prayed to keep my soul
T
here is nothing wild about her.She is calm but comely, the young girl. She has a gentle way about her (when she casts shadows on plants, she shifts to again allow the passage of sunlight). Elli stands alone and everything still happens around her, and would happen without her (the sun would still arrow across the sky, the animals would still weave and dig and climb through the land and night would still pull a cloak over everything). She is unmoving through it all. So still that she forgets to breathe and by the time she remembers, chokes on the air that hurriedly fills her lungs.
She is strange, perhaps, but not wild.
Not like the flowers, her mother’s flowers that sprout and grow around her. That sprout and grow just like the stories that now whisper between thin stems and beautiful petals. They talk about a girl, about a unicorn. They say she is strange and Elliana listens.
She has always liked strange.
This is whens she realizes why she keeps feeling that stuttering chill, raking down her spine like glass. She can sense the flowers that are dying, dying when they should not be, but dying all the same. It is her, it is her, she is sure of it. It is then she knows where to find her. Death points her like a compass. But it does not point north, but to a hole dug six feet into the ground.
She walks, and walks, up and down the rows, and it is not so much Elli’s feet that lead her, but her soul. It bounces and jostles around inside her, first at the tip of her forehead, telling her where to go, and then it sinks down into her chest, telling her she must go, and then it spills into her bones and her blood and she is consumed by it. She must find her, this is all she needs, all she wants. At least Elli thinks.
The girl will have this thought again, about what she wants and what she needs. It will come later in life, but at the heart of it, it will be the same, it will still be about those god-forsaken unicorns and the death of things and the ghosts. She will think about all the she needs, all that she wants.
Isolt is not the only creature who hears that flower cry out. It comes to Elliana as if across the planes of a dream and she turns and she finds her. She watches a smile creep across her face like the blood Elli saw that day she followed her mother to the hospital. How it dripped, dripped, dripped. But her smile, Elli thinks, does not drip, it is smeared across her face like someone trying to clean it up, clean up the blood.
And everyone moves from the monster as she stands there in her burial site made of flower petals and rotten roots. Everything inside Elliana is screaming like death, like dying flowers, and she has not felt so alive since the last time she was surrounded by more dead things than live things. She has not felt so much like home. And it is the birth of that red flower that sends her forwards, towards the girl, as if cartwheeling across the dirt. “Does it feel like a graveyard inside of your chest?” She asks her as she draws closer, and though her voice is soft it is hollow, like an echo. “Or does it feel like a garden blooming?”
@Isolt elliana speaks
elliana
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