[P] you were running through me like water [michael]

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

When she and her cousin had been young, they would often tuck themselves into a world of their own. Lilli would build their grand castles with its moats and fortified walls (though the drawbridge always dropped for anyone in need.) And Elena would conjure up dragons for them to battle, there was hardly a need for knights, for Sir Elena would battle the scaled beast. Sometimes, just before she awakens, her dreams find this place of imagination once more, but then it is all over as eyelashes flutter open and she is alone once more, not a castle or dragon in sight. 

Elena finds comfort in the sunset. She isn't sure why, especially when she knows night is coming.

Winter.

There was something vastly lonely about the winter months in a land. There were no colors outside of the simple white of the snow, the blue of the sky, and the green of the coniferous forests. The dull browns, the blackness of night, it could make an entire land look depressingly bleak. Especially when that winter had come, the first winter without either of her parents, the first winter in Beyond. it had been even more depressing still when she would catch them watching her. Marcelo, Aletta, Malachi, even Ori occasionally. They had handled her with kid gloves, desperate for answers but scared to ask the questions. It would have been enough to drive a single person mad, desperate for someone, anyone to be rude to her, to get angry, to show her anything but that sympathetic smile and quiet look of pity. 

When spring had come though, Elena had found friendship in her cousin, Lilli, the crimson girl that Elena still aches to see. And with the coming of spring had meant her godfather had returned to her, and the healer that had been present at Elena’s birth. It had almost been like the family was once again reunited. With the exception of her parents that had weighed on her shoulders and ached her young heart. 

Now, Elena has been alive longer than her parents had lived, she was older than her parents. The feeling was—strange, to say the least. Elena wonders if she had even been given a chance to really get to know her parents. Their faults, their strengths, their trails, instead of having perpetually looked at them through rose tinted glasses. Valerio had told her stories of when her father had first come to Paraiso as a testosterone filled two year old stallion, and how he had rebelled against Valerio’s kind nature. Elena had known none of this, her father never having gotten around to telling her the story, it would seem. When she returned to Windskeep years later, she learned things about her mother that she had never known. These stories, while they warmed her soul, caused her to bite her lip in sorrow. Elena realized how little she knew about her own parent. The more she learned, the more she felt as though she had been living with complete strangers. 

The golden girl finds herself in a place she has rarely ever found herself before. Standing there and watching with a glacial gaze the swell of the ocean as it arches and crashes against the shore. If she closes her eyes she can almost hear the sound of Paraiso’s waterfall, Aletta and Brynn talking, Lilli laughing. And that alone is what holds Elena still.

Maybe, she still has a bit of that imagination after all. Maybe it hasn't quite run out.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
of dusk.

@Michael