staring at the ceiling in the dark
same old empty feeling in your heart
Some habits die hard, and for that Lepis is grateful.
Though her heart skips a beat- perhaps three – at the disembodied voice, her blue-grey eyes had already seen the displaced dirt of landing and caught the scent of her youngest son. The natural surprise is replaced with patience. Meanwhile, she reminds herself that he is the fifth of her children with the habit of popping out of thin air, and that her true patience would have been deeper if it had not been rubbed thin over the past decade. Though the calm is forced, the fondness that blossoms in her chest when Elio does finally appear is genuine.
Her grey eyes meet his with a bright smile, and for a moment she forgets entirely the stressors behind this particular meeting. She embraces him, somehow still surprised to find he is taller than she, and smooths a few wayward locks of his red mane before she pulls back. The attempts at grooming is futile, she knows, flight will surely tussle and tangle them in short order. But it calms her, and very little does so naturally.
“I’d score your landing out of ten,” she says with her own smile that crinkles along the edges of her eyes. “But unfortunately I wasn’t able to see much of it.” She doesn’t seem surprised by his invisibility, a gift that she suspects he might have only recently discovered, though the reason shortly becomes clear. “You must have inherited that from your father.”
Lepis rarely mentions Wolfbane. No, that’s too lenient: she never mentions him, at least not to her children. That she brings him up now, so lightly, is perhaps a testament to the inevitable healing brought about by time. If it was so, however, it does not remain, for it reminds her of the reason they are here, of the task she must perform.
“Lio, there’s something about your father that you need to know. He is dangerous, but there is a reason for it.” The stoicism she projects to herself keeps her voice steady. This is the easy part. What comes next is hard.
She perseveres.
The tale of the curse – from Tiberios all the way to Wolfbane – spills out quickly, though she does her best to cover the most important aspects. That Wolfbane is not Wolfbane, but rather a creature cursed. That he is unpredictable and that as time passes he will become even more so, will become crazed and violent and a threat to them all. “There is no cure,” she finishes, “not one that your Father knew, not one that a magician could find.” That she means to pin down a second magician and that she had braved death to question Heartfire she leaves out. She does not need Elio to worry about losing both parents.
Now she waits, for the questions that she has come to expect. Will they come though, she wonders? Before, it had been a tale for the children, a fairytale curse that Daddy’s family had, but that he surely never would. Pteron and Marni had even played ‘Longclaw and the Wolf” when they were growing up in the Pampas – that their game would become reality is something that a younger Lepis had never imagined as she watched them tussle.
@[elio]
LEPIS
staring at the bottom of your glass--
hoping one day you’ll make a dream last
but dreams come slow and they go so fast |
