“Come here Elaina. Come here and tell me about your scars…or leave.” He had said to the girl with golden skin. It is a challenge, she knew it when he uttered those words to her. She shakes under his touch, but she stays never the less. “Are you all alone?” He asks, and she says yes. Elena will come to replay this moment in her mind a hundred times (a thousand even) because she wonders, in the way we all play our worst decisions like a bad movie, if things would have been different if she had lied, if she hadn't stayed. Was he like a vampire? Only need be in invited in.
“Are you all alone?” Marcelo had asked the same question years earlier, back when Elena had been small, newly orphaned, her eyes itchy from tears.
On this gray winter day in Winter, when Elena feels lonely wandering through the lands of Novus. It is then they come, as they always do, they onslaught her, assaulting her heart until she has no choice but to listen. The way she would spend hours just trying to make Alvaro offer her even the tiniest crinkle of a smile. It is Cherish gathering the foals of Windskeep for a story. Valerio, appearing before them like the guardian he was. Marcelo’s worried glances as Elena tries to balance across a log. Ori’s laughter, kicking up snow. Altair as he presses his forehead against her own, silent promises on his tongue if she just gave him her heart, and Elena so stubbornly refusing to do so. “I hope you aren't afraid of the dark,” he had said and her skin had shuttered. Aerwir pleading with her to just tell him what was wrong. And then it is Lilli, because, in the end it was always Lilli. The one face she had been able count on, a more constant than her own parents had been.
She aches.
Guilt hollows out her stomach and suddenly she feels thirsty. So thirsty. She banishes the memories and lets them sink into the snow, to melt with spring. Why was she doing this to herself? She had come to Novus for a new start, not only for herself, but for Lilli too. Elena, despite the years she has aged is still so foolish. She needs to leave this behind, if only for a little while.
So Elena, with no where else she can go, she goes there once more.
The shoreline roars and drags. And Elena fidgets in the sand. She isn't sure where to go from here. Elena has never been a lover of the ocean, has not sought out its salty waters like so many do, but she finds herself here all the same. She remembers being small, begging her father to take her to the ocean, and no she is here and Elena isn't quite sure what to do next. Her future looks, for the first time in her life, blank and devoid of anything. She wonders if this is what it is like to feel peace.
But then, Elena, why do we find you pacing the sand as if you wanted anything but a blank canvas set before you?
* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.
home is behind the world ahead
there are many paths to tread
He is watching the ocean again.
He is always watching the ocean now, when he has a moment to himself. Once he had hated the sea, hated the way it frothed and roared and beat itself against the shores. You’ll never make it, he had wanted to tell the waves the first time he landed on Novus’ shores. No matter how hard you try, or how long you claw at the sand, the earth will never be your’s.
Now he hopes selfishly, angrily, that the sea would rise and crush the whole world beneath its weight, if only so that the anchor around his heart wouldn’t feel quite so heavy anymore.
His brother would laugh and say better to burn than to drown. But Toulouse is not so sure anymore, is not as convinced by his twins’ words as he used to be. And that is why he comes to the beach again, to stare at the grey waters and wonder what Novus would be like if his ship had sank while carrying him here.
The wind is tearing at his hair and at his scarves, but he doesn’t care. His curls are tying themselves into knots, hanging heavy and wet against his gold skin, and Toulouse pretends to not notice. All the beach is empty, save for him and the waves and the clouds; he paces along the shoreline, stopping to paw and dig up seashells and smooth pebbles that he can fling back into the waiting ocean. Again and again, sand-dollars and shark-eyes and scallops and mussel shells, all of them tossed like so much trash.
It’s mindless enough for him, enough for him to not need to think, and the repetitive act makes his heart begin to beat a little bit smoother in his chest again.
He doesn’t know how long he’s on the beach, tossing rocks and shells into the waves, before he sees her. And he thinks he recognizes the haunted look in her eyes, as she draws lines in the sand with her hooves like she doesn’t know what pattern she wants to paint.
Maybe it’s because she’s as golden as he is that he turns towards her, and makes to intercept her path. Or maybe it’s because there’s still a little bit of wolf left in him that wants to tear at her, that sees her pacing as weakness instead of sameness. Either way, Toulouse lifts his head to her, and stops only when she’s near enough to hear him.
"I know that look." It’s echoed in his own eyes, even when he tries to hide it. The look of torture, and guilt, and a little bit of madness. And as he looks at her he wonders if her stomach churns the same way his does, the same way the sea does; and he hates the part of him that knows how to exploit that, the part of him that wants to make the seas shake.
And what has Elena done? She has lied (“No, he doesn't hurt me”), she has destroyed herself, and she has destroyed the hearts of other. But through fire and shipwrecks and every disaster one could name, she still hands her heart out to those who need it.
Still, she is alone.
Elena finds her heart to be most comfortable in the hands of others. When it sits there in her golden chest, it wriggles, it cries, it aches. Elena holds it on her own, hands shaking and fumbling until she thrusts it into the grip of the first decent face she meets. So desperate to give it away because while she knows, deep down she knows, they will only crush it within their own grasp, at least she wouldn't be the one hurting herself.
Sometimes it is easier, a relief, to simply blame another for the dull thud inside her breast instead of waxing and waning over all the choices that have led her here.
She had sat there as Tunnel had devoured her heart as he took away all matter, the moment she had offered it to him with that first fearful skip of it. The dark stranger had taken it and Elena had sat idly by, chest vacant just as she wished. He had sent that shiver up her spine that had become all too familiar, one she felt with Aerwir, with the demon of black and white. It similar even to Frostbane. Monsters all in their own way. Oh and how Elena knows monsters, how she knows them so well. She had not been so naive not to recognize the looks on their faces, she just willing crawled inside their bed to lie in their terror and horror.
She feels that familiar chill even as sunlight cresses across her golden hide. But Elena knows, she knows that daylight cannot keep out the boogeyman, because not all monsters hide under the bed.
And then she is no longer alone.
That look. What look? Elena wants to retort towards him for the briefest moments, some of that fire in her heart that snaps and crackles before it calms to a smolder. Instead she smiles like smoke. “Well, I cant very well turn you away now,” she says, her pacing halted, lines in the sand drawn with nervous energy and insecurity of being in this place that still feels new no matter how hard she attempts to bury roots in the sand.
The breeze rolls by and for a moment it feels like his breath on her skin and Elena visibly shakes for just a moment. Maybe it would be mistaken for cold, but Elena feels it rattle her bones, like the serpent with its tail. Her morbid fascination for others has never served her well. It had been terror, she had wanted to leave.
Maybe she should leave now.
But the smile she offers him says anything but. “I’m Elena.” Pause. “Are you offering me your company because you wish for some too?”
* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.
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