prayed to keep my soul
S
he asked her mother one day why they all keep trying to forget the dead. We bury them, under mounds of dirt. We let them burn until they are ash. And still others are hidden away. Her mother told her that are deaths are painful, and when they are gone, that we try to immortalize them, to help ease the pain, to make them feel like they are still with us. Elliana did not sleep that that night. She was awake, listening to the whispers and the shouts and the cries and the laughters. And stories, stories, stories. And she thought to herself they are still with us, but no one ever listens.
The dead were not gone.
She likes to pretend that they were born from the trees and the flora rather than bone and blood. She loves to think of everyone blooming like flowers, rising from the dirt and turning into something beautiful. She looks at the girl with pale blue eyes, silently asking if she were grown or was she born?
What flower are you, Avesta?
“I’m Elli—Elliana,” she says as she meets her own eyes in her reflection behind the unicorn. But it is broken as her horn comes to rest across her blue, blue, too blue eyes. Maybe someone else would run, maybe Elli would run too if she knew where she should go. But there are mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors. She has dreamed of mirror worlds and diving into them, but those are just dreams. If you jump inside a mirror in real life you do not travel to another world—they shatter, they break. And you along with it.
The unicorn looks young and old at the same time, Elli does not know enough about the world to place her. “Are you a kid?” She asks, stepping closer. “Are you?” She asks again, as if afraid she would not get an answer if not asked twice. So much more afraid of not finding answers than she would ever be of the monster that roves beneath her skin. Elli shifts from hoof to hoof, as if there were a dance inside her bones. “Avesta.”
@Avesta elliana speaks
elliana
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