[AW] the divine revelation of an almost-star,

[Elena]

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

In a blink everything changes.

Before, she was a wide-eyed child with great enthusiasm for the world, but little understanding of it.  Before, she was forced to learn on her own, a difficult task growing up both motherless and fatherless.  She discovered loyalty and loss, anger and angst.  She found passion and purpose; she found love and lost it, let it destroy her. Where was she now? What did these changes mean? It left Elena with a headache that made her vision blurry.

It was everything that had happened to her in the past year; it was the way she had been consumed by what she had thought was love. But was love this painful? Did love take everything from you and then give nothing in return? Was love this demanding, this selfish, this excruciating?

She had no barometer.

She had watched her parents in love, but she had been too young to understand it, to know the weight. She knew they looked at each other and took kisses from each other’s lips. Elena had known love from her parents, but had understood it in little else. Until she had met Lilli, and Lilli had offered her that unconditional love, forgiving and forgetting, promising her cousin the world even if she had little else in return to offer.

And right now she didn't know where Lilli was, and it killed her.

She searches for reminders of her, and Elena heads to the place where flowers bloom and the fog settles just so to make you believe you are in a place made entirely of imagination and fantasy. But when she moves through the fog, Elena finds that she is not alone in her mourning for another life, another time.

This could be meaningless, this meeting of strangers in the fog and the stars. Except no moment is truly meaningless. They are all important and individual, formative in some way, and this one will be no different for either one of them. Another piece of an important past, someday. She knows this, Elena knows this, and that is why she goes to the girl who weeps and the boy who whispers.

“Does it hurt?” Elena asks her, a strange question. What hurts? Her body, her soul, her heart. Elena has felt them all and she recognizes the pain in another’s tears and the little girl inside her that comforted her cousin in a field of dead flowers wants nothing more than to take it away. Her smile is hesitant but kind as she moves to her side, next to the boy with emeralds shining in his eyes.

She cannot help in this moment to find the mare beautiful and Elena feels the pinch of guilt dig in her stomach. She is beautiful in her sorrow, in her agony, and Elena admires her for it. "My name is Elena,” she finally offers, her voice made of fog. It is a lilting voice that is distinctly feminine but not overly so. Easy, pleasant, calming. It is the kind of voice you want to hear in the midst of chaos. It is the kind of voice you want to hear when the storm simmers into action. But not the kind of voice to whisper soft nothings. “Do you want to be alone?” She asks the crying girl.

‘Please say no,’ that selfish part of her begs. Elena is a slave to the companionship of others and she would gladly soak her shoulder in tears if she just didn't have to take the lonely road back home with only the darkness to keep her company.



* 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.

@warset @Pan