prayed to keep my soul
T
here is always such a curiosity, this welling of wonder in the core of her chest. She is a sensitive thing, she aches for places she has never been, and weeps for people she has never met. Elliana was meant to stretch across the earth, dance in the sunlight, and explore every shadow. But she is not in any of those places, Instead she sits by a man who is not a deer, beside a river. She thinks for a quick moment how it might be to be somewhere else. But she is no where else, and so she smiles contently for now, a small thing on her face, teasing blue eyes that disappear for a moment with a swoop of long, innocent lashes. “I kind of wish you were one though,” she says, confesses, observes in that way children are so known for. It is so perfectly innocent and maybe had it been said by any other it could have been taken differently. But Elliana is just different, just strange enough. She was a shadow. A flower hidden by the trees. “Do you?” She asks him. Deer weren't common in Terrastella, aside from the Mirestag, but she was hardly allowed to go looking for such creatures. “I’ve never seen one, only in my storybooks,” she says. The princess who sang to the wild animals, the faes that cared for the forest. Pictures, and she has painted her own. Maybe this antlered man knew where to find them.
She admires the jewels that come close to her. “Those are pretty,” she remarks. Though her small family did not hurt for money, they hardly lived lavishly, Elena preferring her daughter to grow up modest and humble, just as she had. Their rubies were red roses, their emeralds new sprouts, and their aquamarines forget-me-nots. If flowers were jewels, then perhaps they would be the richest in the land.
Her small body is dwarfed even more next to the stallion, but she doesn't notice. Elliana spends far too much of her attention on insignificant things and is blind to what her mother cautions her of. She would see not a wolf’s teeth, but his amber eyes. She would watch not a dragon’s fire, but the glisten of her scales. She would notice not the kelpie’s hunger for her flesh, but the smell of sea salt on their skin.
She laughs like snowflakes in the sun. The plants are beautiful and Elli smiles. “You need more paintings.” A pause and a smile that is so delicately beautiful when it crinkles in the corners of those too blue eyes. “I could paint some.” Clearly, her understanding of maps is limited. She sees pages and thinks of stories, she thinks of stories and she thinks of pictures. “Well, you suppose wrong,” she says to him, looking up at him with satellite dish eyes. She is a bold little thing, but she thinks she has nothing to fear, but the shadows that whisper to her at night. She thinks if she has a nightmare, her father will vanquish them like the dream knight he is, that she knows him to be.
Elliana is ignorant of the fact that it is her real father that placed those shadows, however accidental it may be, there in the first place.
“Want to go on a walk together?” She asks him, tilting that little head. “You can finish your map and I can look for tulips in the snow.”
@Septimus elliana speaks
elliana
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