[P] let your colors burn

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

She doesn't care about him anymore. (Elena believes this as she has mastered the fatal act of believing her own lies.) She had ignored the warnings, pushed past them as if they had been nothing but light branches of a willow tree.  He had left her. Fell through her cupped hands like water. Then he came back to her, saved her as some kind of acting white knight. She would not succumb to him. He could not cause her to falter. 

She was born bold and brazen, restless.
But it is more than that, too.
She is insatiable.

There was always desire in her bones, longing for what she shouldn't take. But Elena had also been born sweet, compassionate, empathetic. Sensitive to her own emotions as well as those of others. 

Perhaps it was dangerous to be soft. But how could she have been anything but when Elena was born smiling at the world and the world smiling back at her? And how could she be anything but soft now with eyes that bright? Elena had been born from love and with love. Love so fierce that she swears, her first image of life was the explosion of it in beautiful colors. A love unable to be contained and so they placed it inside their golden daughter. The only difference was, where their love was sure, strong, solid, they were wise with their hearts and practiced in the art of affections. While Elena holds this powerful emotion in her chest, unsure of how to manage it. So it spills out from inside her, uncontrolled, latching onto any who come too close.

And Tenebrae just kept getting far too close.

He hurt her, and she swears she will not go back to him. 
Little girl, little girl, you bad, bad liar. 
 
There is a loneliness since that day at the hospital. It has plugged its cold hand into her chest and wrapped its sharp hands around her heart. A loneliness that was not made any better when she fell off the cliff side like Icarus down from the sun. Elena’s paper wings were never meant to fly, and the bruises covering her are a not so gentle reminder. The glacier eyed girl is thinking perhaps it would be good to be strong. Strong like a silver queen she once knew. 

Perhaps Elena had never admired anyone more than when Aletta had gone off to battle to protect Murmuring Rivers. Valerio had not come back to them, and a stallion was knocking on their door, ready to rip everything away from them. ‘Rule by my side,’ he had told the grey mare that Elena had grown up looking to as a second mother. But Aletta had not stepped down, she had not simply lowered her head and tucked her tail ready to run. Aletta had risen from the wildflowers of Murmuring Rivers with far more beauty and strength than any Phoenix in its ashes could ever harness.

Silver blue eyes rove the shelves of the library, overwhelmed by the selections. Where does she even begin? With Caligo? Monks? The sun and the moon? Elena is lost as she weaves in between shelves, her golden head moving as she half heartedly glances over all the titles before her. Elena sighs then before turning a corner. “Excuse me,” she says politely. “I’ve traveled from Dusk to do some er…research.” She is hesitate to say just what (who) has brought her to Dawn’s library. “How do I find the topic I am looking for?” She asks, before the sunlight girl smiles to the stranger, Tenebrae’s hunger lightens in her blue eyes.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Sereia

[Sereia]

Sereia

The scent of salt was still upon her skin. A swim she had lied to a girl who asked why the air amidst the books smelled so much of sea-spray and sand. There was a partial truth in there, Sereia had been for a swim. Yet also she had eaten. It was a blessing the library was not filled with the scent of blood and bone too. Yet Sereia’s guilt was rife within her belly, it twisted and clawed at her sides until she almost vomited her meal back up upon the sands. 


Her sorrow is ebbing, slowly. But it is why she is curled up amidst the stacks of the library. Here there is no bloodstained sand nor a breeze coarse with salt. The only sound is the soft sight of printed leaves being turned. The whispers of scholars, the scratch of pen across paper. 


Sereia tumbles down into a world of words and fantasy. She drowns herself in the stories of others. She feasts upon words strung together like art. The kelpie reads until her golden eyes grow blurred with their effort, until her knees ache from their kneeling. Yet still she does not rise to stretch her limbs, to escape the aches of her body. No, she simply turns another page and falls back deeply into another world. Submerged, contented. She thinks reading a book might be like finding Atlantis at last. A whole world to explore. 


Excuse me.


The words come sharp and sudden, startling the sea-girl from her book. She looks up and is grateful her makeup was so careful this morning, painting over the sides of her too long lips. Yet she still lets the curtain of her hair fall across her face. She tips her gaze up from beneath it and smiles small and lovely. Closing her book, Sereia rises at last. “Of course, I know the library reasonably well. What topic are you looking for - I will see if i can help.” The smell of Terrastella clings to her skin. It is the scent of stars and dreams and sunset skies. “You are from the Dusk court are you not?” Sereia says and casts a sideways glance from beneath her lashes, “My sister lives there too.”


@Elena


 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana