[P] lead me out into the light

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

The brush of feathers over her shoulder was as welcome as a cool breeze in winter. Though her muscles tighten as momentary fear slips sharp and brilliant through her left side – what if the touch was not as soft as a sigh but enough to press just where her muscles and bones ached at their most intense?
 
But Florentine was a healer once. Once… for a moment she remembers that girl. The younger Flora, fresh into womanhood yet still clinging to her childhood as if it were cloth she could not untangle from her torso. That was before she was an emissary and then a queen. That was back when things were just so… simple. When she hunted out the healer in the Swamp and begged to learn all that she knew.
 
But she was now broken beyond her own help. She was so very different to that young girl who did not know what love was like – how blistering and wonderful and utterly consuming it could be. The girl who did not know what horrors the world could create – Florentine was not afraid of monsters, for the greater monsters were what they made for themselves and for each other. Her wing was broken by the very creature she brought back from death. Ruth. Oh that kitten, she still remembers how fragile that dying cat felt in her arms. Florentine was just a child then, buoyed by naivety and a belief she could help all. It had served her that day, and she would not have done anything differently. She would still have willed her own young healing into that other baby creature. They were children together, she and Ruth. But Ruth returned, changed by Time magic into a beast – the largest Florentine had ever seen. They did not recognize one another, and Ruth struck her from the sky as if she were little more than a moth. But it was not Ruth who brought on Florentine’s depression. It was not she who made the once-queen feel dark as death.
 
That was all Florentine.
 
Yet Florentine smiles, for healing was everything. Her gaze travels thoughtfully over Samaira’s wings. Each seemed whole and perfect, unblemished. “Oh, really? I would never have known.” And Flora’s eyes are bright with hope. “Who healed you then?”
 
The healer gestures toward the bandage that wrapped about her slim torso. “Please.” Florentine murmurs and then, sheepishly she laughs, “I am sorry it is so dirty. I travelled from Denocte only a couple of days ago and I have not found a suitable replacement for this bandage yet. So it is a little road-worn.”
 
But all of Florentine is as rough and wild as the woodland that surrounds the hospital. Her mane is as wild and free as the grasses and roots that grow in beautiful tangles. Her flowers are like those that bloom within a free meadow.
 
There is a silence that descends upon them, as the bandage is unwound, the degree of her twisted wing revealed, nothing like it once was: once whole and working and beautiful. The muscles are fatigued, weary with misuse the bones fused, bent and wrong. Florentine sighs softly as she looks to it and then away, as if ashamed – in part. “I wish to get it fixed-“ She begins in a small voice, a whisper, a confession. “So I am healthy for when my child comes.” Her smile is small, shy, quite unlike her usual open manner. But maybe that is the nature of first confessions, of the first realization of motherhood. They are enough to make one shy, nervous. Besides, she needs someone to tell, especially since Lysander is not around.
 
Her lashes lower across her cheek, deep and rich. They shadow her face in a fan and Florentine gathers her breath as her eyes close. When they open they are brighter, more joyful. “There is some movement…” And her wing lifts a bit, but not enough. Slowly she moves it through its range of motion, always a bit but never enough. Then with a sigh she returns it to its place. “And now it aches… Do you think you might be able to heal it?”

@Samaira 

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world