prayed to keep my soul
E
lliana. Welcome to the world. Her father had told her. It is one of her earliest memories. And then he held her, held her in a way her mother never could, that no one every could. The way a father holds his daughter. He has been the only father she has ever known, she had never questioned her place in the world when she was able to snuggle closely beside her parents. Not until recently. The shadows tell her things.
She can feel there is something different between the both of them. Sure stars live in the night, but they are still light, just like her parents.
And Elli is just so oh so tempted by patches of darkness she ought not wander into.
She is patient in his silence. It is only one of the similarities that was passed from father to daughter. Elli is quiet as she watches him, when he speaks. Not because she is shy, but because she has always been one to observe first and talk second. Her words are elegant but rare, the steady girl always content to observe and watch over engage.”How so?” She asks him, so curious because no one ever speaks of shadows to her. They lay forgotten as their eyes shut for the night, blind to them, but Elli knows. Oh how she knows. And she wonders why she does.
“I guess so,” she responds, oddly never having had the word for how she feels about the shadows before. “But sometimes they frighten me,” she admits, staring up at him with blue eyes even if he could not look back at her. Would he feel it? The icy, winter blue of her eyes settling against his own face. They frighten her sometimes, yes, when they yell, when they come to her on a full night. A bent neck lady at the end of her bed.
Maybe if she had been more like her mother and less like her father, Elli would have reached into the basket to pull one out for him. But she simply carefully watches with the practiced patience of a monk. Eyes follow the offering into the fire. “It’s perfectly splendid,” she says, talking about flowers.
She does not even have to look to know he is smiling, but maybe she should have, to the mirror staring back at her in a similar smile that fathers give their daughters. “I have heard sunflowers grow in the fields in the summer,” she says, adding another offering to the fire. “I think I should like to see them.” Her mother has told her enough about them, they have one in the window, but she has yet to see an entire field of suns. “Have you seen them before?” She thinks for a moment. “Can you tell me about summer?” She asks like such a child of winter. “Is it as warm and as bright as they say?” She thinks. “I do not know if I will like any of it—except the sunflowers.”
@Tenebrae elliana speaks
elliana
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