prayed to keep my soul
S
he aches for what she cannot define. She has known so little of the world except what has been offered to her. By her mother, her father, her aunt, her godmother. And now Aeneas, he shows her things without realizing it. Everything he does looks entirely new to her, as if she opens her eyes for the first time. The way his breath fogs, the sound of wind through feathers, the shifting of his weight beside her. She has doubted her place in Dusk, despite being made from it. In the burrs that tangle in the thick waves of her tail, the dirt congealed up her knees and the austere patience, like that of a mountain, or a rock splitting a river. In the arch of her neck, like the bow of a branch; the bent of a pollinator, busying around the bright, arousing revelation of wildflower stamina. She is dirt, and lavender and ocean spray. Still she doubts (maybe because she lingers too long in the shadows, or strays too far into darkened corners, this is not what little girls of sunshine do.) But Aeneas and how easily she fits beside him, he lets her know ‘yes, you belong here, because I do.’ And if Aeneas can belong, so can she.
The girl wants to believe at least.
She stood still, charmed by silence. She is so firmly grounded. Rocks and seafoam-green lichen, soil, the tangle of roots, tree bark, willowy new saplings; she is: the flutter of bug wings, the trill of passerines, the slow bleed of one season into the next. He is wind and sky. Does he makes ocean breezes when he breathes? Does he draw hurricanes when his wings flutter? Do rainbows appear when he smiles? Elli is too scared to ask.
And just as if he were his father, he would have smiled. If Elli were her mother, she would tuck his hair behind his ear and carve herself into his chest in this moment and tell him his father is alive and well, and not to think that way. But they have drifted so far from who their parents are, here in a meadow of secrets and light. “I will,” she promises, because unlike her mother too, she still believes in promises between boys and girls.
That wing moves and draws her in. Another night, in the future, this action will send her head reeling with questions and wonders and curiosities. But tonight, they are just a little girl and a little boy with magic reflecting in their eyes. They have big questions, but they hang out in front of them like little balls of light. She looks back at him and catches his eyes on her. “I think I was always meant to be the path,” she says and means it. Elli is not even entirely sure what those words mean though. “And I will be happy to follow you down it,” she says because it has never been about leading the way for her. She is too busy staring through the trees of a forest to look too far ahead.
“We need to go back,” she says and it is not with sorrow, but she has a look in her eyes, it is her ‘thousand colors look’ her mother calls it. The look she always has when she feels the itch for a paintbrush, as an image sits just behind blue eyes. The look she wears as she aches to paint a picture before it is gone. She presses a tiny shoulder into his before the pair begin to move from their secret garden that grew not flowers, but magic.
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
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