Days from now, her mother will catch her walking precariously close to the ledges of their cliff side home. Elena will stop her and pull her back asking why did she keep walking and just what she was thinking. Elli will tell her she was pretending she was blind, like the man she meant. (Elli remember later that he was not a man, but. Monk, but something told her not to tell her mother of this realization.) He will say she wondered what it must be like not to see. So she shut her eyes and she—
She feels exhilarated amongst all the race participants, all these others who are here to run and sprint. She is no empath, but Elliana does not need to be to know those who are lined up are not like her, they are here to win, to cross the finish line before all the others.
And she is Elliana—and she will let them, because she knows how there are such more important things. When those that whisper come to her, they never speak of their races. And this is how Elliana knows.
The smoke grows and she smells a summer evening in Denocte that she had never been witness to and has heard no stories about if only because her mother can never tell them to her.
She watches the fire grow and change and Elli finally understands the phrase she once heard ‘moth to a flame,’ and she thinks the moth not foolish, but brave and wild and adventurous. (Maybe she is a moth too, she feels like one here and now.)
Someone comes in front of her with eyes of fire, and Elli thinks he too must be a moth, a moth that got too close to the flames, and she cannot blame him for such a thing.
Music.
Silence.
A scream.
It is one she has heard before, in the night, in the shadows. So busy is Elli with the scream in her head that when everyone leaps forward, she stays ground before she too strikes off with a shake of her young head. She runs with the rest of them, dazzled by the spectacle. The smoke grows thicker and so too does the shadows—but she is the daughter of one so she does to shy away, but embraces them.
That is before a wall of flames find her. Do not race the fire, her mother had told her, and she veers to the right, into a space just large enough for a little girl who is not blind, but imagines what it must be like, to fit through.
Elliana
@Official Dawn Account
