I guess I've got a taste for poison; I've given up on ever being well
I keep mining the horizon, digging for lies I've yet to tell
Long has she wandered.
But her journey has not been a lonely one.
Because the trees and the flowers dance alongside her. Sometimes she can even roll great boulders along, but they drain her energy, leave her chest heaving. Alas, it is impossible to be lonely when one is surrounded by love in its purest form.
She does not know where to call home, so she calls it all home. How deeply she loves them. How her love for all of it blooms in the long column of her throat, hitches up her breath. She kisses the trunk of a tree and she closes her eyes, grins quietly to herself. Because how wonderful it is simply to be alive.
She knows that the dead have returned. She does not know enough to hope that her mother is among them. She is naive, Lovewell, and thinks that her mother’s absence means that she has found some grand adventure. She will come back eventually, Lovewell thinks, she will come back to her in one way or another. She knows even less, still, about fearing the dead things that have risen up around them. Fear is a bitter pill for the girl, too bitter, and she does her best to avoid it. It is easy to pretend that it does not exist when she can make the flowers dance. When she can focus on all the good.
She is testing her gift, trying in vain to use the magic associated with it to bring a fallen bird back to life, when she catches sight of him. She watches him a moment, watches him search the faces, and wonders if he’s someone returned from the dead. She does not know that he is something that should be feared. She does not know that his blood runs thick in her veins.
She abandons her foolish endeavor, murmuring a quiet apology to the bird, kisses its downy head and then moves toward him. She intercepts him with a smile. A smile that lights up her whole face. “Hello!” she chirps, perhaps a bit too brightly. “You look like you’re looking for someone and I’d like to help.”
Lovewell