09-26-2021, 10:24 AM
W
hen morning arrived, it was surprisingly cool, and Elliana awoke to chilled skin coated in a fine dew. She had been sleeping on the ground, though she couldn't remember lying down the night before. The sunrise had passed, and the sky was a cloud-scrubbed, cool, pale blue, and the wind bit at her damp skin until she stood and shook the sleep from her cold limbs. She moves off with wanderlust aching in her chest like a lead weight, and she found it hard to concentrate.She rises from the ground, not an orphan only because her parents aren’t dead yet.
She is in some in between place, no where to really settle (though Elliana has never had roots, only blossoms, desperate to catch a breeze). But she finds herself moving closer and closer to the pampas, like a child desperate to touch a glittering web—forgetting that spiders bite those they think flies.
“You are strong and brave beyond your years, Elli, but you are still just a child.” Her mother said, disgruntled as Elliana hovered at the doorway. Nicnevin was headed to battle to aid in the growing tension between some of the Courts. Elli believed she could help her teacher, protect her family (her mother, Bird, James) “When you are that young, it is the responsibility of your parent, of the adults in your life, to look out for you—not the other way around.”
Now what?
She is still young, but not that young, and the adults in her life, they are still there, but there is no cooling shadow hovering over her anymore. There are shadows that mingle with her own (she calls to mind Aela, she calls to mind Reave) but they are not tall enough to climb over her own. Or maybe, Elliana has just grown so tall, so expansive without anyone to block her sunlight.
It’s been a while since she’s seen anyone at all. Alone but not lonely, that is Elliana, the shadow-girl, little star-child, floating quietly through this life as if she has not a care in the world. When, really, she has lost it all. But, Elli does not mind that she had been one to inflict this solitude upon herself for no other reason than that she has better things to do than heap her problems on everyone else. Elliana, lost though she does not truly know it, lost in a world that was a dream for her parents, for her godparents, and the rest of their generation, but not her own. Her world has become sarcastic and sharp and little by little, the room for starlight children, flower children is running out.
As if she knows this, she settles into a patch of flowers and looks down at them all. I have a story to tell you, she whispers like every one of her words is a secret. A woman with dark locks and skin as silver as the moon dust on a clear night, she stepped into a field of daisies and she started dancing. A breath and a heart beat is the only break she takes. She kept dancing until she collapsed into the flowers from exhaustion. And then she awoke and began again, dancing and falling, dancing and falling. Eventually others joined in, like phoenixes, rising from flower petals, not ashes, dying in sa-shays not flames. Hundreds were consumed by this dancing until one day it just stopped, she pauses here. Some has died, during the dance, others unable to move, other still would sway, as if not entirely able to ease the dancing from their bones. Just then a breeze picked up and the flowers swayed. Yeah, just like that.
..but nightmares are dreams too.