[P] seek me out

[Elena]

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

H

e understands this world, but Elena does not. Throughout all the sorrow in her life, she has never been able to understand true cruelty, true torture, and true evil. She has only known the repercussions of it.

She can feel it racing through her—the grief that she has never known how to turn off. So many others around her seem so capable of becoming immune to it but as the years go along, she just fractures more and more. Perhaps she grew up too sheltered. Perhaps she never learned how to truly protect herself.

Maybe she was always made to feel the way that she does.

Forever broken by the world and then remade by it.

He keeps screaming, no, it sounds so much less than a scream to her, it sounds like a cry. Screaming, crying, tears and snarls, they are all very much the same when it comes to grief. That is when she realizes this place is not a city but a graveyard, of fragmented nightmares that never came to be in the real world. And they crossed that god forsaken bridge into it. They crossed it when they never should have.

They say if you touch the net of a dream catcher, all the nightmares will be set loose.

They walk together, long enough that she expects no answer from him, long enough that she does not mind the silence. She looks to him then when he speaks, almost forgetting what his voice sounds like, her blue eyes are somber. “There have been very few I have ever been happy to have leave me,” she says. Tunnel, Frostbane, she doesn't think of the rest. The fact that he lied about her name causes a note of laughter. It seems so relatively insignificant into what other territories they have crossed with one another after all this time. “We never promised to tell the truth, we never promised anything at all,” she comments, her words are like butterfly's wings. Wispy, pretty and fleeting. “Torrin,” she says, because that name feels right after all this time.

And into the darkness they go through doors he opens. I hate myself, Elena, he says and she turns to look at him, straining through the dark. And his startling confession is enough to break the glass and she turns her head into his shoulder, closing blue eyes. When she opens them there is a hallway lit up before her and she walks with him, down it, and she knows what she sees is not real, is not really there, because images of dragons (the very same dragons she and Lilli used to dream up) are before her. They cry and snarl, one holds back its head, nostrils flared. Elena pushes her golden head once more into his shoulder before the heat comes as she knows it would. She breathes into his skin, laughing and crying all at once. “Take me home, Torrin,” she says, buries the wish into his skin. “Take me home to my daughter.” And her world does not go black, instead, it is swallowed by dragon fire.

@Vercingtorix
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon

Elena went night-night because of smoke. She will wake up in her home away from the city :D but for the intentions of this thread, she is done.