It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary
I
f Elena were anyone else, she would have given up by now. She keeps reaching for the sun, reaching into that endless blue sky, expecting the warmth of it to be reflected upon her, but instead it is always so much colder than she expects.
If Elena were anyone else, she would have stopped reaching by now.
She sighs heavily as she watches everyone flutter around like butterflies atop the cliffs. They all have drinks, sipping and downing them respectively. She has always loved flowers, from the time her mother first showed them to her. Her love of them only grew as she did, planting her own garden (and crying when one of the boys accidentally trampled it). She would wave flowers into Alvaro’s hair with only his mild complaints. She picked flowers and handed one to each soldier before he set out for war.
She placed flowers on her parents’ graves.
White lilies for her mother.
Gold roses for her father.
She grabs a drink and settles in amongst the crowd to watch the sun begin to set. It truly is a marvelous sunset. Spring can be such fickle weather, but Elena is so grateful that is had held out for the Tulip Festival. No sudden rains, no stubborn snow. It had been a yellow sun and bright blue skies, with flimsy clouds to race across it. All ending in an explosion of color that is the sunset. There are flowers weaved into her hair, done by her daughter. They are white daisies, flowers that have slowly become Elliana’s favorite. Elena has encouraged the passion, finding the daisy much more pleasant than her daughter’s earlier fascination of Chrysanthemum.
The flower of death.
She senses a presence nearby and turns to face her, not recognizing her face. The Champion of Community tilts her pretty golden head, a flower tumbles free from golden locks and finds purchase on the crowd below. “Hello, stranger, come to enjoy the sunset?”
The desert is no home, not home in the very harshest of ways, to flowers. No matter how golden they look in the sun against the red-stone dune or in the dappled light racing across the canyon at dawn-- all flowers ever find in the desert is death, and decay, and sunburnt petals. It feels strange to her to walk though acres of flowers planted for a festival alone, with no purpose but beauty to be found in their rainbow appeal.
How soft, she thinks, to frolic between flowers instead of the bones of desert-beasts and dead cactus.
And perhaps the thought lingers in the golden glare of her gaze as she walks through the pathways like a predator in a pack of lambs (they are too soft to even be ewes). She does not pause to wonder why the horses look strangely at her, nor why their eyes shift away quicker than the time it takes her to smile with a mouth full of teeth as them. In the end, it does not matter, for they are still the lambs and she is still the thing walking slow enough to brush her feathers against their sides just to seem them flinch away from the heat of her.
As the twilight sinks lower, and lower, and the shades of rose and blue layer upon each other like wounds, she turns towards the crowd gathering at the cliffside. Someone offers her a drink colorful enough that it promises nothing that interests her. Instead she pushes through them, wings spread wide enough that it is impossible to stray too close to her, to the mare standing too near the edge.
Amaunet wonders if anyone has ever tried to push her off (and she wonders how quickly the party might end if she does).
When the mare turns to look at her, she gives her another smile full of teeth beneath the pale-dawn glow of her magic. “No.” She answers, just no and nothing else. Because where is the chaos in being as typical as a golden mare that weaves flowers in her hair just to enjoy the sunset?
It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary
S
he told Elliana the story of the princess and the frog. How the frog turned into a prince. She finished the story, expecting Elli to be in awe or even excited, but she sat instead with a puzzled look upon her face. “How does she know she loves the prince?” Elena explained that the frog turned into a prince and so she loved him. “But what if she doesn't love him as a prince?” Elena was puzzled. “What if she loved the frog instead?”
Because a girl should love a prince or a princess, Elena had wanted to say.
But it would be a lie, because she had fallen in love with not a frog, but a shadow.
The blonde is hardly aware of the other woman’s thoughts, but is taken aback by her words. “Why not?” she asks, studying the sun-drenched horizon as she speaks. One word was not enough for Elena, not when she was such a golden social butterfly. She is so stubborn in the company of others, even in something so simple as a chance encounter. She would not allow anyone else to push her away, would force herself to settle against them. Even if the only thing they wanted was for her to turn cheek. “Maybe you should shut your eyes then,” she says, and there is no bitterness in her voice. She once hated sunrises and sunsets if only because she could not see them.
“What would you like to see instead?” She asks the woman. “Tell me your name.” There is a finality in the statement, but it is soft (as soft as lambs, because Elena is no lion). “I am Elena,” she says, a white flag. She has met too many strangers, seen too many faces, but she has such little to show for it in the names she holds so close to her heart.
There is a weed that grows in the desert with rampant disregard for the cruelty of its surroundings. Amaunet has forgotten the name of it but she can still see the miles its root system had stretched when the Davke children made a game of digging it out of the dunes. Some had thought it a metaphor for the insidious, and fragile, flowers filling up the city. Others had thought it an omen about how desert-bred things kept their roots hidden until every dune, and every stretch of nothingness, was filled with them.
Amaunet had thought neither.
She had only seen a weed with no flower to make it lovely an no poison in the sap of it to make it useful. It had been a weed, only a weed, as useful in the ground as it was torn from it.
The way the sunset glimmers on the mare, the way it echoes in her eyes as if the dying sun has already turned to starlight, reminds her of that weed. She can see it in the mare, that hunger for another mile, and another mile, and another mile, that the desert had no intention of surrendering.
But Amaunet is no desert dune. She is not a barren stretch of nothing filled with violence. She is the violence and savage life that fills it.
“There will be another sunset tomorrow, another one after that, and in all of them there will be two skies of twilight full of the same colors. Fill the world with enough of something and eventually it will all seem alike.” Her smile is a terrible thing as it brightens when she wonders if the mare is clever enough to keep up with something other than her flowers and her softness.
Amaunet wants to tear the woman's eyes out for suggesting that she do anything. Her wings rustle like a storm forest at her side as they itch to see how quick another shade of twilight might stumble and fall.
It hurts, actually hurts, to tuck them back to her side and look a the city full of lambs. The colors are too bright for the desert and she finds the citizens paler for the way they must fill their city up with color instead of themselves. Or, she thinks as she turns away from the mare to look back at the stretch of horses below, the way they must braid color in their hair to make them stand out.
“Hello Elena.” She says. But the mare had not asked, not in any way that Amaunet might heed, and so she offers nothing but, “what I would like to see is nothing that your city would love,” in place of a name.
It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary
S
ometimes the best way to punish your enemies is to take away what they love most.’ The undead man had said to her, his eyes glowing red. ‘Is that what you intend to do with me?’ She asks, but doesn't ask, am I the thing someone loves most, or am I the thing you are going to take away from? What does she love most? The answer is simple: Elliana, her daughter. But, who loves her most? Not Lilli, she cant blame her though, Lilli has her children now. Not Azrael, how could he? After the betrayal. And not Tenebrae—not Tenebrae.
Blue eyes watch the mare as magic gathers under her skin. Chaos. She was utter chaos. It reminds her of the War of Windskeep, of the volcano in Tephra, of the feeling of tumbling through the air before you hit the water. Chaos.
She stares at the sky for a moment, letting herself study the clouds and the way they curve and shape themselves against the sunset sky. She and Lilli used to cloud gaze, created castles and kingdoms, with dragons flying by. (“Are dragons real?” A red haired filly had asked. “Of course they are.” A golden girl had answered.) She almost loses herself in the dying light, her mind drifting to things she shouldn't think about, that fill her heart for an instant, before sending it plummeting back down to earth.
“How can you be sure?” Elena asks her, and the way her blue eyes look at her, is with genuine curiosity. She has learned through all the pain in her life that nothing is guaranteed. Because there was a time once when she could not see the sunsets or the twilight or the day.
The empath can feel the nerve her words struck as easily as if it were her own. “I unsettled you,” she points out to her. She too can feel that restraint, like ropes tied around her to keep her grounded and Elena offers her a smile at the effort. “Then do not show me,” she offers gently, reading into the woman’s emotions, waiting for anymore unsettlement. 'Like a rabid coyote.' She associates her with the idea. Grace and ease is how to handle them. It was how she watched Valerio when one made its way into the ancient valley on a crisp autumn afternoon. “But tell me.”
![[Image: ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db...0iFb4PvyXE]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/8026a53b-dc57-41ab-b574-9f8a8fe57ce4/ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db0780.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzgwMjZhNTNiLWRjNTctNDFhYi1iNTc0LTlmOGE4ZmU1N2NlNFwvZGR2b3R3ZS01OTMwMmJhNi02YTgxLTQ3YmYtOTg0Ni0zMGM1YTVkYjA3ODAucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.ujCJH7FAbsQhfZlQniMmEd_vw-VmvaTDn0iFb4PvyXE)
