prayed to keep my soul
E
lliana does not wish to climb higher onto the mountain to look down at the others around her. She wants to climb high enough to see above the clouds, to find out if they look like snow when you get to the other side of them. She does not wish to dive into the deep ocean, to go further than anyone else and harness whatever power the sea hides. Instead she wants to find the shells that hide there, and ask the fish, ‘do you get scared of the dark down here?’ She does not wish to be the first to travel through a jungle, but only to make it to the waterfall it harbors and smell the flowers that cling to it, and let the mists gather on her skin. She is happy to watch others pass her, climb higher, go deeper, Elliana is content to watch, ands he will wave them in passing, blow a kiss only when their backs are turned.
Another child would laugh at the way he is tickled by the paintbrush, but Elli is so concentrated that any twitch of his skin is not separate thing. It is like when the wind blows against the back of her canvas and the paper bubbles up. Part of the process, part of the painting, part of the beauty and the story. “I like your name,” she gifts him with a compliment, something she does not so freely give as her mother does. “But I like the sand dunes, maybe that’s why,” she says, such a childish assumption, but one could not believe it to be untrue. She loves the flower on his shoulder, it glows gold like the sand in what she imagines it must shimmer like in the sun. The golden orange hue is stunning, nothing like the gold paint he worse before, the gold of wealth, of money. This was the gold of nature, of exploration.
She looks down at her night sky body when he pulls away and giggles. It is beautiful, she thinks, she would have to keep it until her papa could see. It would be a battle, resisting a bath for that long, but her mother, she should understand. “I thought the same,” she says with a winkled nose as she adds a stem to her final flowers and backs away from the garden she created where she once believed a star to be. “I think I prefer the quiet of a field or a forest,” she says, even if such things are never quiet with the giggling sun and the dancing grass. “I’ve never listened to the dunes though, Dune. What do they sound like?” What do their shadows say? Who lurks inside them, waiting for someone to hear them?
@Dune elliana speaks
elliana
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(okay, I ended up not closing it because i love Dune, but we are welcome to whenever!)
