10-10-2021, 10:33 AM
Soul-walker. He repeats and she ducks her head to the side like a charming snake, such a sanguine grin on her face. But there are still ghosts in the silver blue of her eyes (a part of her has never left the forest, and her terror is too freshly buried, the grave too freshly dug, for her to think of anything else.) She blinks and she opens her eyes and is so very glad they are of the sky instead of the earth.
He speaks and it banishes a cobweb from her heart in that place where her adventure used to reside. “And what shape do you love the most?” She asks him, and there is a hunger gnawing at her stomach for the knowledge she does not readily know. The black-sea is rising against all her youthful, innocent bones. It's black as ore and as salted as a hundred tears. It's an endless storm in the silence between their rocks turned to weapon instead of earth. And it's fluttering inside her over and over again like a wave against the shore. Like it wants her to fly, to soar high above the earth like a god with not religion. She feels like an undiscovered beast, something more than a girl born of royalty.
Elli feels as if could be lost in a canyon miles deep as this boy's gaze meets her own and he rises like great rocky walls inside her chest. He is jagged mountain walls and she the deep, the sandy bottom, broken stones, lost gems that settle on the floor. She is as homeless as those creeping critters, left to crawl and scavenge, seeking an impossible sunlight, desperate for the cool air of the cliff side, just to sit freezing on the canyon floor when that sun sets.
She slides her back against the bark of a tree, leaning into the knotted bark to let the sting of it bite into her back, not quite as sharp as the teeth of a once wolf. But she does not push away from it, or turn, she likes it. It lets her know she is alive.
Sometime she forgets, like when she looks into his eyes that seem deeper than her soul and every part of the sea, that she is no ghost. Terrastella, her mother, they had made her feel like nothing, like the one broken thing in a world that talked so easy of walls and cobblestone.
Her eyes, sunlit salt water and summer skies, slide away from the pressure of silver storm cloud of his stare. He's too hard to hold in a look. She slides her rib-cage against the tree.
Her voice is a whisper of words, a soft, silver dusting of moonlight in a world lit by hot, summer sun. “Bolder.” His name is a sigh in the wind, tattered and torn like a leaf long reaching for the ground. It is something dark on her lips, a prayer to something feral and wild fluttering in her chest. “I know of Hyaline,” she says with a sweeping blink. Knows of it in stories, had explored its outer edges, curious of the place her mother once called home. “Freedom,” she responds. “Or trying to find it.” She whispers. “What is it like to be free, Bolder?”
Elliana suddenly decides to meet his gaze one more time as her question still leaves the taste of wet stone on her tongue. A smile, small and fleeting, takes the place of a shout on her lips. “Did your mother give you those eyes?”
@bolder