[P] only holy devotion can keep the devils away

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

Elena, when she had been little, had been taught to sing and to dance and to love. It was easy then, it was so easy to live that way. Sing, a soprano voice echoing through an ancient valley. Dance, it was between sunflowers, feather light like sun beams. Love, it was something the golden girl did not need to be taught, and therefore she had been taught far too well. And so she loves too hard, too much, until she falls apart, singing words of despair and dancing like heartbreak.

“Why do you think you love them?” The dream man has asked.

Maybe she should have said it was only because love is what comes easiest.

Elena might have said once that for all of her weakness, there is one thing she does better than most:

Survive.

But now she is not so sure.

She does not feel like herself any longer. She doesn’t recognize the face that greets her in still waters, int he mirrors. She doesn’t recognize the very beat of her own heart. She is hollow and quiet and broken. She shies from others where once she flung herself into the worst of it. She pulls away, tending to wounds that may never heal. It all becomes so much, too much,

Foolish, perhaps, but she cannot hold out against it. Despite the fear in her throat and the million things that tell her she should turn from this, she succumbs to it. Despite the logic and the sense that rage in her mind, she merely turns herself over to the wave of emotion that rises in her throat.

She can feel her when she comes. It is a wild storm raging inside Elena’s chest, and the golden girl leans into it. It feels so good to be out of control, the lightning strikes her heart, the thunder rumbles her skin, and the wind shakes away all her torment, leaving chaos in its wake. She closes blue eyes against the force of it.

“I see plenty, but hear nothing,” she finally says, her voice low and soft. The words taste bitter in her mouth, like cold metal. Confession blooms like a bloodstain on her chest. When she opens her eyes again, they are bruised, the curves of her flaxen mane curving around her jaw, wildflowers in her hair. “Until you came,” Elena says and she turns to them. There is no room for fear in blood, even if there should be. Elena above most should know death, but she cannot see it through the cloud of rain that erupts from the storm in her emotions. Elena walks towards her, she is not herself, the magic of home has left her on this island, and only disarray has been strong enough to stay behind. She reaches out and touches her dark shoulder before pulling back as the empath’s body erupts. And she thinks this is death, this is the loneliness of rotting into nothing. She feels as though her flesh is wilting away from her body, she is just muscle and veins, and then bones, and then dust. And then her body comes back and she is once more golden, but she feels rebuilt in the likeliness of the unicorn.

And Elena cannot remember what it is like to be born—she only knows what it means to be created.

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them