H
e turns and he will find big, bright, blue eyes staring back at him. He smiles and she suddenly feels no urge to speak, and break the peaceful calm that encased her form entirely. Where has this smile been before? Across oceans, through the deserts, over mountains, twisting through trees. If it could talk, what stories would it tell? Although Elli knows, smiles can very well tell many stories to those willing to listen. Something like delight twists in her as she watches him. Something like a heart beat thunders in her bones, but it is not her own. Souls are heavy things, this the little girl in the woods knows. She knows it better than he may, but then again, she does not wear a necklace made of one. She just carries their voices around in her head.
“What a fate,” she comments to him, her voice as silvery and as bright as her mother’s had been at this age. Talking, Elli thinks, she wonders what things she would say to a white raven to draw it to her. Though listening, she thinks, she could listen to its called, could listen for the sweep of wings over the sky, or the rustle of branches it flies past. Even the spirits that cry as they follow. Her eyes glance to the dog beside him, wonders if there exists a relationship betweens birds and canines. (What secrets do they share?)
She offers him a small smile, that smile that only emerges when mystery is afoot and working its way towards her. “Cross my heart,” she says, staring at him with wide, expectant eyes. Look closely and you can see ghosts laughing behind the blue of them.
“Tell me everything.” From anyone else, those words might have sounded like a demand. But coming from her, with eyes that were both sad and sweet, searching his face in the shadowed forest, it was just a hopeful request. She walks close to him, and she walks with the liquid grace of someone you would expect to be older until she is a breath away, if she were older, maybe, just a bit, she might think she has never been so close to a boy before, but she doesn't think this as she looks down at his chest. “Does it have to do with that necklace?”
some are ghosts before they are dead.
