This is always the strangest, longest part of the night. The moments right before the sun peaks her first rays beyond the horizon. The interminable moments before Azure will be released from her prison of glowing bone. It’s not so terrible, this fate. She does not hunger, nor does she recognize pain. But some nights she cannot seem to help but long for touch she cannot possibly feel. Just once, it might be nice to know the sensation of sweetly perfumed night air against her skin.
It does little good to dream of things that will never be, yet still she dreams. She cannot seem to help herself.
There is peace in the tumbling murmur of the river. She often finds herself here in the smallest hours of the morning - the hours she finds herself most in need of peace. This morning is no different from those others. Sometimes, she watches the sun crest the horizon in the unreachable distance. Others, she merely waits to draw that first, sweet breath of a cool dawn.
Today though, she finds herself staring at another. A girl as lost in fantasy as she so often is. For a moment, she merely wonders what it is she dreams. It’s a foolish musing, for she cannot read minds. Still, she is ever the fanciful girl, imagining things that can never be.
Though a heart does not yet beat in the bone cage of her chest, it compels her forward. Towards this stranger who swells with fanciful yearnings that seem to match her own (or perhaps it is merely her own fanciful yearning that makes her imagine such things in a stranger). If she had lips to do so, they would have been smiling. Instead, there is only the perpetual grin of a bare skull to greet the moon-marked woman. In a moment, when the first rays of dawn strike across the horizon, that smile would be there in truth. For now, she can only portray it in the friendly lilt of her greeting.
“This place is beautiful at this hour, is it not?”
Azure
you take the shape of everything I'm drawn to
@Elliana [insert "it's been 84 years" gif here]