[P] Winters end

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

“And then, from the shadows the King of Bloodvale leaped, mouth open and aimed at Valerio’s throat!” The filly shouts excitedly as Mina and Maren sit there with wide eyes and open mouths, enthralled with the tale of their grandfather that they knew so little about. Mina even manages gasp as Elena’s voice grows low with suspense. “It looked like this was the end of Valerio the Valiant.” Voice is somber. Elena had a gift for storytelling, she always had. Creating dragons out of boulders, mountains out of pebbles, oceans out of streams. “But then, just in the knick of time, Valerio produced a gust of wind so powerful that he was able to blow Cazador back to Bloodvale,” she says and the fillies’ eyes light up in triumph as Elena raises her head a little higher. “The wind was so powerful that some say it is still blowing today, and will keep blowing for all of eternity, trapping Cazador there so he may never return to Windskeep again,” she says with an affirmative nod of her head, thus concluding her story. Of course, this tale was far from the truth, but the girls had asked for a Windskeep story and Elena certainly couldn't tell them tales about the war and how sometimes, despite her parents shielding her, she saw the soldiers come back bloodied and broken. How every time her father left she thought maybe he wont come back. She couldn't tell them about how Val returned every day looking more tired and more ragged than the day before. So Elena tells them a story full of conquest and glory because she cant bare the truth any more and if she tells the fantasy enough, believes it hard enough, maybe it can become her new reality.

She looks tired.

This is what Elena thinks when she looks to the mare. But Elena quickly pivots her ears towards the mare as she answers her question. The gentle start of a conversation was refreshing to the sunflower girl. “Politics, really?” Elena asks suddenly curious, it was like a thirst parching her throat. Elena too understands the call of a healer. She had been a politician, a diplomat back in Beqanna, but her first calling had been a healer, an apprentice to Lovelace. She had given up that grace and art for the complication of politics and alliances. In a way, it felt good to be back where she started. “You must have lived so many experiences,” she says, admiring the wisdom that is worn on her skin, behind her eyes. No wonder she is so tired.

Elena smiles in response, her one way to tell her that she didn't mind. “Childbirth,” she says then. “I helped the healer in our herd deliver many children before we too branched out from the herd to help other expecting mothers,” she says, remembering the laughter, the tears, the cries of pain, and the joyous breaths of relief. “I was a midwife of sorts, though I knew well enough to heal wounds, and although not all sickness could be treated, I learned how to manage the symptoms.” She pauses. “I thought becoming a diplomat could provide the same sort of satisfaction, but I got…tangled up in the wrong sort.” Was it really a diplomatic problem that had caused her to run into Tunnel? Or was it merely fate? Either way, politics had never been kind to Elena, from the war, to being stolen, to lust in alliances, he was meant for a quieter role. “It could be considered funny I suppose, that I should so love children, yet I don't have any of my own.”



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.

@Luvena