i will always hold you close

She waits until it is dusk and the world around her starts to change in subtle ways. Families return home, and the children flash tired, satisfied eyes to a sky that turns orange and gold with streaks of red, to shadows that grow so long and vast beneath their mountains and their trees. There is less of that murmur of conversation, fewer clusters travelling by together as everyone makes that subconscious decision to head home - wherever that may be in this moment of their lives. 

But Peridot is like the small animals who stretch and blink and poke their faces out of their dens and into the falling dark. Probably because there is so much of it in her blood - from her father, her brothers, her sisters. So many who can weave shadow or light into whatever they wish. She is not like them, though, no special gift but for the strangeness of such beautiful emerald green eyes that allow her to see in any dark. But, maybe that is why she loves the night so much.

She is made for it.

She slips out into woods of Taiga with the rabbits and the deer, watching a racoon wander past with her kits bumbling along behind her. For a moment she thinks to follow them, finding such sweetness in the way they race and tumble and are oblivious to anything beyond the beautiful moment that surrounds them, the immediacy of their life. But there is something else in her heart tonight, something full of wild and wander and it uncurls softly in the corners of a delicate smile, draws soft furrows of pleasure at the corners of those gem-bright eyes.

Unquestioningly she makes the journey from Taiga to the Forest. It would have been easiest to cut through the rocky hills of Loess, but something urges her instead through the valleys of Hyaline where she treads along the shores of a river she knows weaves along beside the Forest. It takes much of the night, but she enjoys the way the stars and moon become trapped like living pictures within the glittering surface of the water, the way she is surrounded by only the night and the dark and the beautiful quiet.

When the Forest finally rises up through the dark at her shoulder, she welcomes it with a smile. Turning away from the river, she is greeted by the smell of damp earth and cedar, by the flickering light of fireflies that bob like untethered stars through the tangle of tree trunks and hanging branches. “I love it here.” She murmurs to herself, scarcely making the conscious decision to speak aloud. Then she’s off again, winding slowly through trees that rise up into a dark made starless by the branches covered so thickly in leaves.

but i will learn to let you go