05-10-2020, 12:25 AM
“The child wouldn’t be here if things in Windskeep were going well.”
No, she wouldn't have been.
So what does it mean as she stands here in Taiga? She wouldn't be here if things were going well. But this time, Elaina knows as she looks to her cousin. It is not the War of Windskeep, but whatever rages inside and around Lilli that she is here for.
This time Elaina does not run away from battle—but straight towards it.
“Perhaps one day, Elena might be the fiercest of warriors but she needs to reach adulthood before that can happen.” This is what Lilli had thought of her cousin. But, in the end, Elena was not the ferocious warrior, because it is not bravery to look the things you hate in the eyes, but to stand beside your loved ones as they stare them down knowing you would do better to run. “I can’t leave you with him.” She had said when Elaina had refused to leave.
Even then she had been foolish, why had they not been able to see it?
Elaina has broken down more times than she can remember, and she had grown so sick of having to put herself back together for everyone else. How often had she looked to the sky asking where they were when she needed them. Of course, in the next heart beat, it was Lilli who turned up beside her. “What is it like?” She asks curious. “Being a mother?” She wonders because she has never had children, she never wanted to children, when Aerwir had asked, she shut him out, when Aerwir had pushed, she had left. She wonders if it is hard to longer be able to just consider herself when she makes her decisions.
The hardest part in all this, that Elaina doesn't realize, but in a way, Lilli has, is that one day she will have a daughter and she will look into her eyes and her heart will break a thousand times more than Aerwir, Underworld, Tunnel, or her shadow man ever could. Because when she looks into those eyes, she will see only Lilli staring back at her.
She toys for minute with the crimson of her mane.”Celo carried so much weight with a future and a crown. I never realized it until I was older,” she admits. The boy king, who ruled alongside Aletta with shaking hands and a trembling voice. “Your mother was a good leader,” she finishes with the truth. Aletta had protected them. Pride flares in her chest for her heritage. Aletta was not of legacy blood physically, but spiritually…and Elaina would always look to her as a second mother.
“Everyone seemed happy, when I was there.” Everyone except herself, seeing it in the way her face looked solemn, her eyes dull, Elaina is still not sure at which point Windskeep stopped being home for her. (It is was when her mother gave her eyes of blue because she lost her father’s, when she tried to manipulate fate and fate punished her instead.) “I want to show you it one day,” she says, curious why the idea never came to her before. Maybe because she was too busy thinking about boys with brown eyes, boys of blue, and boys with scars on their chests and death in their eyes.
“Lilli!” She says, letting the mast fly open, to steady the ship about to dive off the waterfall. It is then the golden girl looks to her with matching silver blue eyes. “I don't know,” she admits. She is not Jay with his stars, nor Valerio with his wisdom, or Aesop with her immortality. Elaina has always been aware of just how little she has to offer. “If you are sin, then I should have been cast into the fire’s of Hell a long time ago,” she admits because Lilli has always been the better pieces of herself and when she looks at Lilli, looks at her eyes and her smile, sometimes she can almost make herself believe that only those better parts exist.
Here, with Lilli at her side, every shield she defends herself with, every thought that brings an ache deep in her chest is left far behind her, out of reach. Make no mistake, it runs, sprints, fights its way to get back to her, but for now Elaina can feel the atlas that rests upon her shoulders lifting. One day she will return to this moment, to Lilli, to Taiga, and think that maybe she should have stayed among the trees and the fog. And then her shadow will come, on a night beside the lake (“If you want to remember…) and she will remember different things (distant things), while forgetting this one.
“Tell me your happiest memory. Something that always brings a smile to your face.” She asks, begs for. They deserved this, this moment, they deserved a moment of smiles, of joy. They deserved this.
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me