[P] seek me out

[Elena]

It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary

S

he never heard the rumors. Maybe if she has she would not have come. Maybe she would have tucked Elliana closer to her and they would have settled before the window of her cottage, Nic beside them, and watched a spring rain begin to wash away the winter snow.

Maybe still—she would have come anyway.

Elena is not a girl who slays monsters—

She is a girl who loves them.

The ground rattles beneath her feet, and she would think the world was ending if she did not know that it still has misery to offer her before it dissolves in the nothingness that waits for all of them on the other side.

Lilli had urged her no more cliff dancing, to stay far, far away from those ledges that so enticed her.

But Lilli has told Elena no words of warning when it comes to rickety bridges and burning cities.

She hears nothing, no voice of reason, feels nothing, no soothing touch upon her back, she can only see the horned stallion as he comes towards her and she thinks she should have know, she should have known. Even when she is a good girl, even when she follows the path, the wolf, the lion, he always finds the lamb, the fawn. He told her once he was neither, but then again, she has been fooled by disguises before. (A monster with a smile and a touch, a shadow dressed in bonfire embers, the beauty of snowfall covering the deadly ice that waits.)

Elena thinks she could go to the ends of the world, the ends of time, and he would be there, smiling while the world blazed down into ashes, and time drowned in the sea.

“There was little choice once on the bridge,” she says flatly, blue eyes glancing towards him. “Forward or back,” and a roll of her shoulders. “You found your way here,” she says, not offering him a question, just a mild observation. And just in an instant her defenses are dropped and she looks at him with wide eyes, they are neither winter ice nor summer skies, but blue like her mother’s eyes when that Snow Prince tried to take her daughter. “I think—I am scared.” She says, and tries to breathe, but it catches in her chest. “And yet, I cant stop myself.”

And she steps towards the city, like Snow White reaching for the apple.

@Vercingtorix
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon