"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
10-28-2021, 06:08 PM (This post was last modified: 10-28-2021, 06:09 PM by thistly.)
Fall in love whenever you can, her mother had admonished. It didn’t seem cautionary, just a piece of wisdom thrown about carelessly like a handful of dust tossed to the wind. Love often and love fiercely, is what she also said sometimes when she stared off into the distance and she peered after, trying to see whatever it was her mother saw moving on the horizon. Usually all she saw was the scud of clouds or light so bright and beautiful that it hurt to look at it. Still, she looked and she listened and let her mother weave all manner of wildflowers and weeds into her hair and the rest the wind took care of.
In this way, she grew up. Wild and wanted, no less loved or nurtured but there was always a distance in it, a wistfulness that bordered on pain that pricked at her heart. If that was love, she almost didn’t want it. Not the gaunt look of malnourishment as her mother pined and paced for someone that wasn’t there. She understood that someone was her father. That the cave they dwelt in had been his and the thatch of forest beyond had been roamed over by her mother in bear-form. But if that was love, no thank you ma’am. She did not want it despite her mother’s tender admonishing to fall always and often as if love was the best thing that could happen out of everything else in the world.
Then, there came a time in which their paths separated and she watched as her mother’s shape changed from equine to ursine and it was a bear that lumbered off unconcerned of the offspring it left behind. The bear was better at compartmentalizing the mare’s tragedies and triumphs. Or the bear in her just did not care. But as for her, the daughter left on the verge of the wood and the world, she watched until the bear blended into the shadows and was no more and felt the smallest thrill at some newfound sense of freedom never before tasted.
Truth be told, she had not the fortitude to leave her mother on her own. It had to be done in this fashion - with Keeper the one to go and the daughter left behind to discover that she could act of her own accord now without pinpricks of guilt and shame. It was as if she awoke, came to life, with a shiver and an internal spark of elation as the next chapter before her began to unfold. She laughed then sobered, perhaps mad to be standing in the woods and laughing to herself but madness might help keep the undesirables at bay. Not that she was at all scared, just so elated to be free in a sense that she had never before comprehended and now…
The world was her oyster and everything in it a beautiful pearl to behold. Forget love, there was an abundance of it in birdsong and breeze, river and ravine, trails and time. Thistly smiled and struck off down some path that only deer took and cast herself into the hands of fate like a smoky blue stone.
er mother told her a story once about the wind and the woman who fell in love with him. It was a long story, but it ends with the girl standing alone on a mountain, and the wind blowing half way around the world. It ends with them asking if she was sad, and her saying she knew he would be back, that the wind is such an unstoppable thing—it would tear down mountains and cross oceans to get to where it wants to go. They ask her how long she will wait. She said forever and a day, until a winter breeze tickles her ear, and sparkles snowflakes on her eyelashes.
Elliana can remember thinking how silly, to wait. She would never wait.
How long has it been, she thinks.
How long since what, little shadow-girl? How long have you been away from home? Or how long since he left you and took a part of you with him? How long since she abandoned the little girl Elliana and replaced it with something similar but not quite all the same. How long since her mother stopped worrying over her every move and started to worry about bigger things, nothing at all, and then everything at once?
How long has it been since she decided she never wants to go back?
Elliana has learned to not grow melancholy over a bit of lost self.
When she looks at the trees, haloed like gods in the light, she tries to see only something holy enough to live in her dreams. There is a piece of her that wants to find that grave that sat wide and gaping, ready to swallow her whole should she only ask for such a thing.
She finds her, in the forest and Elliana is unsurprised, she always came across another when she started to feel lonely. A social butterfly that hides in its cocoon. Altogether, a contradiction. Her breath makes the same hush, hush, hush sound that she makes at Aela when she gallops off to burn the world. And Aela is far more dangerous than any other creature Elliana might encounter. “Do you ever wonder why the seasons change?” she asks her, this strange, looking at her with those too glassy blue eyes. “Or why it can’t always be autumn?” When things are dying but not dead, she thinks but does not say.
Elliana has always been one to see the art and not the decay.
10-31-2021, 11:52 AM (This post was last modified: 10-31-2021, 11:56 AM by thistly.)
She rattled about; careless of the noise that she made in leaf-crunch and step. Forests were like that; the comings and goings either noisy or loud and she fell somewhere in between. Making just enough noise to be heard but not enough to be a noticeable racket from all the rest. Let them come to her, and not her to them, as if Thistly had better things to think about - like whether or not she really would fall in love whenever she could or if she’d just bluster and bristle in the face of love and luck.
Love was less and less on her mind as she ambled down the deer trail. She noticed their cloven prints sunk deep here and there in pockets of muck the sun had not reached, or the piles of their round pelleted droppings that smelled like nothing she had known before. It just identified them as deer and poop, nothing spectacular like berries and grasses, bucks and does, and all other manner of suggestion like a stud pile could tell her. Mother would have said to read the bear claw-scratch on the tree trunks and the rings of mushrooms on the ground if she wanted to know things.
She didn’t always put much stock in what her mama said though, since the mare functioned less and less as a horse and more and more as a bear. Bears couldn’t govern wild wide-eyed little girls all that much, especially ones that bore a striking resemblance to their absent father that it made their mama’s heart hurt each time she looked at her beloved child. Thistly had borne such hurts well and often looked askance, not letting her mama know that she had seen the flashes of pain therein, like flickerings of quiet dark shadow or bright hot flames.
That’s why she decided to forsake love as much as she could. Except the world had other designs and each step she took brought her closer and closer to loving every single little thing about it. From the specks of dirt that worked their way onto her smoky blue-black skin (like old smudged bruises admits shadow and smoke) to the gales that slipped and tumbled before in admirable acrobatics that sent leaves swirling and sailing until she became caught up in their tireless ancient dance of shake, spin, and fall. She recognizes a kinship in the leaves; tossing and tumbling and leaving the parent-tree like she had.
It makes her pause and smile, all thought of her own coming and going stalled as the season further stands its ground, putting down roots before the winter comes. She can smell snow in the air and knows it won’t be long but snowflakes fall instead of leaves and the trees stand naked and eerie before her, near-dead and just wood. No leaf, no life. But she can understand and appreciate the dynamics of it - of seasonal change and dormancy. Not that she’d partake of it as the girl finds her, two lost souls in the wood before the onset of winter.
“If I did, I was smaller and sorrier for the lack of not knowing.” It is a poor excuse as her black eyed stare meets one of a startling shade of blue that she’s only ever seen in a glacial pool or two before guzzling her fill of such frigid and pure water. She is certain that Keeper must have told her tales of how it goes from spring to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter and all starts all over again. If so, there must have been some involvement of snakes and the eating of their tails and how it’s all one big endless circle.
None of that is what Thistly relays though; “Would you want it to always be just the one season?” She could list pros and cons to each but would miss the unique aspects passing from one to the next. Could she pick just one to endure in permanence? It made her smile longer, “I don’t think I could pick just one, could you?” Despite the fact it sounded like the other girl had, and she seemed partial to the season settling deeper in around them in pops of red and orange and gold. Death had never looked prettier than in the woods.
“Maybe this one…” she confided, as she looked around them and began to appreciate the explosions of color in the tree-tops and gilding the edges of bushes and ferns.
atching her parents, all of them, she wonders if love is just another moment. Moments have never been things by which she might count the passing of time. They have never been more than hollow echoes of her heart, frailer than butterfly wings and just as fleeting. Moments just exist so that the ache of life does not feel so heavy. But when it comes down to it, you will still die alone.
Black and blue. Their eyes look like a bruise, or a black sand beach. In her dreams there are monsters running alongside her like shadows and for heartbeat she wonders if those monsters lurch in the shadows of her dark eyes. The thought weighs heavy on her heart like a noose. The glacier blue of her eyes watches her and that knowing look of hers burns. She has a way of watching people with a terrifying intensity, staring not at them but through them, moving her eyes over the ridges of their bones, the curve of their ribs, staring straight through their hear. But she turns hers away from the woman, focusing instead on the calm bustle of leaves when the wind rolls over them.
The curl in her heart makes her think perhaps she is bitter, after all, as she stares into the trees and imagines things she would never dare to speak. The bitterness of her home, where she came from.
Terratella was poisoned by the memory of her mother, her hero, crumbling before her very eyes and taking what youthfulness Elliana still had down with her. Although, it didn't outweigh the happy memories, not all of them at least.
She says none of these things though, maybe if she had she would have found some sort of kinship in the girl, or maybe it would be far too early and they would both leave each other, and Elliana would be more bitter than when they started.
“I don’t think my parents ever told me. Or they said it was magic and never thought to correct it,” Elliana chirps, almost shocked by the sudden flip-flop of her personality. She feels homesick, almost.
Almost.
There is a lump in her throat and when she swallows, it hardens into stone and sinks down to crush her heart. “Oh.” She says and it sounds like a the start of a story. But she doesn't tell one, just tastes the flavor of orange and gold on her tongue. “And what is it that you love about autumn?” She asks. She wants to say her mother loved summer, her godfather loved spring, and her dad loved only the stars and the night. “I may be partial to winter.” She says. “If I had to pick.”
