omewhere the sun is waiting to rise.

Somehow the night is holding on a little longer.

Elliana. Welcome to the world. Her father had told her. It is one of her earliest memories. And then he held her, held her in a way her mother never could, that no one every could. The way a father holds his daughter. He has been the only father she has ever known, she had never questioned her place in the world when she was able to snuggle closely beside her parents.

It feels so different, she feels so far from this. When did it become so easy to swallow down her heart, to swallow down the sea that tries to rise again and again in her throat like she is the shore telling the waves not today? When did it become this hard to breathe without blowing fire, to wrap a noose around the neck of this thing she’s become that knows only how to rage like a dragon burning down a mountain pass?

When did she lose that part of herself that Aeneas had found and sparked a million fireflies in a secret meadow?

She knows she should be trying to get it back. Elliana knows this. She should look at the beauty of the flowers, and not criticizing its lack of strength. She knows she should be lifting her eyes to the morning and thinking of it as a promise instead of a curse.

She should do a million things — but she does none of them.

Last night she had dreamed of the sea beneath a broad moon. The night before she had dreamed of flowers growing in all the places they shouldnt, that they couldnt. Tonight, in the hour right before the settling of dawn, she had dreamed of monsters.

Elliana walks next to the river. She had taken a detour traveling from Nerine to the Brilliant Pampas. When Elliana had first come to Beqanna (just before the walls of Dusk closed in on her so tightly should could not breahte)she had smelled of marsh and a redwood forest It had clung to her skin like a memory, an omen. Now, there is something in the sunny scent of her skin, and the dust that crawls up her ankles that tells a story of girl who wanders, and wanders, and wanders. She smells like wildflowers and she smells like cliffs and a sea breeze.

She stands between two wispy trees and smiles.
It had turned into quite the dawn.




She speaks like this.