes lamely, bewildered at the brush, at the paints, at the stone. 

Maybe if she lived like him, without the voices in her ear, without the chilling feeling she always gets when she sees the flowers wilt. Maybe if she lived like him she would paint pictures of knights and princesses, even dragons and other villains. But she paints silhouettes that have no faces. She paints voices, paints the tears that fall from their eyes, lonely heart, and battered bodies.

Maybe if she lived like him she would paint things that all little girls should paint.
And maybe not paint so many things that little girls should not.

Her serious lips tilting into the shadow of a smile. As she concentrates. The brush strokes are not as smooth as they usually are on a canvas. But she this is not a painting she would be taking home. It is a painting of a lady—a lady with a bent neck.

Her mother would never approve.
But Elliana thinks—no it is just hopes, empty hopes, but hopes all the same, that when she puts color to her, paints her, gives her a shape in the day, then maybe by night she would be too enraptured in seeing herself to ever come and find her.

She doesn't hear him. Or chooses not to listen, it is one or the other. She is mixing colors, grey and blues and blacks. She thinks the lady may have more color, but she has only ever seen her at night, only the moon able to illuminate her, though she still says framed by shadows. Her brush does not lift from the stone when he comes to her.  

“Painting,” she says. She wants him to both stay and to leave. She cant decide. Ultimately though, she is her mother’s daughter and so she puts down her brush and looks at the boy with a face she doesn't recognize if only because it is not one of the faces that haunt her. “I am Elliana, Elli if you don't mind,” she says with a smile, so unaware it is nearly the same words her godmother said time and time again.

As much as she is her mother’s daughter.
She is not.

She lacks that warmth her mother always so readily provides, that confidence in conversations she has. Her mother a social butterfly, a honey bee greeting all who come by, so bewildered by her wallflower daughter. Her mother says she needs friends. Elliana says the only friends she needs are a paintbrush and a canvas. So she says something she doesn't think a friend would say. “I don't know if I would like having wings very much.” She says, staring at him with blue eyes, one looks like winter—and one like summer.

dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side

He does not mean to. But when she says painting as if she does not quite want him here, the grass at his feet wilts and blackens.

“Aeneas,” he answers, with a smile that is not quite shy but is not bold, either. I don’t know if I would like having wings very much. 

Now, he frowns. He steps back; the grass wilts more readily. The aura of his body turns reddish, bright like light through a ruby. “Oh,” Aeneas answers. “Well, I like them. But I can’t use them yet.” 

Aeneas takes a few steadying breaths; he focuses, as the priests tell him to, on the physical aspects of his body. On the rhythmic draw of his breath. The cool air in his lungs. The way the sun does not quite warm him, and when the breeze blows, he feels cold.

“Why wouldn’t you like wings, Elli?” 

Aeneas doesn’t know what to think of the painting. 

But the glow from his tattoos turns brighter, less tinted. 

She sees him change, but Elliana has never been so concerned with those who are living.

But those who are dying.

She feels the flowers.

Or rather, feels their deaths.

She wants to scream at him to stop, to get away from her. But there is something in the back of her mind that tells her he cannot control this any better than she can stop the voices that lurch and creak in the dark of the night.

And this, only this is what steadies her, and allows her heart to open, fully turning her attention to him. He shares his name and she holds

“Why cant you use them?” She asks, not thinking maybe she should not ask these things, maybe it was something he did not want to answer, but her mom answers all her question, as does her dad. Why wouldn’t he? it like a marble on hew tongue. Rolls it against her teeth. Tests its weight and its shape before she repeats it back inside her head. She presses it against the roof of her mouth and prays that her tongue will remember the shape of it, the specific way it felt.

And then he says it.

Elli.

It sounds different coming out of his mouth.
Because she has only heard it from her mother, her father, her aunt, family. It sounds like a song from unfamiliar lips and she thinks she likes her name a lot more when it comes from lips of strangers. It makes that heart swell to fill up all that space at the base of her throat and she swallows and grins and tries not to let it choke her. She wonders how it feels in his mouth, if the it rolls from top to bottom. If it fits neatly on his tongue or if it takes some effort to hold its shape.

And she wonders why she is wondering these things, when she has never wondered them before. Maybe it is the chill in her bones from the way the plants wilt around him, but her heart starts beating harder, so hard it makes her head swim, but she feels no trepidation. “I don't like falling.”

dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side

The question seems crass… and obvious. Aeneas furrows his brows—but this his upbringing gets the better of him. He thinks of all the patience his father has given him, and his mother to. “They aren’t grown enough yet.” Not I’m not grown enough yet. Perhaps the most boyish pleasure he allows himself is fantasies of flight, of Halycon, of—

Well, he thinks again of the knights in his picture books. “Why—why is your painting so sad?” Aeneas asks, as way of asking, why do YOU seem so sad? 

He starts to think she’s pretty; pretty in the way princesses are pretty. Then Aeneas remembers his sister is a princess. Ew. Hilde is Hilde. His sister, a princess. 

But what is this girl? A commoner? Aeneas knows it doesn’t matter. 

At the same time, it kind of does. 

I don’t like falling, she says. 

“Oh.” Aeneas doesn’t know what to think of that. And there is a moment of indecision, before he decides to share a small piece of himself, a piece he keeps private. “Well—I think that’s what makes it worth it, you know?” He remembers watching the Halycon during a sparring match plummet from the skies before regaining balance. “You can see a lot up there.” As Aeneas says it, he glances up toward the sky, toward the sun.

The mere thought fills him with hope, and love, and admiration. 

The grass he had drawn energy from not only regains its previous colour, undoing the damage, but turns the deep green of summer.

He glances back down, holding her eyes. They remind him of different shades of sky. They make him self-conscious, but he doesn’t know why. “Are you from here?” he asks. 

She wonders what lives below the surface of him. Does he have the same insecurities she does? Does he wake up in the middle of the night thinking he might have heard the shadows crying? Does he find himself alone in the middle of a conversation? Does he think he sees something in the corner of his eye and scream because it looks so very real? Or is he something else entirely?

She realizes she has no real way of knowing, but, all the same, it makes her feel better to think they are the same.

So she does.

Elli wonders if he has ever tried watering them to make them grow, like her mother does her flowers. Still, she keeps such childish notions to herself, tucking them away where they cannot embarrass her.

She shakes her head in response to his question and then laughs, one petal of bellsong laughter, quiet. “It’s not sad.” she defends it. Her mom tells her that she prefers her daughter painting flowers, not ghosts inside her head. “But you can think it is sad if you want.”

Art, after all, is a prisoner to subjection, jailed inside its canvas. A slave to praise and critique.

Her lips pull into a more genuine smile that she lets grow when she tilts her head back to join him looking up at the sky he will one day take to. She wonders, a girlish wonder, if one day he could take her flying. Elliana wonders if she could fly, if she would still hear the voices from the all way up there. She forms the thought and swallows it, it sits light and airy in her stomach.

Wonders if it might be enough to make her fly here and now.

She cannot stay lost in her thoughts for too long, not with the way he is looking at her, like he is trying to hold her like a kite tether. Her eyes are a little wide, framed by dark lashes when she stares back at him in a way that is reserved for doe eyed children.

The grass comes back. But while she felt cold when it died, she felt nothing when it returned. She wonders if death is more tangible a thing than life. Little girls shouldn't be thinking such things.

“For now,” she confesses, a secret just between the two of them. And then the child ducks her head and whispers across the distance that separates them.

“But not forever.” She adds, just as quiet.

dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side

@Elliana | speaks

And maybe if he knew her thoughts...

And maybe if he still wouldn't answer them...

Maybe she would be grateful not to know the truth.

She thinks the truth always seems to heavy, everyone holding onto it like it were salvation, redemption, or somewhere in between.

They pair of them have a common tie to Dusk. They are children of Dusk. And then this is where it ends, like perpendicular lines, he crosses into Day while she crosses into Night.

She likes it when he smiles.
Because it looks like a secret. Something just between them. And she thinks maybe she should start smiling like a secret, too. Because she smiles loud, for everyone to see, and wouldn’t it be better if he felt like her smiles were just for him, too? Her mother says greet everyone with a smile, just like she does. Elliana wonders what could happen if she stopped.

She tries it, mirroring that smile of his the best she can. Fails miserably at it, because it doesn’t fit her face the same way it fits his. Because she is not as thoughtful and, she suspects, not as kind. Or maybe because he will one day fly and she will not. So the most she can hope for is that he might like that she gives him smiles that don't quite fit her, that she wears it like blue and grey paint strung across her lips.

“Death isn't sad,” she says, shaking her head, and she ponders. “Usually she is so scary, but not when I paint her, not when i make her. Now she isn't scary. Would you want something scary or something sad, if you had to choose?” She is rambling, a horribly unattractive quality, but she is too young to know that yet.

She watches him on the rock, stretching out his wings, Elli thinks maybe he could climb the mountains Denocte just as easily. She rolls her shoulder in response to his question. Elliana is far too young to understand the complexities of leaving home and what it entails, what it means. She can picture it only as well as she could picture a dream. “Some where with lots of wildflowers—and quiet.” Yes, quiet, where even the sound of petals on a breeze is deafening.

dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side

He is not used to thinking about others, outside of himself. He is accustomed to mother, and father, and Hilde—and that is all. His tutors seem like components of the citadel’s architecture; the citizens filled with a strange distance. Even the Halcyon he watches seem as if they belong to another world, outside his own.

It strikes him when she smiles that his actions might affect her the same ways hers had him. That there is something shared in that moment, and it belongs to them both but to no one else.

Not even Hilde knows her, not yet—although Aeneas is sure she will, because he cannot keep things from her. For this moment, though, this very small moment… he doesn’t have to share it with anyone. 

Aeneas nearly asks, what do you know about death? He understands it only as a word. To her question he only says, “ I don’t know.” What he does know is both those feelings—sadness and fear—make the grass wilt beneath his hooves, or the moths die in the lamplight, when he draws from them their life-energy to fill his own.

But he doesn’t want to think about that, right now. He looks back at her; her light eyes; her blonde hair. She looks a little like his dad, he thinks. “Can I go with you, when you go? That sounds nice. Much better than being a Prince.” Aeneas blurts it without thinking—but is embarrassed, immediately, by the confession.