From a shadowy copse of trees, she watches him, silent. Her eyes, large and dark, brim with a curiosity she can hardly contain, purposely keeping her breathing soft. She doesn’t know why she does this — why she watches instead of approaching, as if she is trying to steal a glimpse into the side they show when they think they are alone. Usually, she watches them from above, hidden within the wisps of cotton-candy clouds, crafting stories about them to weave into her daydreams. From up there, they were always exactly as she needed them to be.

She had decided earlier today that she would work up the courage to meet one of them. To see if maybe she has been missing something by confining her idea of them to her own mind and imagination.

There is no particular reason that she chose him, at least, not in the beginning. She listens to the soft rush of the river, wondering what he is thinking as he hovers above it. There is something dark, something strange that seems to cling to him, and perhaps this has been embedded into the very fabric of her making, but his darkness is what pulls her from hiding.

“Hello,” she says to him, her voice soft as the stardust that drifts in lazy motes from her wings as she walks. She does not know yet to be afraid; no one had ever been unkind in her made-up versions of the world, and even in the case of her own father her mother was an unreliable source. Still, she does not close the space between them entirely, her dark eyes watching him from beneath the honeyed glow of the halo above her head. “Did you do that?” She asks, gesturing toward the trail of frozen and wilted vegetation he seems to have left in his wake.

Silence stretches between them, her heartbeat echoing around it, and she thinks he is going to ignore her presence entirely. Perhaps being pretty has spoiled her, because that was not an option she had considered, and her chest goes tight at the thought of it.
In her dream-world they never ignored her; they didn’t need to be in love with her, of course, but they did not ignore her.

She does not know why the idea of it—of being disliked or unwanted—sparks a desperation in her veins that she has not felt before, and she thinks, in that moment, that she would do anything to rid herself of the feeling.

So it’s almost a relief to see the ice winding towards her, to at least be acknowledged.
There is a moment where her heart gives a sudden lurch as the ice touches her skin, winding up her leg before dropping back down, and she sucks in a soft, startled breath at the coldness of it. She looks at him, dark brown eyes alight with curiosity and admiration. “You must be powerful, to be able to create ice,” she tells him, transfixed by his ice-blue eyes, by the nearly tangible darkness that radiates from him—a stark contrast to the naivety that emanates from her. After spending most of her young life locked in a tower of her own making, she was beginning to realize just how little she understood the world she had been watching.

“Oh,” she says when he points out the stardust, looking down to where it has settled in a thin layer on the ground. The way that he says it—almost indifferent—makes her wonder if he is annoyed by it, and what will she do if he is? She cannot turn it off, and she worries now that everyone (a scant few though it may be) she has met has also been put off by the golden dust that spilled from the tips of her wings. “I did. I’m sorry,” she apologizes, but she isn’t sure why. She does not owe him anything, this ice-cold stranger, but that same desperation is there again, and that innate desire to twist herself into something that he would find tolerable.

“My name is Empyreal,” she says this as if giving him her name will somehow keep him here, like it is a thread to connect the two of them. She steps towards him, just once, her head tilted just slightly to meet his gaze when she asks him softly, hesitantly, as if she is already prepared for him to reject her in some way, “what’s yours?”

There’s something a bit off about you, isn’t there?
If she is anything at all like the blood that created her, there is so very little that is right about her.

This is an innate thing that she knows, a wrongness that has been there as long as her heart has beat, but it is not something she could ever articulate or explain. She just knows that she was born with an insatiable ache in her chest that nothing seems to soothe, as if she had been born broken before the world had even touched her. She isn’t at all offended that he had picked up on this right away; she has always assumed anyone would be able to see it, that her honeyed halo and shimmering stardust could not hide her flaws. It is partially this belief that she does not belong that has kept her hidden all this time, and perhaps it is fate that her first act of bravery is only reaffirming her suspicions.

But instead of withdrawing inward she only gives a small smile, a quiet curiosity sparking in her dark eyes as she watches him. She finds him equally strange, though she does not say that. For all her dreaming, she could not have possibly dreamed up anyone quite like him—she has not experienced such a coldness before, and her naive mind simply would not have been able to conjure it.

“Isn’t there something a bit off about everyone?” She asks, genuine. She is sheltered, but she knows that part of being alive is being imperfect. But a slight frown shadows her brow, tentatively adding, “I can’t possibly be the strangest you have ever met.”

She isn’t sure what she is supposed to feel when he calls her a beautiful thing.
She knows that she is, or at least, she knows that she should be perceived that way. But she thinks that she is beautiful in the way a flower is beautiful, or a sunset. Nature behaving in the way you would expect—a cosmic and ethereal thing birthed from a god and an angel, as if there could be any other outcome.

There is a small, logical part of her that knows he is only stating a fact.

So she may not flush with warmth, and yet still there is a brief, sudden flutter of her pulse as something else flairs to life inside of her. A shadowy thing that curls around that miniscule validation, clings to it, holds it tight. For a brief moment that hollow ache in her chest doesn’t feel so empty, and while she doesn’t yet recognize this for what it is—her fatal flaw, an inheritance of mother’s brokenness—she tries desperately to hang onto it.

“Well, I haven’t met very many others,” she says, thinking. Her circle was terribly small, and once again she was wondering how badly she had doomed herself sequestering away in dreams and clouds. But even from her vantage point above, she knew that he wasn’t the only strange creature to walk these lands. She has seen them—dragons, shadow creatures, things made of more bone than flesh. She wouldn’t lie and say she found them beautiful, but she did not think them ugly, either. They existed as part of the world the same way everything else did, woven into the same tapestry that painted a larger picture. “So I guess for now, you are the strangest, but that could change.” She says this with a smile, her dark eyes alight with her teasing. And now, with his attention directly on her, she presses again, “And, you still haven’t told me your name.”