For her entire life, Elena has always been the strong one—the rooted one.
To the world, she put on a face of the utmost strength and unburdened, tall unmovable mountains, towering redwoods. It was how she protected herself, how she managed to protect those around her. But strip away that veneer, peel back the boards, and you would find a woman who burned with feelings, tumultuous storms that raged within her belly. Emotions that she could not quench, fires she could not sate no matter how she tried.
She has not even been in Terrastella a year, but it felt good to stay stationary for a moment. For years, she has ran when anything felt too heavy. She ran to shed the weight of whatever sat on her shoulders, but something she had began to learn was that no matter how far she ran, the weight followed her. No matter how far she ran, it didn’t change that her parents were gone. It didn't change that Tunnel had scrapped his teeth against her golden skin one day in the forest. It didn't change that anyone she had called family had slowly disappeared. The girl that had once been surrounded by more love than she knew what do with was now suddenly completely, utterly alone.
Eyes of early morning frost look to the side as she passes the building, underneath the sunset that is painted like fire, wildness and ancient things. She feels, peaceful. Elena has never truly dreamt of gaining power or building her reputation. Unlike her godfather, she never thought herself a guardian of ancient lands, and never truly positioned herself in ways to seek it out. Instead, she has just tried to know just what she was. She was happy enough to love and heal those who let her.
Still, she was a girl born of kingdoms and there is comfort in having a home.
So she is more than happy to have found hers within the heart of Terrastella.
She has come into the city once again, to hang her hat at the capital’s door, lose herself in the bustle of Dusk life. There is the smell of saltwater buried in her skin, there is a wildflower tangled in her mane. In the setting sun, there, in the city with life moving all around her, Elena first looks like a true Terrastellan and some might find it beautiful, some sad, and still others wouldn't quite know what to think as the blonde girl turns down a quieter alleyway in city that has started to shape her into something Elena will see in her reflection and no longer recognize. There is a tall building at the end of the way, it overlooks both the rolling hills and the sea. Elena makes it to the top as day kisses the night in a feverish display of affection before they will part ways until the morning.
She thinks she is alone and comforted in her solitude she hums, a song from her mother that she can no longer remember the words to. Those blue eyes squint in quiet solace as her body begins to sway, as if she hasn't quite shaken the ocean that still swells and rolls in her soul.
* 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.
He really doesn’t; the act is involuntary, and feels as powerless as falling does. Some sick puppeteer has transformed him into a marionette; his strings are dancing; and his hooves move, nearly stumbling over themselves, when he turns to go after her.
Ghosts never really die, do they?
That’s the thought that floods his conscience like the tale of Genesis. He feels undone, rewritten; and sick, sick, sick.
She’s dead, Lyr tells himself as the sun turns dusky on the horizon.
She’s dead, Lyr repeats as he pursues the sun-bright palomino at a distance through the crowd of citizens. Terrastella is finishing work, closing shop, going home for the day—and he tells himself, that’s it, that’s it, because he never wants to return to the solitude of the soldier’s barracks.
Perhaps it’s a diversion. A final distraction at day’s end.
He knows better, though. He knows the thing that carries him is almost obsessive. He knows he is as powerless to it as a shell in the sea’s current. He simply has to understand, he has to know. Lyr holds hope in his heart more fragile than porcelain, an impossible hope, because maybe it’s her, it’s her, it’s her.
The walk is so similar. The mindless gestures of one going through life unobserved… everything about the girl, from a distance, screams, Capella, Capella, Capella. Watching her walk is the same as watching sun streak across a field. Watching her walk is the same as seeing it settle, somewhere, with the grace and beauty only the transient can hold—
Lyr follows her to a tall building. He knows she went inside, because it is the only place to go, and from there the only place to go is up. But standing outside, he finds it difficult to make himself move those extra steps; here is a pinnacle, one he must either reach or abandon. To follow further would mean he would have to talk to her, he would have to look her in the face and destroy his own fantasy. Lyr swallows. Lyr drags a hoof against the cobblestones and then, and then, begins to ascend the stairs.
He breaches the rooftop to hear her humming.
The sound strikes a cord in him that will not stop echoing for the rest of his life.
It isn’t her.
It will never be her again.
He clears his throat, announcing his presence.
The beauty of the sunset is lost on him; he only sees the way the light plays across the blonde of her mane, her body, in all the same ways it had his beloved sister’s. He says awkwardly, haltingly,
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Elena knows what it is like to see your ghosts, and had she known the grief she caused him, she would have coated herself in darkness to spare him the agony of familiarity.
There is salvation in the gentle ebb and flow of the waves, foamy crests curling gently above the abyss but not disturbing it, crabs sidestepping quietly across the beach, leaving pinprick footsteps in the wet sand. She wonders if this is the sort of piece you feel before you are born, before the moment when you are brought into the world.
She does not remember being born. Not that first gasp of air or the way her lungs had felt when they first expanded, when life flooded her veins and her eyes fluttered open to find her mother for the very first time. She does not remember the sun on her skin or the way the world had cooled when the clouds rolled out to watch her first steps, or how strangely exhilarating it had been when her legs wobbled forward and her delicate body stayed aloft.
She knows they happened, all those beautiful moments that her parents had been there to witness. But they are not memories for Elena, nothing things she can look back on and feel emotion stir in her chest as it must have all those years ago. Instead they are factual, bits of knowledge, things she knows must have happened because they happen to everyone.
At this moment she didn't know that just the night before, another had been born and one day they would mirror each other within eyes of blue.
For all of its scars, Elena’s heart should be more guarded than it is.
Perhaps she is foolish.
Perhaps she should hide it away, lock it up, keep it safe. Perhaps she should not let it leap into her throat whenever she sees another who cries, who aches, who smiles, who laughs. Perhaps she should be wise.
But she is not.
She cannot be.
Elena loves burying herself in the emotions of others far too much to seclude herself away from the world and its turmoil.
‘An easy life is what I want,’ she has said.
‘An easy life is what I want,’ she has lied.
It is in quick succession that she hears him, sees him, and is at hide side. Elena thinks perhaps only a heartbeat, maybe two had passed. She is at his side, with gentle and quieting ‘shh’ being muffled into his ear in much the same way her grandmother had done for her a long time ago when she returned to Windskeep and wept at the graves of her parents. She wants to cry with him, crumble to the ground and let the tears flow. Because she aches for him, for herself, for all the things wrong in the world that she doesn't know what they are. You wouldn’t see the fear of the small shattered thing within her. You wouldn’t see the cracks that spiderweb out around her, threatening to buckle her knees with memory. Because she stands there so steady against his form, offering her shoulder his tears and her heart for his sorrow.
“Do you want to tell me about her?” She asks, this shouldn't be that difficult, comforting another, but she finds that other words nearly form, but they die quickly—escaping her mouth in a soft exhale. “I can go,” she asks, no matter how much she wishes to stay. “I can,” she repeats, convincing herself, she could walk away. “But, if you want me to—I can stay.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
The breakdown is always a disappointment; Lyr has found the catharsis it is meant to bring never comes, as whatever comforts that can be found for his particular loss are hollow. He remembers upon the first, motherly shhhhh of her lips the last time he had spoken to his father and the way the priest had turned, at a loss at last, and shouted in a way utterly uncharacteristic. He had said, Lyr, there is nothing I can do for you if you choose to be inconsolable!
If he chooses to be inconsolable… as if the loss of his sister, the one person who had ever known him, could be consoled?
Yet here is another trying, and the comfort remains a hollow one. Even in their resemblance they will never be the same. Even in their similarities his heart is rent apart and she says, Do you want to tell me about her? Lyr turns his face away. He cannot look at her in her divine perfection, in her simple but certainly not ordinary beauty. They are so much alike.
They are so much alike. They are so much alike, even in this stranger’s asking, in a voice like a salve to his wounds. I can go. I can. And he nearly begs her not to. He would, if his throat were not raw with the tears he holds back. He would, if he were not fighting something insurmountable within him, something that swells to the brims of his being like high tide and threatens to reach further, further.
After what seems like a small eternity, Lyr clears his throat. He ducks his head and blinks the tears from his eyes, hard, until he can raise them at last to meet hers.
It takes a type of wild resolve; wild, because at any moment it might break again.
He laughs, a little shakily. “I… a-apologise.” The childhood stutter reemerges with his uncertainty, with his embarrassment. He closes his eyes and inhales a deep breath, until he feels he can open his eyes and regard her without emotion, without sentiment.
When Lyr takes her in again, he knows that will never be a possibility. The only difference between them is the heart-shaped mark on this mare’s forehead and even that does not seem like so much of a difference, but more of an addition. He struggles through the next sentence, knowing she owes him nothing. Yet he hopes with the desperation of a man utterly alone that she stays... and paradoxically, he knows whatever comfort this stranger brings will be of a tragic sort, so familiar it threatens to rip him apart. “She…” Lyr chooses his words deliberately, carefully. Because of it, they come out stiff and awkward, with too much space between them. He would have never talked to his own flesh and blood this way, no; she would have drawn from him who he really was with her lighthearted, easy laughter. She would have known exactly what to say, and she is the only one, and... “She was the sun personified. Her name was Capella, and she knew everyone by name, even those people who no one else bothered to know. She… wanted to be a Champion of Community. To help the people. And… well, she died.”
Yes, that is how the story ends.
It has never mattered how many times he has told it before. It is the ending he cannot rewrite, no matter how many nights he lays awake trying to. Lyr clears his throat and looks past this stranger who is not so much a stranger, toward the sea. He does this so he can ask with careful politeness, “I am sorry for the intrusion. I can… be… going if y-you’d like.”
Lyr should have allowed the illusion to live on a little longer; he should have stood back and watched, and never have let her seen him. Because this, this felt like the undoing of years of rebuilding. It felt as if his foundation shook; as if he were a tree and the wind of some unexpected storm shook him to the roots. Yet he cannot go. He cannot bring himself to even turn away from her, because even this hollow something is better than the nothing that greets him elsewhere.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
How much hurt can one heart hold?
How much pain can one soul suffer?
Is it equal to the amount of love one can feel?
(She finds them all to be nearly equal.)
These are questions that have haunted Elena. Questions that dig deep into her soul, anchoring it down like a ship. She still doesn't know the answer. She tries to have an infinite capacity to love, to bear the burden of others, to have that endless trust and strength in her heart. But it gets harder, oh does it get harder as time goes on and on. She wonders how her mother had done it. Elena had desperately loved her mother. She had worshipped her. When she had been little she had wanted nothing more than to grow into the grace and beauty her mother had achieved, to be so caring and so gracious. Elena cannot help but feel that maybe she is letting her down.
He turns his face away from her and Elena’s heart aches a little more. And then his eyes find her own of silver blue and she cannot help the small, comforting smile that stalls on her lips. She so desperately wants to wipe them away and brighten his face, but she knows there is nothing she can do to heal his heart faster. So she does nothing but offer him that smile, but the ends of it do not quite curl so high knowing how useless of an offer it is to him.
Death has plagued her for so long in her life. She had seen the death of her parents, the sort of death that sends reverberations in your flesh and shake you to your care. But, even after the shock had turned numb, to a bitter acceptance Elena had not been able to help but feel it still. Those icy finger tips creeping across her grief-weary throat. She would not be its victim, it would be others. Sometimes she thinks she can hear the undertaker’s scythe trailing behind the ones she loves, metal scrapping against earth. It echoes in those brief, purgatory moments between sleeping and awake. Grief conjures illusions far worse than any magician ever could.
“Please don’t,” she says to him, casting his apology to the wind as easy as if it were flower petals. He opens his eyes again and Elena cannot believe how beautiful they are and how she hadn't noticed before. Like two perfect rubies.
He utters a single word and Elena hangs onto it, wanting to offer him every bit of her soul in a futile attempt to give him solace. (Though Elena knows that chasing closure is like chasing the sun, it disappears, only to return like a beacon of hope before running away over the horizon once more.) She listens to his words, thoughtfully, solemnly, her face warming as he speaks of his sister. She doesn't ask how she died. That question, that question she knows burns. They had lived a whole life, and when it is concentrated on those final moments, that is what brings the hurt to the forefront.
Illness.
Murder.
In the end they are gone.
She blossoms beneath his attention without even realizing it. Elena has always needed to be needed, and it feels right in this moment. “It’s terrible,” she says, because she cant say it gets better because he probably already knows that it doesn’t. Maybe for some people, but Elena is still waiting for that moment to come.
“Please don’t,” she repeats those same words, though with a different meaning, this holds a plea. “I hate watching the sunset alone.” She admits with a shy smile, like the sun peeking over the mountainside of a home she once called her own. She turns those blue eyes to him, looking up at him from beneath those long, dark lashes. “I’m Elena, please, sit with me a while?”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
How much hurt can one heart hold, before it becomes hate?
How much pain can one soul endure, before it manifests as malice?
Is it equal to the amount of love one can feel?
No. Never. There must be gods laughing, or archangels, or the fates as they stare down at two unequal hearts, two hearts that have diverged so woefully apart. It is not that Lyr knows her, or she him; it is that their souls shine with the same sensitive light, with the same delicate need for affection, sentiment, memory, goodness. Lyr has that somewhere, within him, a tenderly nursed, compassionate nature… or he had, once, and now?
Now there is a woman who resembles, too closely, his sister. And already in his mind he twists her to become what he needs of her. Already in his mind she is soft, and perfect, and consolatory. Already she is the type of light he needs in a life where he cultivates darkness.
The difference between them, however, is what they have done with their grief. Lyr does not yet know it, and perhaps never will, but they are divided as utterly as he and his sister had been, if not more. A medic, versus a soldier. Distractedly, he wonders what he would have done, had someone approached him as he had approached her and—
It’s terrible.
It is. He is drawn back into their conversation, into his story, into the feeling of burning tears.
Lyr, when she was dying, had found it so terrible he could not even face her. As she sickened, and became less and less able-bodied, he could no longer meet her gaze. When she died, he had not been present. He had not gone in to say goodbye.
I hate watching the sunset alone.
She draws him out of his recollections and so he looks, now, at the sunset she mentions. Lyr admires it with the kind of limited admiration men sometimes have for beauty they cannot touch. But he smiles nonetheless, because this girl who resembles his sister speaks to him, takes pity upon him, and makes him feel not so terribly alone.
“It is a… pleasure… Elena. Thank you. I'm Lyr.” He glances at her shyly and turns closer, further entranced by the details that, by the moment, make her appear more and more like the sister he had lost.
He says, eventually—who knows, how long, he stares at that sun? Long enough for the sky to grow dark, and darker still— “You must be new in Terrastella. I haven’t seen you before.” He does not say, I thought you were a ghost.
But there are many types of ghosts, and even more types of haunting.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Elena understands the cruelty of fate. She doesn't understand why she ever grows surprised by it anymore. She has been surprised, angry, but there have been times too, when fate has aligned just right. Like under a Hyaline sky with her crimson cousin wrapping around her closely as they reunite with one another.
Fate can give.
Fate can take away.
Oh, how it can take away…
And away
And away
and away….
Elena too knows how souls shine, and they are not each their own, but made up of others, others that they may never meet. There may be a light inside Elena’s own that once belonged to a piece of his sister. The golden girl would like to think she can do it justice, and let it burn bright. It was the only way she knew how to shine after all.
(If Lyr asked her now if she thought him compassionate, sensitive, deserving, she would say yes, yes, yes.)
(If he asked her tomorrow she would say yes, yes, yes.)
Lyr, let Elena shine for you, she would burn the whole place down with her light if it would lessen your pain. Strike the match and she will flare to life and roar like fire with flowing embers. She can almost see the burn of his eyes, if only because she has felt it before. The need to hold them back, to dry them, to harden when all you want to do is fall apart into a pill of agony and grief. You break and they try to put you back together, but Elena and Lyr are the only ones who know where each of those pieces go. They will break apart again and again, because they must build themselves back up first before they can stand. Elena has tried, she will have the bricks, but no mortar, lumber but no hammer and nails, sand, but not shovel and pail. She seems to miss a piece and her sides tumble down before she can find them. Elena, though bold and beautiful, is brittle, a silhouette of glass and spiderweb cracks. They are not so easily fixed.
Glacial blue eyes peel back to the sunset before to Lyr once more when he introduces himself. “Thank you for joining me, Lyr,” she says graciously. And maybe it is just the way he is looking at her, but Elena feels a strange sense of familiarity pass between them, like maybe she has been here before, with someone like him. She likes the way it feels with him, in this silence. (Oh it is such a lighter load with someone to share it next to her.) “I am,” she offers him back. “I have been exploring, though the capital is quite overwhelming,” she admits. “I prefer staying a little more seaside,” she laughs. “Or, in the hospital, healing when I can,” it is a gracious admission. If there was one thing Elena prized, it was her work of healing. Each physical wound she could fix, it felt like magic, like she was fighting back fate. “What are yourself?”
Silence.
Her voice returns only after she realizes a thought that presses against her mind.
“It doesn't have to be, you know,” she says almost shyly. “A pleasure that is. It can hurt,” she says because she remembers. Remembers how she couldn't look at Lilli’s blue eyes because they resembled her mother’s too much. Couldn't bare to hear the deep, strong voice of Malachi because sometimes if she closed her eyes it was almost as if her father were speaking. There is a tightness in her chest that is hard to ignore. That golden face turns from him for a moment until she can bring herself to smile again. “I don't think I could have wished for better company tonight, Lyr,” she says. “Thank you—for you.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
It is the men, who think they control it. It is the men, who dabble in fate as if it is a currency, or a prize. Lyr does not believe in fate. No, and if he could hear her sympathy for it he might scoff. For Lyr, everything is taken or given; everything is hard-won or left. There are no true gods—only mortals manifested as something larger than themselves, greater both in power and tragedy—and there is no true destiny.
Only themselves. Their blood. Their strength.
If something is taken, it is their own damn fault.
But in that instance, Lyr is not thinking of fate; he is thinking of the taking, the claiming, how strength is the only currency in the world that matters. His father had been weak; it is the reason Capella had died.
It is the reason now he looks at the palomino girl with bright eyes and thinks, nothing will happen to her. This ghost of a memory. This hollow reflection of the one he loved.
Thank you for joining me, Lyr. I have been exploring, though the capitol is quite overwhelming. I prefer staying a little more seaside. Or in the hospital, healing when I can.
The humble admission endears her to him more than she could ever know. Lyr smiles. “Y-you are a h-healer?” The stutter comes on, most often, when he is overwrought with emotion—the mere mention of Terrastella’s hospital reminds him of the first time he had ever come to Terrastella alone, begging for his sister’s cure.
What are you yourself?
The question jars him, momentarily.
A son. A brother. A scholar. A soldier. A poet.
“If you ever need a tour, E-Elena, let me know. I have lived her long enough to know the place. B-but be weary of the sea—Terrastella is renowned for it’s kelpies.” Lyr thinks of his mother, not knowing the future implications the comment could have for Elena.
It doesn’t have to be, you know. A pleasure that is. It can hurt.
Lyr had thought their attention on that side of the conversation had finished itself. He looks away from her, his expression tight with unshared pain. He glances out again, toward the setting sun, and keeps his eyes there until the light of it stings.
Instead of answering, he diverts. “And what hurt have you felt, Elena?” It is clear she knows some kind of pain; the magnitude of it, to Lyr, is still unclear. Unlike her, Lyr cannot muster the strength of a smile. He rarely does.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Maybe, if they weren't strangers, she would confess to him that his coat reminds her of snow.
Of clouds passing by.
Of the capped mountains of her once home.
Of her father’s murderer.
But they are strangers, and so she says nothing.
If only she could hear his thoughts.
Maybe she would tell him that she wont live forever (even with immortality, Elena will one day close her eyes, never to open them.) Or maybe she would sink beneath his skin and ask him to protect her forever, because it feels like it has been so long since she has been protected. It has been so long since she has felt that sort of sanctuary that only comes from another wrapping their arms around you and promising to save you, even from yourself. If she could read his thoughts she would have asked him if he would always be there, if he could promise her that.
And right now she wouldn't care if it was empty.
“I try to be,” she says, modest. In truth, Elena has been healing since she had been small. An apprentice at just the age of a year and a half, a herd’s healer in her own right at the age of 3, to two different herds before she turned to politics and diplomacy.
But she found her way back home in the end. To comforting and fixing and mending. She always thought her reasoning for healing was entirely altruistic, but it wasnt, not entirely. She shouldn't tell him this, what would he, a stranger, think of her? “I like fixing things I can see, mending what is broken. I like easing pain.” She decides to tell him anyway, because it feels less like a stolen secret when she can convince herself it’s been willingly shared. “A cut, a concussion, a burn, is so much easier than other things.”
It easy for her to recognize the hurt in another—the familiar anguish, her own personal brand of sorrow. It is easy for Elena to call upon it, and she can easily see it in his eyes, in the shifting of his ears. She knows how it feels to have hurt buried beneath skin to make its home and pierce your heart, leaving you open and bleeding beneath it.
She knows too that it is difficult to find the words to describe such hurt and opening it up to fresh air has a way of amplifying the pain, so she doesn't say anything more, pretends she has forgotten how he had openly weeped only moments before, the same way she pretends her own wounds do not sit just below the surface, threatening to rip open at the slightest movement.
“I would love that,” she murmurs, her voice lilting and soft. Her eyes follow his out and she counts the nearest trees, traces their branches and memorizes the shades of their leaves, and when she finally turns back to him she is careful to hide her brokenness from him. “Enough to last this lifetime.” Her voice shatters quietly, coming apart at the seams and her eyes drop, darkening like bruises against her golden face. “You never have the luxury of forgetting you are an orphan,” she says through a smile, like it might have been a joke, when really her heart kicks inside her chest. She presses a quiet kiss into his shoulder, it means nothing more than what it is, a need to touch, to comfort, to connect.
She thinks about telling him, how the colors of sunset reflect off his skin and he looks nothing like her father’s killer.
But, she doesn’t.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
I like fixing things I can see, mending what is broken. I like easing pain.
What if I were to tell you, Elena, I used to be a poet?
That the one thing my mother kept from the sea when my father stole her from it had been the language of it? And that language, it had been inherited by me.
I dwell on that, briefly; and wonder what would have happened, if I were not a soldier, if my father had not been the kind of man he had been. Perhaps I may have been a bard, or a lyricist, or a writer—
I wonder what I would have written, in that other life. And all these musings stem from the fact she does something useful, something that helps instead of hurts—and then there are moments (long stretches of days, or weeks, or even months) where I want to do nothing but make the whole world bleed.
But still, I smile at her; an appreciative, shy kind of smile. A smile that says thank you with more sincerity than my stuttering words.
I would love that.
“Then consider it done.” I spend more time thinking of what he wants to say; he spends more time forming these words, so they come out clear and direct.
You never have the luxury of forgetting you are an orphan.
She touches him; it is jarring, to someone who lives their life so frigidly, to experience the sudden warmth. I nearly flinch away but instead hold steady. “No—“ I agree, but not knowing, not understand. I have never been an orphan.
But then: “Let me s-start the tour tonight. Get o-our minds off the s-sadness.” I offer what I know is a stiff, awkward smile. But then I turn away from the sunset, wrenching myself from it as if I’d been sewn into the light—
I step away from the edge, and gesture her back the way we had both come—back toward the city, and life, and the flock of birds that abandons their roost to flutter past us.