prayed to keep my soul
W
hisper. Whisper. Whisper. Whisper. Whisper.
A ghost is here. Does he know?
It rests against Elli’s spine, and he tells a story in her ear. About a boy who stood there, newly born, dead mother, father as absent as shadows at noon. He took the sun from the sky and swallowed it down his throat. Did it burn? Elliana wants to ask the ghost that smiles behind her ear. But she doesn’t. Her mouth hangs open for a moment as if she too may swallow the sun when it rises. She knows she won’t. She may be her father’s daughter—she is also her mother’s and she swallows those shadows, enamored by their mystery and darkness.
Her eyes laugh before she does, lighting up with it before the sound comes chiming from her dark mouth. “You are not old,” she says. “I can tell,” she narrows blue eyes in thought. “Shadows move differently when they are old and weary,” she tells him and it is true. Those old ghosts, their shadows sigh and pull back, and grieve. But young shadows, they move, rattle the cage they have been trapped in, or dance freely amongst the shadows of the flowers. His does not quite dance, does not quite long to escape. She is not as attune to emotions as her empathetic mother, Elli longs to know more, about what his own darkness wants, what it searches for.
They like her too much. Elli does not realize how desperately she needed to hear it, and how she needed to hear it from her father and her father along. The weight of his words fold across her skin and nestles itself between shoulder blades, make her stand a little taller. He cannot see the smile that comes to rest across her face, but she hopes the shadows will tell him so.
She begins to follow him then, him and his shadows, through the light of the bonfire. “I can’t,” she suddenly says as her blood grows hot. And suddenly she wishes to run, to run the race her mother told her about, to stay away from. His shadows gave her this, they alighted wings upon her feet. “Goodbye, Dall,” she says and descends away from the fires and into the shadows once more—she finds now that she delights in the dim, dark rhythm of the night.
@Tenebrae elliana speaks
elliana
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