[private] even through a stone a flower can grow

[Bluebell]

At first she thought the nightmares were her own. Malicious and terrible, full of fury and left her drowning in darkness. Is this what her father had warned her about? The malevolent plague bestowed upon their family, the beast that is their third eye? She had awoke in a cold sweat and tears, unable to shake the pure terror that had racked her lungs when she had screamed herself awake, her throat raw and burning. Is this to be her life; to live each waking moment in fear of the future, unable to outrun any of it?

Her father certainly hadn’t.

It is this question that is on her mind as she strolls absently through the barren meadow as frost and ice cracking beneath her opaline hooves. Warden had disappeared into the night, without a trace, and with his absence came the shadows and the nightmares. Tephra - the only thing she knew as home - was now a nightmare-scape and Bluebell is uncertain if they are her own premonitions, or if someone else’s magic has taken residence within her.

She ventures out, uncertain if she would return (if she were, it would be to retrieve her sister) any time soon, searching for something to ease her young mind. And maybe, just maybe, she would find her parents somewhere amongst the brittle grasses and achingly blue sky. Glancing up at the clear skies, she prays for the night; to search the stars for hope and guidance.

The sun is blazing and bright overhead but does nothing to soothe the cold that seems to bite into the very marrow of her bones, seeping through the deep chestnut and white of her porcelain skin. There are very few knicks and cracks in the glass that shines clear and bright with the sun’s rays, her legs whispering gently against the golden, dry grass. The violet flowers that haphazardly dot her mane and tail could possibly be frozen, Bluebell is too numb to tell. The numbness felt good, in some strange and foreign way.

It feels as if she’s become impenetrable - perhaps she could be, one day - but knows that the bitter cold only made her more fragile, more breakable.

bluebell

shaded by a tree; can’t live up to a rose
all i ever wanted was a sunny place to grow

@jenger
surprise!!

[Eglantine]

Eglantine wakes to the sound of Bluebell’s cries, tugged from one of her own nightmares with a kind of suddenness that leaves her momentarily dazed as she opens her eyes and struggles to discern dream from reality. Mom is still an utter stranger, just the ghost of a memory she had only seen haunting the blue of Warden’s eyes. Real. Dad is still gone, still fighting demons no one but he can slay, falling further and further away from the remnants of family that she and Bluebell are. Real.

But as she blinks again and peers around her, it is still at the humid jungles of Tephra with the veins of fire like burning rivers that criss-cross the sloping hillsides like unwalkable paths. In her dream she had been on a mountain top, alone at an impossible peak and surrounded by fog or clouds or scentless smoke while the sounds of her family’s screams had filled her ears. She had been stranded though, helpless or hopeless or even just useless, and she knows even if Belly hadn’t woken her she would’ve stood there forever listening to those pleading cries.

It should be alarming to wake to the sound of real cries, but even as they break Eglantine’s heart she knows they are something normal now. That everyone inside this place is haunted, that no one can find any peace in their rest. Still, she rises unsteadily and makes her way quietly to the place she had watched her sister curl up in the night before, finding confirmation in the unremarkable visual that Belly is in fact unharmed. Physically, at least. She knows that her twin has just as many ghosts as their father does, and she knows that eventually she will lose Bluebell too.

When Belly leaves for the Meadow, Eglantine follows her distantly with a wordless kind of weight inside her chest, drifting like a shadow untethered but still loyally bound. She knows that her sister prefers solitude to face the pain that lives inside her chest, the demons that writhe inside her mind, but Eggy preferred her company over everything else. They were too much the same, too much separate pieces of the same whole. But where Bluebell looked the part of something fragile and delicate, glass as their mother had been, she was so fierce and so strong even if she existed as a prisoner inside the captivity of other inherited traits. Eglantine was the sister who lacked, the one without depth and without drive, the one who had come to know loneliness intimately but did not face it head on.

It is why she takes so long to pull herself from those distant shadows to join her sister beneath the sun as if she hadn’t followed her in secret all the way from home. “Hi Belly.” She says, and there is a tired kind of warmth to her smile as she reaches out to touch her sister’s gleaming, pocked shoulder. “Seems like a nice day to freeze to death.” There is teasing in the gentleness of her voice and it mostly conceals the note of quiet uncertainty as she glances around at the winterscape around them. “How are you?” Those summer green eyes are as bright as glass when they return to Bluebell’s face, her voice something etched with a shade of yearning like early morning sun. “Can you believe there’s an island in the north that’s like this all the time? Just cold and frozen and snowy? I think I’d never be able to stop shivering.” She knows she’s trying too hard, talking too much, but there is a new kind of dark that she finds in the backs of Bluebell’s wide eyes and it leaves her feeling cold inside.

eglantine

you remind me of who i could have been,
had i been stronger and braver way back then

@Bluebell