S
She smiles at his remark that this is his first time at the cliffs; remembering her first visit here, she giggles softly.“Be cautious which edge you approach,” she smiles, recalling how both she and Cress had been startled by the surprising sea, “sometimes, it hits the stone hard enough that it, like, blasts into the air. It pretty much knocked this girl I know out of the sky the last time I was here, and sure surprised me.”
Leaning slightly over the edge, and looking at the eddy and sway of the distant sea about the spade-like shape of the cliff below, Maude’s face becomes one of sincere pondering, before smiling with (what she assumes, anyway) a sage nod towards Asterion.
“I don’t think it can get us here, though,” surmises the youth aloud, “this cliff-face is much different than that one was.”
When he joins her, the girl does her best to look at him, without staring. She’s not always good at it, often getting preoccupied with thoughts about this, or that, but as she gets older, she grows more adept at moving her eyes about, even when she’s deep in thought about something other than what she currently looks upon. Moving between the stranger and the sea, her pale green gaze is kind, and inquisitive.
That is, until he mentions Gods, as more than a passing thought; her joy suddenly crumbles away, becoming a face of sorrow which gazes far, far out over the sea.
“More Gods that probably don’t hear the prayers offered them,” she solemnly says, doing her best to keep her tears barred behind the flimsy guise of satisfaction she’d managed to piece together in the quiet peace of Novus, “I don’t know of any others to pray to, though.”
She finds that her eyes slowly wander down, to where the flimsy tufts of grass drift lazily in the wind, or dangle over the precipice, and how her hooves are embedded neatly among their autumn-withered bodies. She wonders, while she looks at the shadows of the grass play across her ankles and creamy hooves, if she and the stranger are right, at all; maybe they can hear her. Maybe the Earth is still there, beneath her, if she wants him to be; maybe the wind caressing her cheeks is her Goddess, after all.
The tears she’d struggled to hold back fall, regardless, one and then another, slow and steady down her cheeks. With a sniffle, she disregards her heavy emotions, trying her best to smile and force what tears threaten to follow the two traitors behind that warm expression, and her earnest desire to not feel as if the world was a place in which she would forever be tragically alone, and cut off from the sense of belonging that had once defined her every day existence.
“I’m Maude,” she manages, her smile becoming a slight wince as she (somewhat) admits to having become caught up in talking to Miss Eva, rather than listening to what was being talked about, “I think we were at the court meeting together. I… I admit I didn’t catch your name. I get distracted sometimes.”
@Asterion
