f l o r e n t i n e
The winds blow across the plain. They set the sea of grasses to dance and sway. Ripples roll out like waves to crash against the girls’ limbs. Plants rustle and sigh where there should be the soft hiss of an ocean. All about the girls, bison pepper the land, rising like great weathered rocks from the surface of the green, green sea.
Flora’s eyes tumble from the crown of the distant mountain and away, away from its imposing figure. Even with her eyes resting upon Bexley as they are, she still feels its call. That call twines its son of vines and thorns into her stomach and pulls, oh, it pulls so hard. It sets whispers in her ears, whispers bearing Inkheart’s voice… They are whispers that demand she should seek and she should find. They want her to know of the gods, to know their ways, their teachings. They demand she love them.
But did they know what a flighty girl they tried to catch? What a flighty girl she was to run at the mere idea of relenting and finding out more about them?
Defiant, keen, desperate, Florentine drinks in Bexley. It is not hard to sate herself with this distraction for the Solterra girl is resplendent. Beneath the lazy glow of the sun, Bexley gleams. She is the dark gold of the evening sun to Flora’s woven flax and liquid honey. The sun girl’s mane gleams white as snow and pulls Flora’s lips into a lift of appreciation. Bexley’s words colour the air around them, bold, inviting, as startlingly bright as her colouring.
Curious as a raven, Florentine’s head tilts as her amethyst eyes, dusk radiant, drink in the lines of the other girl’s face. What had she lost? Had she lost anything at all?
Bexley’s opposing question had stolen the words from Flora’s tongue, had made her think, consider deeper than she otherwise might have. It only beckons her smile to grow, and it does, sly but hot like a midday sun. “What makes you think I would have lost anything either, or that I would tell you if I had?” She asks, voice spun upon the wind.
Slowly Florentine steps up beside Bexley, as if to take her Solterra eyes, as if to see the meadow from her perspective. “I was not the one stood here, looking.” Flora’s own eyes roam now. They skip from tree, to flower, to rock, to horse, to bison. This way and that they roam, as if waiting for the plain to reveal some secret with a grand flourish.
Nothing.
She is disappointed, marginally. And yet her smile becomes smaller, sharper, more playful. Through her tangle of snarled mane and woven flowers, Florentine returns her gaze to this girl of sunshine and vitality. Together they stand, the passing of daylight into starlight. Florentine bearing her dusk-hewn purples and honey-golds and Bexley her white snow and winter sunlight. “So,” the dusk girl hums, “if you have not lost anything, then what is a girl doing standing here just looking?”
Amethyst eyes, scan the plain once again. “Unless she is waiting for someone?” The question is light as her eyes drift back to Bexley. “Or maybe she is just waiting for some opportunity to stray her way?”
@
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
