She thinks this: the salt is so engrained in her skin, in her hair, that perhaps it will never be removed; the sunsets over the ocean are still as magnificent as before, graced with the colors of Vespera, but they are less alive than she remembers and more painful; and the moon, the moon that glares in slivers through clouds is too bright. Her prison sharpened her eyes, made light an enemy even moreso than it was three years prior, made her hearing more acute, made a woman into a beast, into a predator willing to do anything to protect and destroy.
The stench of the sea clings to her skin, never fully leaving - not now - and it disgusts the magpie girl who walks with ribs out and shoulders bare, who stalks the streets, away from those lapping waters that remind her of the kelpies deep in the swamp. The kelpies that came from the sea, the ones that stole her father - stole her childhood. It leaves a permanent scowl on her lips and frown lines beside bright, intelligent eyes that see everything all too quickly and all too completely.
Even so far away from the coast, it still reaches pale fingers into the city, onto the buildings. So she moves further away, toward the epicenter, toward the place where only the sick and dying stay.
In the gloom of the evening, the hospital is a mausoleum with a yawning mouth, gaping wider and wider, broken teeth for windows laughing and gnashing together, waiting to swallow her. Waiting to bring the magpie girl to her final resting place. She is not sick, not really, not physically, but she craves piece like she craves a warm bowl of porridge. Into the dark cave of life and death she goes, reveling as chemicals hit her nose, cleanliness expunging all traces of salt, until all that is left are the moans of the ill and the taste of that which helps kill them and keep them clean.
Dalmatia moves through the halls as a phantom, quiet and quick, hardly looking left or right. Before her, labyrinthian halls seek to confuse those who do not walk them, but she has. She has. In the times when she was a girl, there was a period where she lay prone upon a bed, stick upon her left side as bandage after bandage was wrapped over her right wing. Sprained, strained, mildly fractured bones groaned when she'd moved then. For months they kept her from her skies, for moths they told her she could not do anything too quickly for fear that she would never fly again.
Then, Eustace had come in often to entertain her, to teach her the new formations of their unit.
Then, things had been so simple.
Now, as she enters the room again, staring at the high window with shutters half open, she knows nothing is ever simple anymore.
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
@Elena | this is only thread two, please be gentle with us !<3
“She was beautiful, you know. It was the first thing I noticed when I met her. Not her physical beauty (though she has plenty of that, mind you), but the beauty of that light that I could see dancing just behind her eyes. It was incredible, just to see how alive and full of energy this one little person could be. And, I’m embarrassed to admit … I fell in love right on the spot.” -Benjamin, Elena’s father.
She shines like the golden sunshine child she is. Her parents had named her in honor of the afternoon sun, bold and beautiful, burning. In turn, she lived up to her namesake. Elaina had not been like some of the typical legacy girls that surrounded her family, far from the quiet Melody and Starlett. The fillies that were raised by their mothers to be poised and proper, elegant and gentle in the presence of their elders or guests. The colts were taught to be calm and courteous. They were taught the formal and respectful ways to greet maidens and those of higher rank, how to carry a sense of level respect and uphold the family name, image, and honor. Elaina had been born eager to test her limits and find adventures, rather than learn her lessons about duty and grace. She loved the feeling of the wind whispering into her ears and running through her tendrils as she raced as wildly and freely as the eagle that soared high above the trees and mountains. The rush of finding something new, the thrill of not knowing where a trail might take her, creating an adrenaline infused concoction of excitement twisted with uncertainty. She was told this brazen personality came from her father, her godfather had always said he was a bit “against the grain”, while that grace in which she took on the world was entirely her mother’s. The golden girl has still not done what her family has. They either wait for her in their graves or they have found a life that is much more quiet and simple than the one she has chosen.
Elena does not know that there is another who has been traveling to the ocean often enough, maybe if she did she would not quite feel so alone as she does in Dusk. It is a new home, she so often reminds herself, but the thought hardly comforts her.
She arrives on the hospital, wanting to mix some herbs together that Lovelace had taught her. They were supposed to ease some the pain during childbirth. Of course, Elena has never seen a child being brought into this world, hr and Jay often left behind at the Cavern while Lovelace would tend to the mother. ‘When you’re a little older,’ she would say and smile before heading off to bring life into the light.
It is dark, Elena has stayed here longer than she intended and it would be a long way back to the capital. She begins to leave the hospital, slowly picking her way through the building when she hears a disturbance. She was not alone. Thoughts of Tunnel flash through her mind, he had found her, to pick at her skin and make her bones shudder. Or it was Aerwir to drag her back home. Her thoughts go to Lilli, but Elena knows in the same instant that Lilli was safe in Taiga, not here in Dusk. “Hello,” she calls out before she can stop herself. She knows so little about this land, who is to say it is not some sort of ghost haunting its halls. “Where are you?” She asks, not who you are, because that question has led Elena down far to many paths she has not been able to return from.
* 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.
Silence is a blessing lain heavily upon her shoulders, a cloak in the world of noise and chatter that had been shut away from her for so long. So many smells and sounds assaulted her on her trek here, the sea most of all cooing for her to come back, to come home to a dark cell and a dark secret, begging and crying in its briny tones, a wailing man on the shores beckoning with open arms. She would not. She would never return to the arms of iron and bars without light.
So silence reigned and she let herself relax, let her foot tip forward as she shifted into a more comfortable position.
It was a blessing. And then it is destroyed.
'Hello,' echoes softly through the halls, a warbling voice without confidence nor comfort in its tones, wholly unknowing to the woman that grinds her teeth when those tones grate upon her ears. 'Where are you?' They ask, only a few rooms down the hallway, passing, but slowing still.
Hush, Dalmatia thinks, throwing a glare toward the door.
Of course they would not, of course she looks back in time to see a woman of cream and white walking just by, turning Baroque face toward her, expressive eyes widening. Dalmatia frowns. It has been so long since she's smiled, so long since she felt laughter bubble in her chest like clouds drifting in the sky. Instead, she turns her face to the window, to the moon, "You found me," is her only reply. Now keep walking, she thinks, tail flicking to and fro while her ears tip back, hiding within masses of hair, freshly combed and braided once more.
She is a woman fit for battle, a woman on edge, she is seeking everything but company. No, that's the last thing she would ever desire when she's drowning in her memories and they're trying so desperately to eat her alive.
There are so many demons there, in the cobwebs of her memories, clinging like spiders as they spin their webs thicker and thicker, waiting until she finds the threads that won't let her step back again. Waiting and watching and wanting.
The ex-vicarious sighs at last, a crude huff of air through her nostrils, and glances back again just to see if she is alone at last.
There was nothing that made Elena great or wonderful, or even unique aside from her wild past. She was a mass of tortured beauty, thinking she would do better to live a life of solitude, but never finding it, never succumbing. She has heart ache, battered dreams, and beautiful friends and family.
Elena briefly wonders what happened to Altair, and if Lilli was safe. She wondered if Aerwir was still in Woodlands or if he had moved on, she wondered what happened to Soren and if he missed Beylani still as much as she did. She thinks of Kensa and if she still ruled Hyaline, and her thoughts find Tunnel before she quickly abandons them (if only it were that easy).
She is content for now in her loneliness. She is a quiet thing, as tough as stone, but she has her chips, the scars on her heart. Her parents’ deaths, being hunted down like property, being ripped from her home, multiple homes. Yet, there is that piece of her, that good piece, that remains unshaken in her faithful determination that the world is a good place. Elena is unoriginal, but there is a strangeness to her still.
Elena is the lone stranger here in a sea of old friends in this new land.
She smiles, such a beautiful smile at the stranger she has found, and it breaks her heart in ways she doesn't know or understand that her parents are not here to see it. She is happy, and she doesn't know why, but she decides that she will be her friend. She counteracts that frown with grace and beauty as she had been taught.
“It would seem I have,” she says with a little bout of laughter at her own discovery. So unaware of what thoughts the stranger harbors behind that brooding exterior. (It is more brooding, Elena should know this.) And she does, but this is what drags the sunflower child closer. Her expression, the tilt of her lips, the narrowness of her eyes, and unfriendly nature, it reminds her of someone and Elena cannot help but think of Alvaro in this moment. Her heart surges in her chest with love for her older male cousin and the sense of familiarity she finds with a complete stranger. The more she pushes, the more Elena pulls towards her, like inadequate magnets.
She misses her stoic cousin in these moments, how she would sit for hours beside him, not saying a word as she placed flowers into his mane. He would sit painfully quiet, tolerating his younger cousin’s quiet touches and girlish giggles. But there were moments too, in the stillness, in the solitude, that she would spot the angles of his lips twitch upwards into something of smiling before giving to gravity once more and falling flat against his dark face. And that is when Elena would bury that tiny golden face of hers into his shoulder, her silent promise to keep the secret of the afternoons when Alvaro would smile.
Foolish in her joy, in her own memories, Elena so believes she can do the same for this woman too. She is foolish, but at least Elena remains kind-hearted. But so often aren't the foolish full of good intentions?
“I could use some company on a walk,” she says then, blue eyes falling beneath dark lashes before opening once more. “I’d love for you to join me.” She hardly leaves room for opposition.
* 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.
Irritation flares like a firework, bright and sharp in her stomach, growing and hungry in her heart. It is dark and it is sinister and it gnaws and gnaws as a starved dog upon her patience. The woman looks every bit the wolf that she is, there alone in the room. Green eyes seek the window, seek the memories to take her away from the sunflower girl that just keeps on pressing nearer and nearer. They are closed in the room together, closer and closer, her sweet stench filling the warrior's nose until she's ready to puke.
No. No.
She can't be trapped in a room with a girl without a brain. Stuck where there's a body and no exit in sight. Some part of her is hostile, snarling. Some part of her is in a mad rush to fly towards the door. Dalmatia urges her lungs to take in air, and then more and more and more until she feels as a blimp ready to explode, stuffed to full of nothing until there can't fit anything more between the atoms that are her and the atoms that are not her. On a heavy exhale, she turns her head, turns to glare. "Do I look like I want to take a walk?" It is a snarl, a warning.
Perhaps that is the most warning she's really ever given anyone.
She really isn't the type to go easy or do anything that she doesn't want to do. Stubborn and resolute. Once her mind is made up there's no changing it. Once she feels like a cornered dog she's more than willing to bite. And there is something so ready to bite in her, ready to slobber and snarl and lunge. It is caged, held on a chain, a leather leash that's fraying more and more with every step Elena takes.
Dalmatia tries to breathe again, sucking oxygen into her lungs, but all she can smell is the girl and so she pants shallowly. Flashes of wet walls. Hints of leering guard's faces. They mix with the golden face of the girl until they are one and the same and she's back in the prison and she's here with the girl and it's awful she can't stand it.
Why couldn't she be let alone with her ghosts?
"Move. Now." It's not a request. The ex-vicarious is a hurricane when she shoves past the other woman, uncaring if she pushes into her, pushes through. The only thing she needs right now is the open space and the sky. The hospital is too small for two people in one room. She can't do it. She can't be inside like that and feel okay.
Behind, there's the telltale sound of tapping feet and she knows that the girl isn't leaving her alone. It irritates her like rubbing a dog's fur the wrong way. Skeletal fingers snap along her spine, sing into her ribs of a sweet darkness that would hold her if she were not here, not with this girl. You wouldn't guess how badly she craves that - a taste of something that is not the inferno constantly burning and yearning within.
And all she can do is move faster through the winding halls towards a doorway that can't open like a gaping wound fast enough.
She had wanted to touch the sky and so the gods had made her a bird, with silver wings that glistened in sunlight and shone in moonlight. She flew amongst the clouds, and she would swear she could touch that endless blue sky with the tips of her feathers. If you asked her what it felt like she would say it was like freedom.
But oh she missed the ground, the solidness beneath her feet, the steadiness. So the gods made her a rabbit, with fur of snow white, and eyes of green like the grass. She scampered through the underbrush and slept in the fallen leaves. If you asked her what it smelled like she would say like when the seasons change.
Those green eyes had looked to the sky though, with the ground beneath her feet and she wished for the freedom it provided her. She went to the gods once more. “I want the sky and the earth.” She had told them with her voice as sure as ground and as airy as sky. “You cannot have both child, you must choose,” they had told her. But a girl of both worlds did not believe this so easily. She thought for a moment before an idea struck her. “So then make me a tree, so that my roots make always know the firmness of the earth, but still the coolness of the sky, and that the rest of me may live in between.” She had said and the gods gave it to her.
Elena had sat under a giant weeping willow with her mother as she told her this story. The same weeping willow her mother would be buried under not a few months later. “Is this her?” She had asked in lilting soprano tones. “Maybe,” her mother had responded. “Do you think so?” She had asked and Elena, always so eager to believe the stories she was told had nodded. “Perhaps we should give her a name then,” she says, looking to Elena with blue eyes that one day Elena would gain from her. “Ava,” Elena says, quickly, much too quickly. “Lets name her Ava.” Her mother nods. “Ava. Life.”
Elena should recognize someone wild when she sees one, but she is so engrossed in the company in a land she is still learning, that she either doesn't notice or chooses not to see it. “Maybe not,” she says with a sunflower smile. “I don't mind staying here and having a chat though,” she says. Elena the relentless they will call her one day. Not because she never surrendered on the battle field, but because of her inability to leave someone alone.
Move.
Now.
No :)
Elena is moved aside with a brush of the woman’s shoulders as she rushes past. “Wait,” Elena calls after her, following behind like a lost puppy. She will not always be this uncertain in Novus, and certainly not in Terrastella. One day she will run through the swamp, all determination and resolve as she rushes to the aide of the one they both call commander. But, for now, she slinks behind, nervous steps and shy smiles.
Pretty, young, nimble Elena manages to step around her speeding footsteps and cuts her off. “You did not even tell me your name,” she says almost accusingly, but the smile that sits there softens the blow. “Where I come from—we usually start with that.”
She thinks this: the salt is so engrained in her skin, in her hair, that perhaps it will never be removed; the sunsets over the ocean are still as magnificent as before, graced with the colors of Vespera, but they are less alive than she remembers and more painful; and the moon, the moon that glares in slivers through clouds is too bright. Her prison sharpened her eyes, made light an enemy even moreso than it was three years prior, made her hearing more acute, made a woman into a beast, into a predator willing to do anything to protect and destroy. ![[Image: ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db...0iFb4PvyXE]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/8026a53b-dc57-41ab-b574-9f8a8fe57ce4/ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db0780.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzgwMjZhNTNiLWRjNTctNDFhYi1iNTc0LTlmOGE4ZmU1N2NlNFwvZGR2b3R3ZS01OTMwMmJhNi02YTgxLTQ3YmYtOTg0Ni0zMGM1YTVkYjA3ODAucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.ujCJH7FAbsQhfZlQniMmEd_vw-VmvaTDn0iFb4PvyXE)
