prayed to keep my soul
S
he was so young that day she met them—and yet she will leave them feeling entirely too old in her young body. This feeling, it will fade after a few days of playing with Nic, hearing bedtime stories, and losing herself in her paintings.But right now, the emotion is fresh and she stands taller, braver, or maybe we grow more foolish as we age. They have made her older, for she was not born this way, but they are shaping her, making her, even if they do not realize it.
She was so young the day she met them.
She stands at their feet as if they are not capable of terrible, horrid, deadly things. Or perhaps it is because she is capable of such things too. There is a sound, a trilling call that she would compare to that of a bird if she had to, but she knows it is not a bird. And she does not want to look into the darkness. The darkness that comes and keeps coming, as it always does. And as always, the bent neck lady with it.
Isolt smiles and it spread like blood from a wound as a smile slips over Elliana’s lips. And she smiles not like the coyote, but like the crow who is just out of reach, who knows about the death around them, and knows there is so very little they can do about it. So they smile because they know death better than most and they know not to be afraid.
Elliana is wrong.
If the unicorn says it, then it must be true.
The blind faith is an ill intended gift from mother to daughter.
“I can be wrong,” she says. “And so neither are you,” she says looking at them both. “You are not dead, I would know,” she says. You would know they tell her. “I would know.” A rose instead of a heart. These words would haunt her when she starts not to feel so old anymore, but young once more. It would haunt her as she stares at the roses in her mother’s windowsill and her heart flutters in her chest like petals in the window instead of beating like a drum. “And I would have it,” she says not hungry like the coyote, or pleading like the rabbit, but watchful like the crow.
And she walks.
The dead are already here, she can tell by the way the voices rise and swell around her, a crescendo of buzzing and humming and shaking. There are too many voices, too many sounds in her head to understand what happens around her. She wonders if this is what Nic feels like when she passes from one life into the next. Finally, the buzzing softens and she is brought back to the world. And she sees them, all of them, their forms waver there, the very sad and very dead lot of them. They look at her, finally quiet, and she thinks they are only quiet because them, the unicorns, and Elliana looks at them as if they were gatekeepers, when all along, she too has carried a key. “Did you kill any of them?” She asks because she doesn't want to know, but she thinks she will collapse if she keeps the question inside her head for too long. And then there she is, a clear path between them all: the bent neck lady that haunts her dreams only when she is awake. “They are scared of you,” she notes. “But why am I not?”
@isolt @DANAË elliana speaks
elliana
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