[private] dawn is coming, open your eyes, phae

[dear]

careful, child, light the fuse and get away—

She likes the way his mouth moves, each shift betraying some new emotion, and she tries in vain not to stare at it. (The deer do not wear their emotions so plainly, their mouths so rarely twitching with amusement or bewilderment.) How bewitching the soft curve of his smirk, she thinks, but shifts her gaze then to the slow orbit of the planets as they circle his head.

(She will dream about this for weeks, she’s certain of it. She will never forget this stranger who smiles and speaks in honeyed tones and tells her his name so easily it’s almost as if she hadn’t even needed to ask for it.)

A tree, he tells her, and she blinks in surprise. How could a tree have birthed something so spectacular? She’s seen so many thousands of trees in her life, but she’s never seen one capable of this kind of magic. And how strange that something so intrinsically connected to the sky could come from something so firmly rooted to the earth.

She watches as he lifts his head and feels one strong pang of longing when he turns his gaze to the canopy overhead. She wants to call his attention back to her because the forest is suddenly cold without the weight of his eyes. He laughs and heat pools in her cheeks as she herself looks away, bashful. 

“No,” she says, smiling, shaking her antlered head. But it has been so long since she’d last spoken to anyone capable of speaking back.

“Love,” she answers, peering up at him, doe-eyed. And it’s true and she has always known it and it has always been the most important thing.

“But I’m ordinary,” she continues, “compared to you, I’m nothing at all.”

— cause happiness throws a shower of sparks

@daedalus