[P] closed doors and open windows [marisol]

[Elena]

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

The dainty filly had run out ahead of her mother, her childish giggles floating behind her like footprints. The valley grasses that surrounded the lake were lush and soft beneath her feet, with flowers bloomed and bright clustering the landscape. Up ahead, she could see the sun sparkling off the water, and with an excited squeal she had immediately raced ahead of her pale mother. She ignored her mother’s sharp protest, nearly at the water’s edge, her large amber eyes taking in the way sparkles and shines. But those awkward, gangly legs are no match for her mother’s much more fluid, strong stride, and in a matter of seconds she is crashing into the side of her mother’s barrel. “Elena!” There is worry that crests every syllable of her name. “What have I told you about rushing head first into things? You don't even know how to swim, what were you thinking?” And it is not so much sternness that Elena hears in her mother’s voice, but a tremor of fear.

But Elena was so oblivious to the near heart attack she had given her mother, and instead she ducks under her creamy stomach to peer out at the water she longed to romp in. “I just wanted to play in the water like you daddy did when you met,” she says and there is a trembling lower lip as if she may cry, but Beylani has seen this behavior before and she smiles before moving the girl off in another direction. She should know better.

Elena should know better.

She always should have known better.

There are some things she would know anywhere.
Some of these are sweet, like the exact architecture of her mother’s body, the lilt of her voice, the way she had smelled like flowers that Elena had no name for.

Some of them, well – they are not so sweet.
Other things she would know anywhere—the hot breath of the matter destroyer, the sound of his hooves hard against the forest floor, the way his voice reminded her of rats scampering on broken glass.

The girl with pale locks knows a leader when she sees one.

Marisol is stunning. Her grey eyes remind her of stones that scattered up the walls of the giant overlook in that ancient valley that Elena sometimes feels like she can no longer remember. She is brilliant, commanding, beautiful, intelligent, and Elena does not know her, but she is like Kensa, like Valerio, like Aletta, and the rest.

Her voice is like smoke and ash, heated, but not dangerous, and she both blossoms beneath it and then grows solemn. For a moment she is quiet as she considers her, her face serene, her smile flickering in the corners as she speaks. “Thank you, it is a cold day.” She follows the mare to shelter, her body shakes with chill. “I’m Elena.”



* 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.

@Marisol