“Mama, will you braid my hair?” She asks, walking across the floor of their family’s cottage. Elena obliges (as she so often does for her daughter). Her hair is still short, though no longer the mohawk of her newborn days, she has gained some length, enough for small braids throughout. Elena weaves a flower up near the top by her ears. “There, perfect,” she says as Elli rushes to the window to look herself in the mirror. She is pleased enough and she turns blue eyes to her mother. “I am going to pick you a bouquet,” she says determined before rushing out the door to head to the festival.
Today, she decides, she feels like the color yellow (not yellow like her mother, nor yellow like the sun, but maybe yellow like the center of daisies in a daisy chain). So when she reaches the flowers, Elli moves to those yellow tulips that stand there, ready to be picked and made into a present for her mother.
Elli is young of body but old of spirit. She feels a constant rustling in her soul, her mind straining against the confines of its walls, and her heart thrumming against the edges of her ribcage, as if so eager to burst from her chest and fly around the world. She can feel it now even, as she gathers up the flowers, placing them together. Dusk Court, while beautiful, cannot fully quench her desire to see the entire world. She thinks of the forest she had dove into and the twins that had she had met there. She would find them again, maybe, find them, follow them. Maybe they knew where the end of the world rested. If anyone knew, she thinks, it would be them. It had to be.
She moves to pick another flower, this time a red tulip, to represent the godmother she hears so much about and admires so greatly. But as she goes to pick it, she is met by another. “Excuse me,” she says politely, eyes coming to rest on the stranger’s face. “Could I have this flower?”
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