little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
It is hard to look at him the same, after that, although Elif tries.
His first impression on her (so important, those first founding moments, a beginning) had been of someone not so different than herself - young, curious, but decidedly mortal. Now she can’t forget that overlay of color, the way it had shimmered and pooled, a wealth of hues greater than any she could have counted in her four years in the desert.
She wants to ask him about it, to demand that he do it again - but she is no spoiled noble girl any longer, to stomp her foot and be given what she asked. Or maybe she is, and it is the world that has changed, the order no longer set up to cater to what she knew. Either way, something hushes her tongue, and neither of them speak of what had just happened, and the moment passes. (Except it doesn’t, it lives in her still, and every time she sneaks a glance at him she half-expects and wholly hopes to see those colors swirling.)
Of course nothing so wondrous happened as she explained Solterra’s prayers. Maybe, if she had brought a candle, and a match - maybe, with their bellies full of god-water and the wind a hymn weaving through the rocks - maybe if she believed enough -
Well, she’ll never find out.
She’d braced for his dismissal, after such a dull explanation, and so his laughter comes as a surprise. Elif smiles, soft as the hazy colors pressing the horizon to darkness, and wonders if all the courts used candles in their prayers. If they were more the same than different (a strangely sharp thought, after a lifetime of being taught that the Day Court was the best, the strongest and the fiercest, born survivors who had to shape a home from an unkind world).
Or any of them, he finishes, and her head tilts like a bird’s. “”Do you pray to the others, too?” she asks, and then wonders if it is too forward, and as if to make up for it adds “I can’t remember the last time I sang. But I know it didn’t look like…that.” She shrugs her narrow shoulders like shifting beneath an itchy cloak.
Even the scratchiest wool would be welcome tonight, as the darkness increases and Mateo is almost lost to it, all his edges blurring to softness. She steps nearer (so as not to lose him entirely, she tells herself), and grins when he mentions Solis. Hush, she tells the wind, and what chilly breeze there was, laden with the scents of night and wild, high places, falls still. The night is pinpricked with stars, so clear and close it seems almost possible to catch them like fireflies, to touch them with her wings.
“No. I wonder where they go…” It seems right, for her voice to be hushed in this open-air cathedral. When she shivers it is not entirely the cold, though it’s a large part - she wonders if they could extend their wings over one another, a hen gathering chicks. She can’t remember the last time she touched someone she hadn’t already known for years.
Up here the wind is too strong for her small magic; it has a mind of its own, one that clucks at her like a parent. When another breeze rises, pulling at Mateo’s long dark hair, Elif thinks longingly of her city, and how it held the heat of the day close to its heart all through the night, as though storing the sunlight in the streets themselves.
His question shouldn’t surprise her, but it does, and she is filled with a warmth that has nothing to do with the desert. “Yes,” she says simply, grinning, and Elif doesn’t feel the guilt she’d expected, doesn’t feel like she’s degrading her own home by wanting to see a friend’s. Up here on the mountain, after all she’s seen today, the world seemed an awful lot bigger and stranger than it had at dawn. It makes her feel bigger and stranger, too, like her heart is full of doors she’d never known could open and each one opened to another, and another. Like the whole world is a mansion and she’s been lingering in the hall (or perhaps the solarium). “I’ve never seen Viride,” she admits, shy and almost breathless with the confession. “Or any forest, really. Is it true there are trees there a thousand years old, that grow taller than any building in any of the courts?” Elif laughs then, a little breathless, half because the cold has stolen it and half to imagine something so unlikely. The trees she knows are stunted, wizened by their lives in the desert.
By now the cold is impossible to ignore; her feet are feeling numb and she stomps them the way you might rub your hands together for the illusion of warmth. She guesses that Mateo feels the same - from his question and the restless way he shifts, the way their breaths are becoming twining plumes. Elif leans away from him, shuffles her wings against her shoulders, the ticklish way the feathers slide against her ribs. When she glances back at him he is hardly more than the glint of green eyes in the dark, and she pulls in a breath that aches with cold before tossing her head with a grin.
“Race you down?”
@Mateo I literally did the same thing! It was so easy once I began. I'm not sure why I have the biggest mental block with her.
