don't ruin this for me
She had wandered too far from home.
Farther than she ever had before, certainly.
She had ventured to strange worlds. Carefully, of course. Always so careful, like their father had been once, as if one false step might spell disaster. How easily they thought they could shatter. How fragile they thought they were. Built to underestimate their strength. Built for fear.
But Clementia has failed to recognize so many hazards. It is the earth she fears most. She does not know how to fear the darkness within it. It is the holes and the rocks and the fallen trees that she fears. These things that might trip her, send her to her knees, and inevitably shatter that soft veneer.
She is not an afraid thing now, as she reaches the familiar edge of the forest. She knows this forest, even if she does not spend much time in it. The trees are dense here, they keep the sun from her. They do not allow for the rainbows to bend away from her skin, gleaming. The trees here turn her dull.
So she makes for the river where she’d met Pollen and felt some coy flicker of heat for the first time. She makes for the river because it catches the light the same way she does, because she feels at home there. Even more than the meadow, where their father waits tirelessly for their mother.
She hesitates at the edge, peering through branches at the winged figure in the fog. Feathered wings, no doubt functional in a way that hers have not had the chance to be yet. He is a handsome thing, she can tell it even from where she stands, shrouded in darkness the same way he is shrouded in the fog.
It is not fear that keeps her rooted there but something else entirely. Some tremendous sense of wonder, maybe. Because there is no telling the kind of stranger you might happen upon in the darkness.
He speaks to her, so softly that she almost doesn’t hear him over the noise of the river and her own wings. Still, she hesitates, blinking dreamily at the scene before her. And she exhales a sigh, all full of wonder, even when a sharp tendril of fear snakes its way through her veins. It is not enough to deter her, it never has been. And she emerges just as he speaks again.
“I don’t either,” she muses sweetly, the voice bell-song soft, as the moonlight fights to penetrate the fog. Still, she only faintly glints as she moves to the edge of the river. She turns those galaxy eyes on him then, tilts her fine head and smiles. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
@[Molech]