prayed to keep my soul
S
he has spent a considerable amount of nights during her short, short life so far, with her head tipped back to the starsShe has watched how they spin and clash, how they spiral apart and away from one another, opening up entire chasms between them all. She has watched how they breed black holes, swallowing entire galaxies in the blink of an eye. She has dreamed she was there once, that a ghost, one of her ghosts, took her into the stars. She had reached for the sun and felt it snap beneath her, sending her spinning off into nothingness. She dreams of it still, the quiet, the black, the crushing gravity.
Such things press into her now, a strange weight in her chest.
They had gone to Dawn, her mother had taken her with. The willowy girl had stood in Elena’s shadow, watching as she spoke to people, people she knew, people Elliana did not. She was stuck there, chains hanging from her skin while her entire body burned to be elsewhere. It was only when the blue eyes of her mother turned to her and told her to stay close, but that she could go and play.
The willowy girl had needed nothing else to drop the chains beside her, send them clattering into the snow ground before like ballerina, she twirls into the barren trees. They try to catch her, to reach her, those empty branches trying to wrap around her waist as if they were her partner. They lift her into a leap and she lands in the snow with a graceful patter.
From the day she was born, her legs itched with wanderlust. And this, this is the only thing that soothes it, this moment alone, to stretch her arms from one end of the forest to the other. She thinks if she stretches them far enough they may find one other on the other side, and clasp together.
She dances, she sashays like she on ice, chaines as those short locks of hair try to flutter in her own windstorm like her mother’s does, so effortlessly.
The day passes, and Elliana falls deeper into that forest, no not falls, dancers do not fall, she glides, leaps, turns. This is her dance floor, and the snow ignites underneath the setting sun and the rising moon.
There is part of her that knows she should have gone back sooner. Back before it was dark, before the shadows started to creep, to crawl, to throw themselves upon Elliana’s body as if she were their canvas and they paint.
Part of her that knows her mother will be displeased, and like a petulant child, she had avoided it.
A snowflake falls. It lands on her tongue. It tastes like water, like cold, like sugar, and a little like kisses on foreheads.
She tastes another.
Another.
Until her lips are frozen.
She hears something.
Her lip are so cold she cant move her mouth anymore, when she drags that dark head from the sky. When she does speak, she finds she is surprised that she is capable of it. Her head tilts to the side and she considers him with her cornflower gaze, they pierce from her dark skin. “Hello?” Elliana blinks, shakes her head at such an unclever thing she has just said.
That is when the voices start.
They start like an almost silent buzz, in spring it could be confused for bees humming.
But Elliana has never known spring, she has never known the bees in their trees.
She knows those voices. They comes to her when she closes her eyes to sleep. They cry outside her window, they giggle under her bed, they whisper in her ear just when she thinks she has fallen asleep.
A shape appears before her, a lady she knows all to well. The lady with the bent neck. She doesn't cry, doesn't whimper, just closes her eyes and drowns in the voices of the dead.
@Isolt @Danaë speaks
elliana
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