[P] A drowsy sweetness

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

Florentine has long ago become immune to the scent of her flowers. It clings to her like perfume, radiated from each flower that grows within her tangled hair.
 
The girl is anomalous here. Not just because of her heritage – a stranger to Solterra and even to Novus – but because of her looks. To watchful eyes this fae-girl is everything this part of Solterra is not. She is golden skin, flowers full of vitality – not wilted from the sun or the arid terrain. There is no part of Flora that is not regal when compared to the slaves that scuttle around her like mice and watch her passage tentatively.
 
Maybe Florentine should not be here. Maybe she should not have slipped from the bounds of Terrastella by night and run to the furthest corner of Solterra – but she did and she is here.
 
There is no part of Florentine that is not dirty and ragged. Solterra has already laid its mark upon her skin. She has become as dirty as a street urchin. Slowly she walks and slowly she continues to morph. Memories rise thick and lucid and the Florentine who walks along the ruinous street of Solterra is no longer a horse. Her memories turn her human again (within the shelter of her mind) and back to the dirty, pauper child she had once been – in another life.
 
Oh to look at her golden skin now is to remember how it once was for a child like her. Florentine remembers how stolen, expensive gems felt when held by her small, dirty fingers…
 
The eyes of Solterra’s poor are flames upon her skin – they lick the gold like leaves from her skin and burn her with their fire. The flower-girl turns her gaze to theirs and there is nothing conceited in her contemplation, no sympathy that elevates her above them. This queen knows what it is to scrounge, to beg. Their only difference is Flora is the time-traveller-girl. She lives one life and then passes into another with barely a blink of her amethyst eyes. She could die a queen and wake up a princess or a lowly, sheep farmer’s daughter...
 
What are you doing here?
 
His eyes don’t feel like the others that watch her. His curiosity is one they dare not voice. His words creep along her spine, sharp like needles with their questioning, smooth like the glide of a blade with the baritone of his voice.
 
She shivers.
 
Dusk’s queen stops where her eyes rub against the wide, wide mahogany gaze of a child.  She blinks and the big eyes are gone, lost to darkness and secrecy and hunger. Slowly the fae-girl turns to face her finder, the one who wonders, like her, just what she is doing here.
 
“I don’t know.” The queen concedes softly, for she truly doesn’t. But her eyes roam through the ruins, they pick their way between broken stones and the too-angular shadows of children – where was their softness?
 
There is no smile to further soften the elven lines of her face. There is no smile to light the spark in her gemstone eyes.
 
A pause.
 
A breath, then:
 
“What do you think I might be doing?” It is nearly a whisper, a sigh, that the wind promises to steal the moment it parts her lips. But Flora watches Eik through it all, as curious of him as he of her.
 
Will he cast her out? Accuse her of spying and send her home… Florentine drinks in all of this quiet, curious boy. The silver of his skin, soft as moonlight and dappled like light through leaves, is gentle on her eyes; he is all the softness of lunar light but the sharp silver of a brandished blade. Before him the gloaming queen stands. She is golden and beautiful and littered with flowers that cannot and should not be here.
 
On the outside she is a stranger, foreign and wrong on this part of Solterra, but inside this girl is full of her own poor, poor memories.

@Eik <3 <3

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world