little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
“No,” she answers at once, and there are twin feelings rising up in her then like two cobras in a basket, unsure if they will strike at one another or whoever is unlucky enough to open the lid.
The first is something like indignation, for why should a daughter of the desert concern herself with the politics of Dawn? It means little to her (or would have, before) what their softer neighbors to the west do. But the second feeling - oh, that is the worse of the two, for it is very nearly shame and it settles in her stomach like a stone. Is she so proud, so closed off, to give no thought to murders in a place so near? It is small comfort when she tells herself she likely would have known, where she not slipping from court all the time to watch the sailors come in from the sea, or to join the hawks riding the updrafts that wind like rivers above the canyon.
So her green eyes widen with all of these things, and with sorrow, too, for the two unnamed victims. (Yet it would be a lie to contribute the uptick of her heartrate to anything but the thought of a killer on the loose, and the thought of hunting him.)
Why close the borders then - if the killer was already within them? She wants to ask, for it is foolishness to her, but she does not wish to insult the home of her new friend, and risk vanishing the pleasing crinkle of his eyes.
Instead she settles back, shakes her head, forgets for a moment that they stand surrounded by magic. “That is ill news,” she says, a little lamely; but he is not wrong, for Solterra is no stranger to questionable deaths. There is, for instance, the murder of her own brother -
another tangent best avoided.
She misses his brief pout; not that she might have recognized it at all (goodness knows she was worn the same expression enough times), but she is busy testing the wind, a thing she knows loves her even here in this strange, warm, wavering light. When he speaks of Oriens she glances back, a brow raised. “Maybe,” she agrees, though what anyone so young with sunlight in their veins would want with that boring old god she doesn’t know.
There is no more time to ask; grinning like a well-pleased cat she watches him tilt his feathers, test the air, and leap. Her laugh rises with him on the breeze, and Elif tosses her head, gods and murders forgotten both in favor of this.
For her takeoff, she begins with a gallop, bursting from stillness to speed with the practice of a desert hare; she cannot resist running through just the barest edge of that golden, god-touched pool and when the water splashes up around her she may as well be Moses parting the sea.
And like Moses blessed, when she asks for the wind to help her it obeys, lifting under her wings as she raises them, carrying her up and up until she is running on air, until she is not running at all but flying.
With an extra little push of her magic she glides below him, twists her wings to cut up toward him on a breeze, darts her summer-eyes to his and finds they wear the same grin. “And I am Elif,” she says, and laughs again when the wind (her wind!) snatches her name away.
@Mateo it was lovely <3 and that would be great!
