[P] no one can hurt you [Azrael]

[Elena]

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

She remembers that night. Her mother lying there quiet and still, Elena refusing to believe the truth, she had been the only one who had seen her mother perform that secret cartwheel at the edge of her grave, everyone else had already absolved that she was gone, but her blonde daughter refused to believe it so easily. She had no pulse, her body was cold and stiff, but Elena looked beyond the mere body, she could see her mother’s spirit was bright and beautiful, just as she had been in life. When they had lowered her body into the grave that Son’crae had dug for her with powers over earth, Elena had told her father she was still there. 

That night her mind had erupted into nightmares, she was inside the earth, screaming and crying and gnashing her teeth. But you cant hear screams though earth and stone.

That night Elena died because she couldn't breathe.

She screamed and wailed in her slumber until her grandmother woke her up, stroking her golden forehead softly. ‘We buried her, we buried her,’ she cried in agony. ‘She cant breathe.’ Elena said in panic, wanting to rush to her mother’s grave site. By then her father had awoken and they steadied the child, assuring her that while her mother’s body rested in the ground still and silent, her soul and spirit had been free to travel. She had not suffered any once she took that final breath.

She feels that same way for a moment, as she moves away from the dancing, away from the monk, away from the excitement. It feels like there is dirt in her lungs and her eyes start to water. It is only then she realizes she is standing close to the bonfire and the smoke was clouding over her like a blanket placed over a child. 

The golden sunshine girl feels hot, feverish, and she turns away from the festivities, craving something like quiet and darkness. Suddenly everything feels too bright and too loud. 

She feels the dirt inside her lungs, building and building. 
They buried her. 

Who?

Her mother, her father, Valerio, Lilli, Lovelace Aerwir, Altair, Underworld, Caunion, Kensa, Tunnel…
All of them, they threw dirt onto her grave even as they didn't know, just handfuls of dirt onto her grave as she cried out. ‘I’m alive, I’m alive,’ and turned secret cartwheels to try to let them know. They never stopped. 

This is when those blue eyes look up and a hand reaches out, pulling her from the grave. Those mountains that set out before her, they make her dizzy and excited all at once. They are not the same ones that built cathedrals in her heart, but there is a certain sense of familiarity with the landscape, and she goes, moving away from the party, though bonfires light the entire way. There is distant laughter and singular cheering that she moves past. She had seen them before. She’s tried to come here but never actually crossed into the mysterious land of Denocte. Dusk and Night are sisters in a way, but she had not ever truly thought about it until she thinks of ocean and mountains, two beautiful things, two beautiful book ends with the rest of world in between their great heights and deep trenches. 

She leaves an imaginary trail of dirt behind her, shedding the grave she had once dug herself. It is the air of the mountain when she breaks above the tree line that she thinks ‘this, this must be what it is like to breathe.’

And she asks herself, with her lungs free of dirt and her head above the soil, she asks herself if they world has always truly been this beautiful, or has seven years underground just made her desperate for the starlight?



* 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.

@Azrael