10-14-2021, 09:43 PM
She loved meadows once, and how they were wide and open. It was because of that, that she once led a boy into one (a secret meadow, just for them). Light erupted, fireflies danced. And maybe, that could have been the first love story that ever happened. Telling Aeneas a secret had been like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight.
She thinks she has fallen out of love with the meadows.
Then what of the trees?
As eternal as they are. Immortal.
Elliana has never been foolish enough to believe that anything could live forever. As a girl she had often found herself wishing so, in her naivety imagining a life the world basked in snowfall year round and her breath billowed cold smoke, and frost clung to her moonlight hair. Her daydreams had always been the opposite of her reality, the opposite of Terrastella, creating a world that was as far removed from her actual childhood as she could make it. Sometimes she isn’t sure which came first - the swamp and valley rejecting her, or her musing of another life.
“No, Nerine,” she says. Her voice is a dull whip-sharp slash of sea-water on the shore.
Then she smiles, it's a curl of bone through her shadowed lips. Deep inside her the sea is roaring, and howling, and slashing at the shore. Her heart already of the great cliffs of Nerine.
She starts to count his bones and the number of wrinkles next to his smile. When he speaks she counts his teeth and listens to the snap of his jaw as it works around so many words. She wonders how he manages to fit them all into the air. She loses track go which number she had reached.
“Which sunrise?” She offers a question as her answer into the silence that had started to grow heavy. An itch whispers down her spine.
“Elliana.”
She thinks she has fallen out of love with the meadows.
Then what of the trees?
As eternal as they are. Immortal.
Elliana has never been foolish enough to believe that anything could live forever. As a girl she had often found herself wishing so, in her naivety imagining a life the world basked in snowfall year round and her breath billowed cold smoke, and frost clung to her moonlight hair. Her daydreams had always been the opposite of her reality, the opposite of Terrastella, creating a world that was as far removed from her actual childhood as she could make it. Sometimes she isn’t sure which came first - the swamp and valley rejecting her, or her musing of another life.
“No, Nerine,” she says. Her voice is a dull whip-sharp slash of sea-water on the shore.
Then she smiles, it's a curl of bone through her shadowed lips. Deep inside her the sea is roaring, and howling, and slashing at the shore. Her heart already of the great cliffs of Nerine.
She starts to count his bones and the number of wrinkles next to his smile. When he speaks she counts his teeth and listens to the snap of his jaw as it works around so many words. She wonders how he manages to fit them all into the air. She loses track go which number she had reached.
“Which sunrise?” She offers a question as her answer into the silence that had started to grow heavy. An itch whispers down her spine.
“Elliana.”