elif
Her prize for him would be a grin, as gleeful as a girl’s, if she knew what he had decoded - a reassembling of her name that had never occurred to her. Elif would feel pride like a sunrise to have him tell her so.
But of course he does not, and she feels like a sunrise, anyway, with the wind full beneath her wings and the cold stinging her eyes and the entirety of the world spread out ahead of them both.
Whatever made up the water of the gods-pool, it must not have been real gold, for it does not sit heavy and sinking inside of Elif’s stomach. She knows well the weight of that bright metal; Solterrans have always been over-fond of it. Instead, if there is any change at all wrought in her, it lives instead in her blood, which feels sparking-hot and quick, warm even as the cold wind drags tears from her eyes and whistles through the gaps between her feathers.
If they were racing - truly racing - she could ask the wind to buoy her as soon as she sees him alongside her. But the urgency in her is not asking her to win but to live, and instead she only grins like a fool at the way he yells at the darkening sky, and stretches out a wing-tip to see if she might brush one of his.
It passes like this, in silence but for the wind rushing in their ears, in darkness but for the way they are still lit by the sun so low on the horizon, until they reach the peak.
Elif has not come to the gods’ mountain as often as, perhaps, she ought; piousness and femininity were lessons she never learned. She prefers her god as wild as she is (and so it is still difficult, to reckon the knowledge of Solis with the idea of him). So it is with unfamiliarity and a little awe that she touches deftly down to the ground, hardly kicking up a cloud of dust with her landing, and shakes out her neck and shoulders as she looks about.
The view from here is almost like flying, the way the fields and hills roll flat below. If it were not so dark, she thinks she could see the golden flare of the desert, and the distant blue wink of the sea. Oh, but her heart has grown heavier since her hooves touched earth, and it is not long before she turns to Mateo, stepping closer to the man, her heart still racing and full.
Among the clouds, silence is expected; here, it feels like a different sort. They are above the treeline, but still she wonders where the nightbirds are, where the crickets. It is cold, as her blood cools, and she fluffs her wings up against the side like a chilly hen.
“They say the gods trapped the regimes here, two summers ago,” she says to break the silence, and at once wishes she hadn’t.
@Mateo I am the latest ever, forgive me <3
