take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
What they all forgot to tell Elena when she had been small was not to go looking for monsters, because unlike the stories, monsters do not die. They mark you, they hunt you, haunt, live between every rib and grow and burn with every breath you take. They slip into your blood and it is not such an easy thing to cleanse. She carries them with her now, and it is only in the quiet that she can hear the murmurs of their whispers that they were not so easy to destroy. Elena was no conquerer, and she had never vanquished her monsters, she just learned to live with them. They destroy her on the inside, but her smile and those bright blue eyes always suggest otherwise. It is only when others smile back at her, the they must not see how destroyed she is with the battle that rages beneath her skin, that Elena believes that she must still be winning. Though she will never claim to be victorious.
The quiet bothers her today, so she leaves home behind. The shadows continue to beckon her; remind her of him and she half expects his eyes to appear out of the dark, his flesh to materialize in darkness and smoke. Her blue gaze tears away and she goes.
To Dawn.
She could have stayed in Windskeep, with her grandmother, Roland, Brielle, their daughter, with Melody, and Zephyra, Rishiri. But she left. Winter came and the ground turned white. She had stayed for months, living among ghosts that haunted her dreams. She had left because it had been hard, not because it had been easy. This, the road to Dawn, Elena finds it as natural as her oceanside home. The gold of her coat soaks in the waning sunlight that cuts across the land. A slight smile quirks her lips as she slips through the towering trees and that blue gaze sets herself towards the meadow.
What she does not expect is the crowd of others gathering around and the high emotions hit her like a wall. Her eyes tears up at someone who is experiencing their first festival without their mother. And then her heart races like a joyful child at all the new sights upon their own first festival of another type. Her chest swells with love like the newlyweds who are eager to enjoy the lights with one another. There are too many emotions and the empath quickly becomes overwhelmed and she isn't sure where they are coming from. Her breathing grows rapid and the setting sun still causes her to grow warm in the early autumn season. Over to the edge of the meadow where only a few faces stand, Elena gathers herself, blue eyes directed forwards as emotions that are not her own ease.
It is only then that Elena tries to remember what she had been feeling in the quiet of Terrastella that had drawn her to Delumine. But with a mixture of a smile on her face, a rapid heart, and confusion in her head, Elena cannot remember what emotions were her own to her begin with. So she lets the lights of the festival that would soon begin settle into her bones. And she forgets.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
“You look like you're having fun.” says the Warden, smiling like a wolf might smile-- all teeth in clean rows, like sticks of chalk.
Here is an emotion to try on, to wear like a winter coat in the dead of summer-- the kind of thick, heavy fabric that makes you itch in the sun. Here is a feeling to make you sweat:
Fear--of nothing in particular. Dull fear, back-of-the-mind fear, fear that drives and digs in insidious ways, almost not there until it is, almost not volatile until it is eating away at you. This fear is slowly waning but he has known it so long he does not even seen it. It is just white noise, a distant roar like the Rapax, always running but never at the front of his mind.
Joy-- or something like it. Not wholesome joy, not baking pies and soft voices and laughter. There is laughter, sure, but it is a high-pitched, panicked kind. Trapped animal laughter.
Deafening anger, anger that comes out in waves, anger that rarely falters and always consumes-- anger that Andras wears as a second skin, anger that Andras uses to mask the fear and the joy. Anger with sharp claws and sharper teeth that arcs off his skin like literal lightning. Anger that rules him more than he rules it. Anger that turns to hatred that turns to boiling, red-hot rage before it explodes.
Apoplectic anger. Coexisting with everything else not because it can but because it must. The sort of anger that Oriens took one long look at and decided it was not a gift but a curse.
And, still deeper-- something else. Something cool and blue and soft. Something that Andras doesn't touch, doesn't look at, doesn't want to know is there. It has the face of a prince and a fist full of moths ready to give him a swift punch in the gut.
All of these, tucked into a that thin, toothy smile, the rough lines of his face, the shield of his glasses. When he looks from Elena to the slowly growing crowd, and the drying grass between them, freckled with light like the sun is not sinking, it feels like home in a way he doesn't expect. Few things truly feel like home.
Though it has just begin, though the lanterns are just being lit, tourists are just streaming in from outside, Andras asks, "Are you here for the festival?"
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Once she was a prisoner. Broch had allowed her the freedom to roam, she had been in Culloden with her best friend, but still, there had been invisible chains placed over her ankles, binding her. It was then she had lost such faith in her obsidian liberator when he had not come for her. And that was the first time she had questioned what love truly was, what it meant. She finds herself questioning it still. It had always been easy for her parents, and Elena cannot help but wonder why it could not have been just as easy for her. “Fate,” Marcelo would say. Elena inwardly rolls her eyes at his invisible comment.
She makes no effort to join them, is content to stand quietly on her own and observe them from what feels like a safe distance. Even putting space between her and the others, the sunshine girl feels like she is a flood of ever changing feelings. It would seem they are content to leave her be, let the blonde girl sit alone. All except one, the way he moves, the directness of him he is coming to her. She is quiet then for a moment, observing, letting his own emotions come at her in waves. Elena turns her own face away, thinking this could stop the torrential downpour that rains on her soul. Fear, joy, anger…another….something….anger again.
A smile.
The sunlight was beginning to wane, tucking itself beyond the horizon and leaving a soft glow of amber and crimson in its wake, though soon the sky is swathed in darkness, as the soft, glimmering light of wayward stars dance along the edges of a bright, rising crescent moon. Her gold skin is bathed in its soft, bleak light, while those too blue eyes look to his face. The creeping of embarrassment spread across the pale curve of her cheek as she realizes how she must have looked.
She knows then what power he posses. She does not know how she knows this (for it is neither said nor shown) just that she knows. She is so plain against him. “Maybe I was just waiting for something incredible to happen,” she says with a playful narrow of her eyes. Her eyes turn up for a moment to find that emerging night sky, tracing the faint constellations that will splatter across the horizon. (In between heartbeats, Azrael emerges, as he always does with the stars.) “I am,” she answers him. “Well, not really actually,” she confesses. “I came here to just—get away from things and was ambushed,” she finishes (perhaps the use of the word ambushed was a poor description for a party). He was a stranger, a strange man at that and Elena has had little luck with the strangers she meets. “And you, are you here for celebrations?” She asks him with a brightness returning in her voice, despite the way his mash of emotions wriggles in her chest. She cannot decide if she wants to scream, laugh, shiver, or sneeze. “Or are you the entertainment we were promised? You look like the type to have a trick or two up your sleeve.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
H
e doesn't like the way that she looks at him, like she's dizzy, or like he's something to big for his body. Andras already knows. He doesn't need-- or want-- to see it mirrored. It all leaves a bad taste in his mouth.
The moon rises with his quickening pulse, the meadow grows darker and somehow still lighter around them, just the colors shifting, just the mumbling crowd groaning into a steady stream of jumbled conversation behind them. Maybe I was just waiting, Elena says, for something incredible to happen. As she speaks, as the warden's clenched teeth tighten far more than they should, over and over, music begins to play.
It is soft music. Joyful music. Flutes and a lyre and the soft pattering of lambskin drums. It does not at all match his impossibly wide smile, his impossibly clenched jaw, or the deafening crack of his magic. It is loud enough to turn a head or two.
"Ambushed," he echoes. "Is that what I'm doing? Ambushing you?"
So quick to take everything personally. So quick to leap at the throat. Andras is so full of anger, full to bursting, but when he looks at her and she tips her head back to look at the sky he does the same. He imagines the void of space, floating endlessly through the black and the cold with nothing but a quiet death before him. He imagines the silence: so much silence, filling each cell of his body, every blank space that is taken up either by anger or magic or the great crawling something in him...
And, just like that, all his anger has nowhere to go. When she looks back at him and he looks back at her it is neutered. It feels worse than he expected.
"Oh--" he stammers, scrambling for purchase as he plummets out of his rage. "No, I have to watch." Andras hates parties. Andras hates gatherings. As more bodies filter into the clearing and the sun sinks ever further Andras feels his skin start to crawl.
She suggests he's the entertainment, smiling at him like he imagines cats smile, or foxes, or-- snakes. He wonders if she knows she looks like she's in pain when she says it. "I resent that."
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
She looks like her mother—a beautiful gold, with blue blue eyes. Light that can glint off her curves and there is the cut of her cheekbones. Elena’s beauty would never launch a thousand ships, but she may haunt one or two with memories. She has always been drawn to beauty, holding it’s fickle qualities so close to her breast. There is beauty in so very many things though, not just the curve of one’s jaw or the brightness of their eye. No, there is beauty in the untouchable too, in the unknowable. In the things one can nearly feel even though they evade the other senses. This too draws her, in a visceral way. It is why she collects the flowers that have not yet bloomed, puts them on her windowsill and waits for them. They may never bloom, but there was something beautiful to be found in the waiting.
Someone once said that good and evil were like wolves fighting in your belly: the winner dependent on who you fed. Well, here in the dying light, in the graceful skip of the music, Elena is the wolf that is being fed.
There is an edge to him, something impossible to define but with a subtly persistent presence nonetheless. It’s that which intrigues her, the possibility of something hidden just beneath the surface. It comes again, then, stinging across her skin, and this time anger flushes hot and red beneath her skin, her ears buried in the tangles of her mane “You are unrightfully angry at me,” she says, it isn’t an accusation, though it should be. Her voice (that voice of silver bells.) is even, calm, despite the man’s tension she feels rising underneath it. “I never said ambushed,” she comments. So perhaps she feels a little surly, a little bitter, but she just keeps it at that. Her smile calm, her gaze just slightly calculated. She smirks and tilts her head at him, offering only sweetness in the curves of her face.
She feels his emotions like thorns against her skin. Tries to fight against it, tries to look for rose petals in his dark face. And then they are looking at the sky and she feels his anger disappear like their breath into the night. “To watch? You must be important,” she says returning her blue eyes to him sincerely. “I wish I was important like you.” She trails off, words clotted in her throat. It isn't entirely true, but the lie comes easily enough. The golden woman smiles like the gentle autumn sun. She doesn't wish for importance, she was important in the eyes of her family (and she still left them), important in the matching blue eyes of her cousin (who she also left, too many times to count.) That was enough.
The palomino laughs then, and perhaps that note of laughter is the bravest thing she has ever done, laughing when he stands there with powers that could strike her dead. “Resent it all you like,” she says. She picks up a string of light flowers and so daringly starts weaving them in his dark mane. “I will just be here.” And she peers to look at him once more, into his wild eyes. “And I will not resent you.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
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