[P] and death is the love of what hurts you the most

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

It had been like a punch to the gut and she had felt dizzy with disappointment, with regret, with the pained way her heart threatened to punch clean through her chest. At times, she had wondered if she had made him up, if she had some how dreamt of him. She wondered if she had carved out the sharpness of his jawline from the ache in her heart and if she had imagined the way that he had told her that she was in his soul, the way he had held her like it mattered, like she mattered.

But the longer she wondered, the more it hurt and the feeling grates down her spine like a knife in her back. (Though Elena now knows betrayal sings its way deeper, far deeper than any knife could).

The more she felt the vicious loss of him as a tangible thing.

Finally, she did the only thing she knew how: she built a wall around her agony. She lifted herself up from the cold ground and shook herself off and she went on living because it’s the only thing. The only thing.

There is a simplicity in the ocean, for all that it can be so wild and unpredictable. Perhaps that is why Elena had found herself a clifftop home that stares across the crashing waves. And why she finds herself by its shores today. Elli is sitting with Nic as she teaches her daughter what it means to be a knight and Elliana imagines herself discovering new places, new lands, new friends.

The day is windy, it whips against flaxen locks of hair, letting it circle about her head like an undeserved halo. She pushes against the wind, it is cold, so cold against her skin, but Elena has always been a glutton for punishment.

Elena sees so many, at least once, beside the sea. There is something about the sea breeze in their hair, the smell of salt that makes a meeting so much more intimate, meaningful. She has seen Michael, Tenebrae, Azrael, Torrin, and Anandi. So many of them. The sea has broken her heart and rebuilt her so many times already while in Novus, and Elena, the foolish lover she is, keeps coming back for it.

She finds Seraphina, and she will join the list of others she has seen with crashing white caps dancing as wolf and fawn in the background. Elena finds her, grey like storm clouds, there are pieces of her, of her coloring that remind her of Elliana, remind her that she really should be going home, should leave all this behind. But Elena stands there, hanging between speaking and staying silent as she looks at her with eyes of glacial blue. “You are bleeding,” she says finally, quietly, voice sad and silver, molten when it spills over such soft, sweet lips. Elena walks towards her, her chance to leave, unnoticed, unmet, leaving her with every step she takes towards the mare. “I am Elena,” she says. Her eyes rove to the cut, superficial, but a cut all the same. “We should clean that.”

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them