prayed to keep my soul
S
he did not yet understand the connection that had forged between them; she did not understand the way her heart had seen him in a way her eyes never could, because she still doesn’t even know who he is and who he will become. But Elli, in all of her young, unbridled naivety, didn’t care at all.
Whoever he is, she cannot help but to feel like he is hers; like a million stars must have lined up to make sure that their paths crossed on that cold, day in that empty field. Destiny was strange like that, she would come to find.
For now, it is just him and her, both of them alight in the glow of the stars and the magic.
She stands beside him, carefree and unafraid. The moonlight pours a stage on which they are dancers, or actors, maybe they are poets or musicians. (The possibilities are endless when you’re young.) With a tip of her head she smiles at him when he asks the question.
What do they say?
This is not the first time she has been asked. The other one who asked was someone entirely different from this one. A man of horns and ghosts etched in his face.
“Secrets,” she presses the answer into him as a whisper. She cannot tell him about the regrets, cannot tell him about the sorrows, cannot tell him about the longing. These things they tell her, she cannot tell him.
He holds her gaze and it feels like time slows. It feels like dying, and she knows about dying. It feels like she can hear the static in the air around her face. It feels like she can smell every dewy blade of the sweet-grass they stand in. It feels like her heart is hammering against her chest so hard it threatens to break through her ribs, like her eyes are rolling back into her head and she can see nothing and somehow everything. It feels like dying.
It feels like seeing everything she has ever wanted for all of her existence.
Thank you, Elli.
She sighs. Elli feels her heart burning – she thinks in all her young life, she has never heard melody in syllables before. “Enjoy the magic tonight, Aeneas,” she says, says his name, because she can never say it enough. (She will find, later, that she does not like his name as much when it is not said from her mouth.) “Tomorrow, it will be gone,” she tells him because it disappears with the sun, she has tried to look for them in the light and has always been disappointed. “But if anyone can bring magic back…” back to their secret meadow, where a girl says a boy’s name, and a boy asks a girl what shadows say. “Bring it back, Aeneas.”
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
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