elif
For a moment, when he doesn’t answer, she worries that she’s offended him - that he might see her as a blasphemer, and their friendship (which feels to her fragile as a new flower) will already be ended. It was never like Elif to worry about such things before. But then, the whole world is changing around them; should it be so surprising that she is changing, too?
She is relieved, then, when he does answer, though at his low tone the slant of her eyes is curious. At the time she had only been two, and not permitted to go; still, she remembered well the almost festival feel of the court that day, when the queen and those with her marched out to meet their god. “To teach us something.” Her answer is automatic, though so is the way her brow furrows afterward; like Mateo, she is thinking of all that came afterward, the blizzard, the war, their court once more isolated. All those deaths. But if mentioning it at all made her feel guilty, to suggest it was anything other than a lesson…Elif gives a little shake of her head, a shuffle of her wings, and turns her chin away so that she’s looking not at alters and stone but at the whole of Novus, spread below them like a twilit map.
The girl is wishing for more of that golden, sleepy-warm water even as he speaks, and the timing of it makes her shoot a look at him, a little of guilt and a little of a grin. “Freezing, she agrees - but he is already turning away, and the small glimpse of his expression as she does steals her smile.
Silently, then, she watches him step out between the pillars (from which it was said the gods had woken). As he spreads his wings she tucks her own tighter about her, and shivers; she can’t remember the last time she was this cold, other than that unnatural snow that had been like a curse from a djinn-story.
But once he begins to sing it isn’t the air whispering over her skin that raises the satin-short hair there.
It isn’t just his song, either, though at first she thinks it is, like something her nursemaid had sung to her once. His voice, though, is boyish, and gentle, and insistent; the words are soft and lovely and though she tries to keep watching him her eyes slip closed, dark lashes fanning dark cheeks. The wind quiets in answer to a question she is unaware she’d asked, and the only sound is his singing.
That is when the colors begin.
First there is gold, just a blush of it against the dark of her eyelids, and she thinks it is some reaction of the pool still with her. But then it blooms to rose, and the colors move the way she had only seen once, on the coldest night of the snow, when it was clear enough to see the sky. Then, as she draws in her breath, they are joined by hues of purple, and of blue, like a sunset over the sea or over the world entire.
She can’t help but open her eyes, even when something in her wants to resist - and she makes a soft sound of wonder to see that the colors are here, too, in the true night. They wind around Mateo, they shimmer across his skin, they fill the places his body leaves as he moves in a way that makes her think of how the wind loves her, leaning into all her hollow spaces like a cat curling up, content.
Like all such things, it is over too soon. As soon as she sees the glint of his eyes all the colors begin to run out like dye wrung from cloth, and she can’t tell if she is paler or richer for what she has seen and as quickly lost.
When he faces her again, Elif’s mouth is open, her eyes are wide and soft with awe like spring’s first leaves unfurling. His question draws her back to herself and one ear twists sideways, uncertain. “It isn’t so pretty as that,” she says, suddenly self-conscious. Rather than meet his eye she steps over to Solis’ altar, pale marble fast-cooling with the night. With the unnatural colors fled, the dusk seems more bleached than it had been before, everything muted and dim-growing-dark. “We begin by lighting a candle,” she says and touches her nose to the cold stone. For a moment she is silent, and still, and then she backs away and turns back to her companion. Mateo is gilded by the last of the fading light; his green eyes gleam like fireflies. It makes her want to smile, and to shiver. Instead she continues, matter-of-fact, trying not to feel defensive that she had not come prepared to pray, that even if she had hers were in no way remarkable as his had been. “Light to represent Solis, and smoke to carry our words up to him. Most of the proper prayers are very long, and very—” Elif stops before she can say boring. Certainly there was something to be said for those long, long prayers that she had grown up hearing priestesses speak - all power and violence and strength - but they had never caught her the way Mateo’s simple song had. Which, then, was holier?
“very serious,” she finishes instead, a little lamely.
@Mateo I love him
