[P] and the marsh became her mother,

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

E

lena had once been a bright eyed, star crossed lover. She had sought out the good in everybody, but there are so many souls that come into her life, when she was in Beyond, in Beqanna, and here in Novus (and here in this swamp), that it is so hard to cling to that ideology. Her rope is about to snap, but Elena keeps climbing, thinking she can reach the top. Elena has tried and failed to pull herself back together. There are certain things, written deep in the cavernous space of the heart, that cannot be scraped away, no matter how much she digs and digs at it.

There is hesitancy in her, and Elena clings to this piece, and it is only this that the golden girl then thinks, she can be saved. She can save her. “Don’t,” Elena says, voice calm and pleasant but eerily distant, as if she were looking through this world into another, even when she turns and focuses on the girl (girl, she has to remember, despite the predator she feels inside her, girl like Elliana, like her own daughter) the wind pulls her blonde mane out of blue eyes.

But then something shifts in the girl and she denies Elena any victory at all in saving her (when will she learn she cannot save everyone? Maybe it is the cursed thoughts of healers and healers alone that believe such things. But she cannot save her and the palomino chokes on her pride. (It takes bitter like swamp plants.)

She chases her until the the water girl overtakes her, and though she is a foolish creature, lost in hopes, Elena is intelligent enough to know (or maybe she is broke enough to know) when it is lost.

As she listens to the feeding, to the dying. As she feels the fear, the satisfaction, the confusion, the hurt. Elena takes a flower from the vine, she thinks of the soul lost (of two souls lost), and places it in the water. The chaos not far from her makes waves, and it carries the flower far far away. The golden girl leaves the swamp, and for the first time in a long time— Elena prays.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Avesta