S
he’d returned to the cliffs, finding something intriguing about the tall, naturally towering stone, and the way that the ocean still managed to wend its way through it all. Not travelling far, remembering how long it had taken her to get back down from the high vantage where she’d met Cress, she stops at the first suitable place, and looks out across the wide, endless breadth of the sea.The sun is a golden ripple along its surface that occasionally is lightened into mercurial tones by the dance and waver of the waves. She watches this magical alteration from gilded to silvered with a passive eye, her mind actively playing through the difficult truths that had suddenly become her life.
She still had not found any trace of her family in this world, though it seemed that there were many from Helovia, dwelling in the peace to be found here in Novus. She had Evangeline, at least, but her old tutor was not the same as Maude remembered her; twisted and changed by the death and destruction that had impended their arrival here, miss Eva was not a young woman, ready for change, as Tilney’s daughter was. She was a woman set in her ways, at one with routine. Maude, however, didn’t truly understand this; it left her feeling as if Evangeline would rather her not be around, and so she had done just that, and slipped away from her one, steady tie to home early that morning, to be alone, as seemed her new fate.
She was mentally chiding herself for being so pessimistic when a gentle, masculine voice breaks her chain of thoughts. Looking over a the source of the sound to discover the kind, bay gentleman she had seen at the meeting in the tower, her smile is tentative, but warm.
“It is beautiful,” she answers, taking a step aside, to allow the man room alongside her, if he so desired. She, like her new company, rarely thinks about the more vile natures of men. “Do you come here to think and pray, too?”
@Asterion
