WEAVE HER A CHAIN OF SILVER TWIST, / AND A LITTLE HOOD OF SCARLET WOOL, / AND LET HER PERCH UPON YOUR WRIST / AND TELL HER SHE IS BEAUTIFUL.
☙❧
One of my lesser-known (and lesser-valued) skills is weaving crowns.
I picked it up mostly by chance in my first lifetime. You see, my mother absolutely adored flowers, and, when my sister and I were young, she would braid them into our hair all the time. If she wasn’t braiding them, she was making crowns out of them, and, somewhere along the line, I learned to do the same. The brilliant jewelry and bright gemstones that adorn so many of the residents of Novus were virtually inaccessible to most people at home, so we made do with what we had to dress up. Sometimes the priestesses used them, in ritual attire; my charms are from that. Otherwise, the brightest thing I’d ever seen before I left home were the golden laurels that sprung from the antlers of my king.
Now I am weaving flower crowns again, ever so meticulously, and I am laughing almost like I remember laughing when I would do the same with my mother and my sister, but in a different voice. (The tulips, sprung up from the frozen ground, are reborn; so am I.) This is my first spring, and it is beautiful. I have never seen so much green before in all my lives, dotted with head after head after head of multicolored tulips, which I have never seen before either – not in such great quantities. There are sweet drinks and pastries and the smiling faces of people that, after nearly half a year, I am beginning to recognize as slightly more than strange faces on the street, and I am trying to embrace every passing moment and be resplendently happy about it, without thinking now of all the ways that the tulips must eventually return to their place beneath the ground and how it has been nearly half a year, and I have not found who I am looking for, and how-
It is not good to think of dark things here. (Burned forests, burning starlings.)
I think of looking for Elliana, but, looking down at the collection of flowers in the wicker basket I picked up on the roadside nearest the field, I decide instead that I should look for Elena. If I cannot weave crowns for my mother again, and I cannot – we are separated by centuries, now, and lifetimes, and I have made my peace with it (as much as anyone ever will) -, I think that weaving a crown for her might be the next best thing. She is not a queen, and I have never served one, but I imagine that she carries herself with all of the grace and goodness of the ones who appear in Elliana’s bedtime stories.
I pick my way across the field, brow furrowed against the brightness of the midday light, and I find her eventually in the flowers, a speck of sun on the ground. I flash her a soft smile, calling out a gentle, “Elena?” and I pick my way towards her through the field, basket of flowers balanced neatly between my shoulderblades and wings. I gesture back at it with a turn of my head. “Would you like me to weave a crown for you?”
(My own, a mixture of bloodred and gold-yellow – to match my odd eyes and autumn colors – falls crooked on my skull; I readjust it quickly.)
@Elena || <3 || elinor wylie, "the falcon"
Speech
☙❧
One of my lesser-known (and lesser-valued) skills is weaving crowns.
I picked it up mostly by chance in my first lifetime. You see, my mother absolutely adored flowers, and, when my sister and I were young, she would braid them into our hair all the time. If she wasn’t braiding them, she was making crowns out of them, and, somewhere along the line, I learned to do the same. The brilliant jewelry and bright gemstones that adorn so many of the residents of Novus were virtually inaccessible to most people at home, so we made do with what we had to dress up. Sometimes the priestesses used them, in ritual attire; my charms are from that. Otherwise, the brightest thing I’d ever seen before I left home were the golden laurels that sprung from the antlers of my king.
Now I am weaving flower crowns again, ever so meticulously, and I am laughing almost like I remember laughing when I would do the same with my mother and my sister, but in a different voice. (The tulips, sprung up from the frozen ground, are reborn; so am I.) This is my first spring, and it is beautiful. I have never seen so much green before in all my lives, dotted with head after head after head of multicolored tulips, which I have never seen before either – not in such great quantities. There are sweet drinks and pastries and the smiling faces of people that, after nearly half a year, I am beginning to recognize as slightly more than strange faces on the street, and I am trying to embrace every passing moment and be resplendently happy about it, without thinking now of all the ways that the tulips must eventually return to their place beneath the ground and how it has been nearly half a year, and I have not found who I am looking for, and how-
It is not good to think of dark things here. (Burned forests, burning starlings.)
I think of looking for Elliana, but, looking down at the collection of flowers in the wicker basket I picked up on the roadside nearest the field, I decide instead that I should look for Elena. If I cannot weave crowns for my mother again, and I cannot – we are separated by centuries, now, and lifetimes, and I have made my peace with it (as much as anyone ever will) -, I think that weaving a crown for her might be the next best thing. She is not a queen, and I have never served one, but I imagine that she carries herself with all of the grace and goodness of the ones who appear in Elliana’s bedtime stories.
I pick my way across the field, brow furrowed against the brightness of the midday light, and I find her eventually in the flowers, a speck of sun on the ground. I flash her a soft smile, calling out a gentle, “Elena?” and I pick my way towards her through the field, basket of flowers balanced neatly between my shoulderblades and wings. I gesture back at it with a turn of my head. “Would you like me to weave a crown for you?”
(My own, a mixture of bloodred and gold-yellow – to match my odd eyes and autumn colors – falls crooked on my skull; I readjust it quickly.)
@
Speech
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
