"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
“I assume very little,” he replies, his bright eyes decidedly devilish as he peers at her, grinning. Where she lay open before him like the pages of a book, it seems she could read little of him in return. It’s an intriguing prospect, knowing she doesn’t truly know him and yet finds him fascinating regardless. And strokes his ego perhaps a little too much, but he is still too young yet to acknowledge such a thing.
Where he can see the way her memories shift and falter - the fear and heart-pounding anticipation of her flight from her home, the love she had borne for those she left behind (even if she refused to admit it), the way she now hides behind her wit and irreverence - she can see only that which he leaves for her. Would she see Brazen’s death in his bones? Lilliana’s continued absence in the raging of the river? The sacrifices he had made for them both in the absence of teeth from the shadows? Or would she find none of it?
Either way, just as he could see her past written in her memories, so too could see the way the future winds before her on so many paths. So many paths that stumble upon his own. Perhaps she would disappear, would run away home, choose one of the invariably few that did not lead to their next meeting. But he doubts it.
As the shadows weave around his bones, knitting skin and fading bruises, he watches her. Listens. There is something about hearing her story from her lips rather than seeing the way it stumbles so haphazardly around her. He finds he rather likes it. “Are monks not celibate?” he asks on a laugh, briefly interrupting. “It’s a wonder you were fathered at all if that’s the case.”
Then she asks about his own family, the shadow creatures of his birth-home. He tilts his head curiously, wondering at her interest in their secrets. “If they did, they would be far more interesting,” he muses, blue eyes fixed on her with a speculative air. “But if you must know, it is merely that my great-uncle is sickeningly in love with his mate and has produced a passel of shadow-children.”
When she has finished her work, he shifts away, suddenly restless. Rune stirs from the tree in which he had been waiting with the silent patience of a predator. Reave glances at the bird for a brief moment before returning his attention to Elliana with open consideration. “Come with me,” he finally invites. It is an invitation he rarely extends. Would she be honored by such a thing? “I don’t think we are nearly finished with one another,” he continues before a wicked smile begins to grow and he adds, “and I might even show you what I was running from.”
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.
“So you say,” Elliana says. She concentrates, those blue eyes cast downwards as she becomes amazed at her own skills. She didn't know how she knew she could do this, could help him. She just knew.
She laughs. “I guess I am a miracle baby,” she offers with a roll of her shoulder before another answer. “Love is disobedient.” It is the simplest answer she can give, and yet it feels the truest, she is faintly aware of the echo of her mother in her voice, and blinks the sound of it away. She understands it, not the lies, or the secrets, but she understands having a feeling, something inside your chest you cannot control.
She is restless, but she has always been restless. Wanderlust courses through her veins, has been her family's to hold since the dawn of time when the first of her ancestors gazed out across the endless ocean for the first time. Today, it is hers however, and she cups it in her hands gently, like a baby bird, examining it from every perspective in the hopes that its confusing depths will reveal some of its secrets to her. Of course, wanderlust has its own idea of the situation and it will adhere to that code lest it be what it is not. Elliana may have been the only member of her family though that had actually enjoyed it. Because she was the one who had no worldly ties to any place, any of its people, no, not anymore. Maybe, when she had been small—but maybe not even then. All that existed of her relationships has blown away on the breeze and while she cannot resent them for leaving as she had done the same, she cannot quite force herself to forgive them for leaving her (thoughts of Aeneas still causes her skin to sting). But especially Po, of all people, her godfather, her mother’s best friend, he just left, with Thana and the twins to hunt gods without another word…or a goodbye. That hurts worst of all. She had pocketed that wanderlust for so long and it is only recently she has set it loose.
And how it has flourished.
Like her mother’s garden.
(Tonight, she will wonder if the sunflowers bloomed again this year.)
She turns that beautiful dark head away and somberly stares at the clouds in the sky that peek through the branches. He has shadows in his family too.
Come with me
She breathes a long, contented breath and pivots to face him, pirouetting like a graceful ballerina, a faint smile on her lips, though it promises to tilt either into a frown or a grin. “And I am just supposed to trust you? Some stranger by the river?” Elliana asks him. “Like I said, you assume too much, Reave.”
She steps out of the shadows and casts a glass blue eyes in his direction, an invitation for him to take the lead. “Though, maybe this once your assumption was right.”
It’s a strange thing, watching her as she reminisces on her family. On those she left behind. She wishes so badly to be free, to act as though she is quiet and unbothered by their failings. And yet she is not. She is trapped by the endless cycle of their mistakes, tethered undeniably in their grip. Her denial only makes it all the stronger.
Reave of course should not speak on such matters. Not with the weight of his own ancestry dragging behind him with each willful step. Not when the machinations and deceit of his own grandmother had filtered down through generations. He is only the latest in a string of them. So many stories had already played themselves out long before he was born, but they too lie as a yoke around his neck. His only fortune is that he does not bear the curse so many of them do. That at least he could not blame on the grandmother who had caused the rest of it.
Love is disobedient, she says, and Reave’s lips twist at that. He hasn’t known love, but he has seen enough of it to understand. “It is,” is his equally simple reply. He wouldn’t exist either if it weren’t.
He watches curiously as the faces of those she loves crash through her memories, all those she had left behind. The garden she even now remembers with a wistful longing. His eyes never leave her as she looks to the sky. For a moment, from an outsider's perspective it would almost appear as though she were praying for absolution. Reave knows better.
He grins at her questions, blue gaze wickedly enticing. “Why not?” he quips easily, teasing her for her sudden hesitance. She had not been nearly so reticent only moments earlier. “I have a garden of my own I could show you.” He pauses, grin turning devilish. “Since you love flowers so very much.”
His head tilts as she admonishes him once more, though he does not appear at all repentant. Neither does he reveal his satisfaction however, when she admits his assumption might have been right. Instead, with only a gleam in his blue eyes, he simply says, “I am glad I haven’t frightened you off.”
As Rune launches into the sky, Reave turns with a grin to do as she had indicated and lead the way.
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.
She remembers more details than she would wish to. The way the cobblestone smelled after a rain. The way the wildflowers tickled her gold shadow legs when she ran through them. The way the cold air whipped at her face the night she and her father stayed out late to catch the northern lights. The taste of salt water when Anandi first taught her how to swim. She tries to rid herself of these details, these worthless detail. But they stay around, stubborn. She has come to accept their existence, but she does not reminisce, she does not prize her memories like her mother does.
And maybe that makes Elliana strange.
Good thing she concerns herself to little with the thoughts of others.
She could not know whether he has been in love or has not. Elliana herself does not quite know where she rests on that plane. It is either she has not yet felt it, experienced it, or—she has felt it far too often to recognize it as something more significant that others may consider it to be. (Isolt, Danae, Aeneas, Bird) Do you love them, Elliana?
Without a doubt.
“I grew up being told to be wary of strangers,” she says even if she doesn't know why. (A mother that met a stranger in a forest, a stranger beside a bonfire, a stranger in a meadow, and countless reasons more). “Tempting offer,” she says to him, sparking her own shadow grin that perches on the corner of her lips. “Do I get to keep one?” She asks with a sweeping blink of forget-me-not eyes.
She would laugh, if she were not so much like her monk father, she would giggle and chuckle with wild abandon. Instead it is a quiet moment of humor, seen in the crinkle of her eyes, heard in the extra beat of her heart, and felt in the way the sunlight warms her just a little bit more. “Not yet, Reave,” she says and bumps his shoulder as he moves past her. “I am not so easily frightened by shadows or strangers.”
Reave does not rush. There is no need when they have all the time they could wish for. When a leisurely stroll through the tall and ancient trees of the Taiga is a stroll through a place as much a home to him as the windswept moors off its northern border. With Rune gliding far above, the path ahead is as clear as Elliana beside him. There would be no surprises on this brief journey.
At least, none but the ones his fetching companion might yet reveal.
The pace they set together is entirely different than the one he might have set had he been alone. But then, there is a wild recklessness in being alone that doesn’t seem to plague him the same way when he has company. No, his recklessness is far different when he has secrets he might pry from the deep recesses in which they hide. Or when he might convince another to join him in his wilder pursuits. Adrenaline is so much more delightful when shared.
It only remains to be seen what she might be convinced of.
He eyes her with amusement as she asks if she will get to keep one. Like him, the garden of the North is not made to be beautiful so much as it is to be bold. “If you wish to,” he replies enigmatically, eyes gleaming with humor. “But I’m not certain you’ll want to weave the flowers in my garden through such a lovely mane.”
He considers her quietly for several paces then, weaving between trees and around mushrooms with the dexterity of someone familiar with their placement. He is not an introspective sort by most standards, but her reactions have made a rather peculiar set of emotions rise deep in his breast. Peculiar, because for the first time in perhaps his entire life, he actually cares what someone he barely knows thinks of him. Perhaps it is the way in which she doesn’t feel like a stranger. Or perhaps it is something else entirely he hasn’t quite picked apart yet. But whatever the case, he finds himself rather put-out that she keeps lifting barriers between them.
“Am I really so much a stranger to you still then?” he asks, that odd feeling getting the better of him. Nevermind that they have truly only known one another for a single afternoon. He feels far more like they have known one another their entire life. And for a brief moment when she had first pulled him into the shadows, he almost believed she had felt the same. “You don’t feel like a stranger to me.”
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.
She loves his laughter, loves how the placid surface of his personality ripples for just a moment in unbridled joy. She loves the way the sides of his mouth crinkle just so, making him look beautiful and comical all at once. She loves the crown of flowers on his head and the wings on his feet. He is so wonderful that she can barely contain her own laughter, so excited is she to bear witness to the man she deemed the king of spring. Elli, surreal Elli, she loves her godfather with all that she has and a little more, but more than anything she loves that he wants to spend time with her. So she snuggles into his side and breathes a deep, contemplative sigh, wondering just where they will go and what they will do when they get there. He feels like spring mornings, like a cool breeze and comfortable shadow, and for a moment she wants to know just what its like to be him, to have all of nature to talk to.
It would also be nice, she believes, to have a thousand lives to remember instead of just this one.
“I think that it’s probably green, like early spring. Have you seen a spring yet?” Septimus had asked her. What would he think now, seeing spring, in another land, with another stranger she has met beside a river in a forest.
But that girl, she was a stranger to Elliana now too. And she’s thankful for it. That is the key difference between Elli and her mother. She is grateful that she has changed, has molded. Sometimes, you had to kill the person you were born to be, in order to become the person you wanted to be.
She walks stride for stride beside him. If she had been an empath like her mother, she might have noticed the recklessness in him, might have felt the adventure swimming beneath his skin. But Elliana is not Elena, and she does not crave secrets like her mother so does. Elli is a daughter of the shadows—it is only natural she should love the mystery of the world.
And not fear it like her mother so does.
“I think I will leave it for myself to decide that,” she says and narrows blue eyes with promise. “Do you have a favorite flower?” She asks him before shaking her head. “No, no, wait, show it to me, don’t tell me,” she changes her mind. If he told her now, the fun of wondering would be over.
Blue eyes drift downwards as she watches his feet set out in front of him with the comfortable familiar that she could recognize in herself, when she had walked through the streets of Terrastella or Denocte, or even Dawn at the end of it. Does he have roots? Do they grown long as they sink and grow beneath the ground? Elliana has no roots—only leaves from the tallest and thinnest of branches, weak against the wind.
“Ask me again another time,” she declares an answer to his question after a few moments of pondering it. His next words, she ponders again, considering. “Then I wont be,” she determines. Even if he were still a stranger to her. She doesn't mind it—not be a stranger to him. There is comfort in that thought.
“Are we close?” She asks before learning her shoulder slightly against his, matching his step and closing her eyes. “I don’t want to see the last of the path, just the finale.”
