prayed to keep my soul
S
he had been born in the middle of winter. It seemed so odd that life would be found in the middle of death. Snow had covered the ground on which her body had lain, where she should have taken her first breath, where she eventually did—only when the spirits found her. Only when they came from the shadows and kissed her brow, and pressed that heart inside her chest, and slipped the breath into her lungs. And there her too blue eyes opened and she found them gathered around, eager to see their creation. Her mother wrapped herself around her and that is when her life began. The spirits gave her that, life, but her mother was the one to give her the ability to live.
She doesn't want to be a scholar, doesn't want to be a medic like her mother, nor a politician, or a soldier. And yet she still sits here, learning the history of her home, learning medicines, learning what alliances are and the wars they faced. She learns all of this while her mind rests on the feeling of a paintbrush on canvas. Elliana cannot hear what the teacher says, only hears the roar of a waterfall in her ears. She doesn't realize she has been creating the landscape of this waterfall on her notes until the teacher comes over and stares down at the girl with a disapproving look. ‘Perhaps you should find your head from the clouds and come back to us when you are ready to learn.’ She says and Elliana is dismissed.
Her mother will be upset. Upset that her daughter is not the stellar student she wished for, that she would not be as skilled as her mother was, her mother who had already been a blossoming apprentice before her first birthday. She could heal a broken wing and treat a burn when she had been Elliana’s age. And what could her daughter do? She knew how to mix her paints just so to steal the colors of the sunset from the sky. She knew just the right amount of pressure to make snow that froze on the page.
Elliana takes her canvas, her brushes and paints when she leaves the school and walks towards the garden. She finds the pine green of the trees and the grey of the clouds a backdrop she needs to capture. She knows, just by looking there is something missing, it needed a subject, someone to stand among the trees with the clouds baring down upon them.
She hides an almost smile when she spots him in the garden. What was he doing here? She watches him breathe, watches him stand so still. It is cold out here, but Elliana has only ever known the cold, she was not like her mother, not a child of summer. She blink blue eyes, halting her painting for just a moment before—
“Have you learned to fly yet?” She asks him as she begins to the long strokes of his wings, of his feathers against the canvas. She doesn't think about what she draws, what he will think of being immortalized with such simple motions. She doesn't think, she just paints. It is the entire reason she is out in the garden in the first place. “Or are you waiting till you grow some more?” She asks him, looking away from her painting, studying the angle of his face before returning back to her work. “You look plenty big to me.”
@Aeneas speaks
elliana
—
« ♡ »
—
« ♡ »
