Private sketch the trees and daffodils

kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul

n the darkness, all stood still for a sweet, fleeting moment before chaos erupted. Faces flash before her, those voices taken form. (Whatever it is – sometimes it’s a clown with a Glasgow smile, sometimes it’s a tiger with no face. Sometimes it’s the smell of gasoline and a match catching fire.) She has seen a girl of skin and bone and dying eyes, with ribs like welts across her sides. “Careful, I might steal that smile from your lips.” A man told her with a blue scarf wrapped around him. It is too much, too much.

So she closes her eyes and thinks ‘go away, go away,’ but they never do. So she goes instead. ‘Bring me back, bring me back.’ ‘No, no.’ And ‘I cant, I cant.’ Elliana rises from her bed (for when the ghosts come out to play she feels so much less like Elli and like Elliana because that name is heavy, that name is weighted and all she feels is all this weight of spirits hanging on her back.)

She sidesteps inside her mother’s cabin, dancing over dead feet that grow around her like tree roots. She ducks beneath cold, dead lips that long to press into her, to feel any warmth that can lay against. She twirls with invisible dance partners as tears well up in their eyes and slide down sad, broken, dead faces. And then she is free, breaking through that door and running, running, running. She is not so unlike her mother. She closes her eyes again and thinks ‘go away, go away.’ But they never do. She thinks ‘go away, go away,’ as she runs, runs, runs.

Go away, go away. And then they do, they are gone, she cannot feel them, cannot hear them, she cannot see them. Blue (too blue) eyes see only empty air below her, and hear the whistle of wind as it rushes past her ears. The world pauses and she wonders, do they know? Those spirits? Do they know she is so close that bridge that they dare not follow her?

She thinks she should scream.
And maybe she does inside her head.
But on the outside, that scream turns into something like a smile as she hits the water below.

@~~Aeneas~~ elliana speaks

elliana
—
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RE: sketch the trees and daffodils - Aeneas - 01-08-2021

rinces are born to look out citadel windows with wide-eyes at late hours, dreaming of all they might accomplish. Fantasizing of becoming Halcyon on the cliffsides and what it would be like to walk through the streets not at Orestes’ heir or Marisol’s son, but as a boy. Princes are born for dreaming, and living jewel-bright and promising lives.

And so Aeneas only lives up to his heritage the night he stares from his windowsill toward a sleeping Terrastella and a lulling sea. From this vantage, he can see the austere face of the cliffs and a very slight clip of ocean. From his vantage, the ocean manifests only as a vast and terrifying darkness. The moon is not full and so the land beneath him stretches stark and somewhat forlorn. When the stars emerge, slowly at first and then with a vibrancy that seems abrupt, Aeneas feels awestruck. His magic hums within him; the young prince leans his face against the citadel glass, and—

He cannot stay confined. It is with practice care that he opens the window and steps from it as if weightless. It is with practice care that Aeneas abandons the citadel and flies further, further, until he is soaring above the cliffs, a mere outline against the sky.

Distant, but not too distant, he sees a silhouette moving through the tall grass near the cliff’s edge. He watches them curiously, in a way that he often does. (Aeneas frequently journeys at night and watches, curiously and through distance, the goings on of his Court and his home). This, however, is different. She does not practice care as she reaches the cliff’s edge, and Aeneas opens his mouth to shout but he is already too late.

The plummets from the edge.

No!

He thinks if he were faster, older, he would have already been there to save her; but he is not faster, he is not older. Even so, he flies as quickly as he is able. Out, and out, and out and then with a swift descent. He tucks his wings and dives, searching with bright, acute eyes for movement, for the head above the water—

He sees her resurface—miraculously, through the jagged rocks—just as he throws out his wings and glides above the turbulent waves.

Aeneas does not expect to recognize her, as the water sweeps her under again. “Elli!” He screams, where she had been silent.

The prince rushes closer, but he is no longer practiced, her is no longer curiously distanced. This is real, and this is painful, and he is full of panic. He desperately searches the water, flying just a wingbeat above it. There! She resurfaces—

“Elli!” Aeneas screams again. He flies closer, but fears if they are both in the water he might not have the strength to save her. “Elli! Grab my leg, let me—let me help you to shore!” But the waves are battering; they unpredictably rise and fall, splashing brine against him.

In that moment, a wave rushes forward and takes him under as well.

the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive

« r » | @Danaë

RE: sketch the trees and daffodils - Elliana - 01-17-2021

kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul

y god has answered me, that is what her father told her that her name means. Ask Elliana and her gods have yet to answer her.

Ask for your family, your ancestors will guide you, her mother told her.

And so she asks.

And they answer.

“Don’t worry, I’ll save you if you forget how to swim,” comes the voice of the grandfather she has been so desperate to meet since she first started seeing spirits. "Aren't you just a knight in shining armor? You don't have to worry about little ol' me, though. I think I can fare just fine without those muscles of yours.” Comes her grandmother. And she sees them, they stand close together and look down at her. She has her grandfather’s chin, her grandmother’s eyes. “I’ve always wanted to breathe underwater…what about you, Elli?” The black stallion asks his granddaughter. And then the pale woman looks first to him and down at the girl. "That would certainly be something, wouldn't it? Imagine what sort of world there could be down there.” They look down at her below the surface. She thinks, she could touch them.

Elli!

Another voice calls, but she cannot recognize it in this moment, there is only a granddaughter and her grandparents. They are so separated. A wide gulf of galaxies and comets; a mesosphere, stratosphere and troposphere, incompatible atmospheres and tugging gravities.

“Grab on, Elli,” her pale grandmother says and Elliana reaches out, surprises herself when she feels something solid beneath her touch. Was she truly a ghost? She had to be. She has heard the stories, of her grandmother growing ill and weary before resting her eyes to slip into the world beyond this one. “Breathe, Elli,” her grandfather tells her, pressing his dark head to her own. She feels nothing, only he rush of air into her lungs as she inhales above the waves.

Suddenly the world is clear, and she can see the ocean waves rocking around her, as she bobs and dips on its surface. And then she sees him. “Aeneas!” she cries out as he falls beneath the surface of the waves.

She could live a hundred nights and not feel the way she did now.

To be so close to death, so close to those spirits, she wonders if this is what it means to be truly alive. Only living when you walk to the edge of that bridge. (Is this how her mother felt when she turned to face a city of bones and death?) She dips below the wave once more, those dusty blue eyes desperate to keep track of him, of Aeneas. And that is when, behind him, erupts a stallion of white. He is beautiful and everything, for a moment stands still. She blinks. He is gone. It is Aeneas in his wake.

Later, a few nights from now, when she paints the stallion, the water, she will realize that he was not behind Aeneas, nor in front of, but he was where Aeneas stood, as if—

“Aeneas!” Comes her voice once more as she struggles to swim to him, closing her body around him, trying to hold onto him. “Swim,” she whispers into his ear in gasps of air, followed by the gargle of water trying to fight its way into her throat. Her tongue tastes rough with salt water, her body feels light with buoyancy, and her eyes sting with fear and salty tears. She presses her forehead to his own. “Swim for me, please.”

@~~Aeneas~~ elliana speaks

elliana
—
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