Time unwinds, as it can only do in dreams and fiction. Trees straighten as heavy coats of snow rise from their shoulders, thread by thread. Leaves take limp shape from the brown rot of decay, then solidify into orange and yellow, and finally they rise and embrace the limbs they once fell from. It unwinds and unwinds. Eik moves backwards, inhales turned to exhales and vice versa. Wounds dissolve, grief ignites from coals into flame then nothing at all-- waiting, as it was, for the next heartache.
It stops unwinding when the wedding is announced.
It is late summer, or maybe autumn-- he never understood how everyone else knew so certainly when one season ended and the other began. Love is still budding unspoken in his heart, the feeling at once painful and delightful. He does not think twice about leaving Solterra for a few days because everything is still right, everything is still normal and he has no idea how the world is about to flip itself upside down. He is just a boy who wants to learn how to dance so he may have another language with which to express that strange feeling taking root in his heart.
He leans forward uncertainly, hooves stopped neatly at the very edge of the dirt clearing as though to take that first step onto the dance floor was to hurtle himself towards a destiny that had not yet been fully considered.
"Mesnyi?" He has never said her name out loud before, had not thought to ask of its pronunciation in the few short letters they exchanged, and the letters all run together on his lips like a river. All he really knows about her is that on matters of dance, she is supposed to be one of the best.
"The color of god is a stain
shaped to you like a grief not yet to come"
art by Pherigo
@Mesnyi :D someplace near the edge of the forest and the plains
Time makes fools of us all
