prayed to keep my soul
M
y god has answered me, that is what her father told her that her name means. Ask Elliana and her gods have yet to answer her. Ask for your family, your ancestors will guide you, her mother told her.
And so she asks.
And they answer.
“Don’t worry, I’ll save you if you forget how to swim,” comes the voice of the grandfather she has been so desperate to meet since she first started seeing spirits. "Aren't you just a knight in shining armor? You don't have to worry about little ol' me, though. I think I can fare just fine without those muscles of yours.” Comes her grandmother. And she sees them, they stand close together and look down at her. She has her grandfather’s chin, her grandmother’s eyes. “I’ve always wanted to breathe underwater…what about you, Elli?” The black stallion asks his granddaughter. And then the pale woman looks first to him and down at the girl. "That would certainly be something, wouldn't it? Imagine what sort of world there could be down there.” They look down at her below the surface. She thinks, she could touch them.
Elli!
Another voice calls, but she cannot recognize it in this moment, there is only a granddaughter and her grandparents. They are so separated. A wide gulf of galaxies and comets; a mesosphere, stratosphere and troposphere, incompatible atmospheres and tugging gravities.
“Grab on, Elli,” her pale grandmother says and Elliana reaches out, surprises herself when she feels something solid beneath her touch. Was she truly a ghost? She had to be. She has heard the stories, of her grandmother growing ill and weary before resting her eyes to slip into the world beyond this one. “Breathe, Elli,” her grandfather tells her, pressing his dark head to her own. She feels nothing, only he rush of air into her lungs as she inhales above the waves.
Suddenly the world is clear, and she can see the ocean waves rocking around her, as she bobs and dips on its surface. And then she sees him. “Aeneas!” she cries out as he falls beneath the surface of the waves.
She could live a hundred nights and not feel the way she did now.
To be so close to death, so close to those spirits, she wonders if this is what it means to be truly alive. Only living when you walk to the edge of that bridge. (Is this how her mother felt when she turned to face a city of bones and death?) She dips below the wave once more, those dusty blue eyes desperate to keep track of him, of Aeneas. And that is when, behind him, erupts a stallion of white. He is beautiful and everything, for a moment stands still. She blinks. He is gone. It is Aeneas in his wake.
Later, a few nights from now, when she paints the stallion, the water, she will realize that he was not behind Aeneas, nor in front of, but he was where Aeneas stood, as if—
“Aeneas!” Comes her voice once more as she struggles to swim to him, closing her body around him, trying to hold onto him. “Swim,” she whispers into his ear in gasps of air, followed by the gargle of water trying to fight its way into her throat. Her tongue tastes rough with salt water, her body feels light with buoyancy, and her eyes sting with fear and salty tears. She presses her forehead to his own. “Swim for me, please.”
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
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