prayed to keep my soul
H
er mother told her a story once about the wind and the woman who fell in love with him. It was a long story, but it ends with the girl standing alone on a mountain, and the wind blowing half way around the world. It ends with them asking if she was sad, and her saying she knew he would be back, that the wind is such an unstoppable thing—it would tear down mountains and cross oceans to get to where it wants to go. They ask her how long she will wait. She said forever and a day, until a winter breeze tickles her ear, and sparkles snowflakes on her eyelashes. Maybe this time is fortunate, this time where they know so little about one another, but stand beside each other in such peace that it feels as if they have known each other for ages. This time so unspoiled by what if and could have beens because none of them exist right now, not when that secret stays locked away, like the locket Elli once saw in a store window. (“I could keep a picture of you and papa in it.” Elli had told her mother.) This is a time of innocence.
He smiles.
She smiles back at him.
Elli doesn't remember, but a ghost told her about his eyes once, told a secret from loose lips. Maybe it is better today, maybe it is fortunate she does not know. For now, at least.
His shadows surround her, and maybe, she should be scared, any other child would be, any other child should be. But shadows are not merely patches of darkness to the girl—they are her birthright. “Do the shadows talk to you too?” She asks him gently, peering up at blue eyes, but she looks not to his bandages, but the moon on his forehead. She thinks about telling him about the moon on her shoulder, how it is Caligo’s blessing as her mother told her, but she says nothing because the flames have distracted her once more. What would have happened? What could have happened?
She is all to eager to instruct him what to do. Pressing her own slender shoulder into his, to tell him where she stands beside him, Elli leads him closer to the fire. He laughs, she laughs too. “I have, Dall.” She says, giving him a name that was once heard on the whispers of ghosts when she had opened her eyes and been unable to see in the darkness through the new moon. “We just take an offering,” she says, pulling one from the basket, “and put it onto the fire.” She says as if it is so simple, maybe because it is that simple. “They are,” she responds, throwing another on the fire and watching it as it crumbles into ash. “Have you been?” She asks. “I know you cant see them,” she adds, though it is not said with sorrow. “But you can feel them—in the fields, they feel like spring.”
@Tenebrae elliana speaks
elliana
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