Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything--
I
have always tried to get lost. When I began to sail on the St. Foxglove as a deck boy, wherever we stopped I would wander. From the ship, to the shore, to the inland beyond. They warned me against it. They said to walk only with soldiers. There were boys like me who ran errands aboard the ship, cleaned quarters, and were assigned to a sailor that went missing in the woods of the strange islands we visited.
Boys who wandered off as silhouettes against the trees, brushing back untouched foliage, to never return. The sailors and soldiers made stories, of course, of demons and magic that wooed the boys away. Astrid once wrote me of a dream she had on an island with red sands every night they were docked there. She wrote me the dream was the same song, and the song was sung by a woman as red as the sands. She could never remember the words; but when she awoke she hummed the tune, wordlessly, eerily, months after they left.
These stories never inspired fear in me. I know they should have. I know I should have been more careful. I should have been more attentive to my solitude; more determined to go only with a friend. I could not, however. Try as I may, the more inhospitable the island the more called I was to venture forth alone. I love the silences. I think it stems from never having had silence as a boy, except at night; and even then my homeland had been so small I could hear the neighbor snore. And so, when I had the freedom I took, and took, and took.
This is no different.
The only difference is the land seems so much larger. It is, I imagine, because this is no island. This is no easily conquerable bit of territory. It is a country; a continent. I have been here only long enough to join a Court; to understand the territories. I have not been here long enough to explore, to understand.
I begin with the Viride.
(And, I wonder, if I will not spend the rest of my time here in the woods outside of Delumine).
The trees before me are larger than any I have ever seen. They completely obscure the sky; a multitude of boughs and needles. Coniferous, I heard a sailor once describe trees of smaller stature on an island where the wolves howled each and every night. Coniferous. As I walk among them, pinecones break underfoot. There is fog in the air; surreal. The light strains weakly through it and dissipates evenly throughout the too-tall trees. I cannot see far down the path, but do not mind. There is an aura of mystery I enjoy. The woods, however, seem strangely silent. There are no birds; no bright, high calls. Only the whirr and hum of insects and the sudden bright blights of fireflies. The sun is setting. The air is turning red.
I walk until I can no longer. There is a fallen tree in the deer trail I had been following and I can go no further. Either direction I glance the trunk stretches endlessly, out of sight. True, who has been wandering, finds me again and together we turn around. The necklace in the hollow of my throat is warm, warm, warm, and Chara's thoughts are alight with laughter.
It occurs to me, suddenly, the trail is gone behind me as well.
t was on late afternoons such as this that the time seemed to slow, drifting by in an almost lazy and lulling manner. Still, She feels dulled, today, far too anchored.
(The heaviness of the world astounds her still, the island, where she was born, in the cold of the snow, that had been a weightless time, before she knew who she was or even knew the world existed at all.)
(So does Aeneas always feel a weightlessness, when he could take flight at any point? Or is it only the feeling of heaviness that keeps him from doing so?)
Elli thinks of the white raven from her dreams, if that must be the ultimate lightness. Where did it find it? Her mother told her ravens are good finders—but they can also be thieves.
So she goes to the forest, where the trees hold her in place and it makes sense to feel as she feels. Silver blue eyes peer up at the trees as that light tries so hard to strain through but makes it only in bits and pieces. The shadows are quiet today, though she cannot help but hope she finds those twins as she once had. The quietness tells her that she will not finds them today. She tries to listen for the dying, for shivers down her spine, but nothing comes. There is no death today.
There is no death today.
But there is a boy.
She should be getting home—not meeting boys in forests that would be better left alone. She never learns—maybe Elli is her mother’s daughter after all. She follows where not a trail goes, but where she thinks that raven might travel—tree to tree to tree.
She walks until she can no longer, a fallen tree, the image of that same white raven passes over her shoulder and she looks with blue eyes before realizing it wasn't there at all. A boy sits on her other shoulder, he is not a bird, but she images him perched like one regardless.
“Do you ever dream something so often, that you think it must be alive—somewhere. Both inside of you and out?” She asks the stranger she finds in the woods, though she is not quite looking at him when she asks. “I think if this dream didn't keep flying away— I may be able to ask it what it wants,” she says thinking out loud and she turns to him, those blue eyes (crashing like white caps in the sun) meeting his for the first time. She looks sharp, direct, a bit other worldly in the way something flutters behind her gaze (like raven wings—white and bright). “What do you think? How should I go about catching my dream?”
Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything--
T
here is nothing more right in the world than the moment that Khier turns, expecting emptiness, to see instead a girl with a moon on her shoulder and dreams in her eyes.
Do you ever dream something so often, that you think it must be alive—somewhere. Both inside of you and out? she asks him. Khier’s smile is incomplete; a smile half-finished, crooked, a boy’s dreaming smile. The smile he wore at the bows of ships, when the white-capped tips of waves splashed over the railing, salting his face.
Chara’s heartbeat feels too loud between us; it feels as if she stands there, and in my mind she whispers, There is nothing more right then meeting a girl in woods that are alive with memories,
He remembers, of course—he remembers the necklace, the way it called to him—the way that the gravity in that moment seemed larger than that of stars, of planets, of space. The gravity between souls always is.
Khier’s smile is shier, now. Fates can be fickle; they can be coy. He does not want to frighten them. “I live that story,” Khier whispers, conspiratorially. Chara is the dream; and she is alive, but only inside of him. Only inside him.
But he does not know what she wants. He might never.
Her blue eyes pierce him; she is younger, far younger, but there is a weighted aspect of her gaze that makes Khier think that impression might be inaccurate. She is not young. She is old in a way of this forest, of time, of the sea that whispered to him as a boy. She is a witness.
“I simply talk to mine,” Khier says. There is a light of mischief in his expression; flitting there, the sun between leaves. “But when that doesn’t work, I listen to the quiet. I try to feel what she is feeling.”
True does not bark; True only turns to study her, with dark, gleaming eyes.
“I might be able to show you,” Khier says. “But you have to promise not to say anything about it, to anyone, ever again.”
And Chara is beat, beat, beating against his breastbone.
e turns and he will find big, bright, blue eyes staring back at him. He smiles and she suddenly feels no urge to speak, and break the peaceful calm that encased her form entirely. Where has this smile been before? Across oceans, through the deserts, over mountains, twisting through trees. If it could talk, what stories would it tell? Although Elli knows, smiles can very well tell many stories to those willing to listen.
Something like delight twists in her as she watches him. Something like a heart beat thunders in her bones, but it is not her own. Souls are heavy things, this the little girl in the woods knows. She knows it better than he may, but then again, she does not wear a necklace made of one. She just carries their voices around in her head.
“What a fate,” she comments to him, her voice as silvery and as bright as her mother’s had been at this age. Talking, Elli thinks, she wonders what things she would say to a white raven to draw it to her. Though listening, she thinks, she could listen to its called, could listen for the sweep of wings over the sky, or the rustle of branches it flies past. Even the spirits that cry as they follow. Her eyes glance to the dog beside him, wonders if there exists a relationship betweens birds and canines. (What secrets do they share?)
She offers him a small smile, that smile that only emerges when mystery is afoot and working its way towards her. “Cross my heart,” she says, staring at him with wide, expectant eyes. Look closely and you can see ghosts laughing behind the blue of them.
“Tell me everything.” From anyone else, those words might have sounded like a demand. But coming from her, with eyes that were both sad and sweet, searching his face in the shadowed forest, it was just a hopeful request. She walks close to him, and she walks with the liquid grace of someone you would expect to be older until she is a breath away, if she were older, maybe, just a bit, she might think she has never been so close to a boy before, but she doesn't think this as she looks down at his chest. “Does it have to do with that necklace?”
