There is nothing wild about her.
She is calm but comely, the young girl with a pelt of softly glowing coal. She has black, black eyes ringed by gold. She has a gentle way about her (when she casts shadows on plants, she shifts to again allow the passage of sunlight). The world frightens her but only in its magnificence, in her fear of not finding her place in it, in her worry of not shining bright enough. Sometimes she experiments. Vael stands alone and everything still happens around her, without her (the sun arrows across the sky, the animals weave and dig and climb through the forest, night pulls a cloak over everything). She is unmoving through it all. So still that she forgets to breathe and by the time she remembers, chokes on the air that hurriedly fills her lungs.
She is strange, perhaps, but not wild.
The forest is another matter entirely. It is her home as much as a stranger’s embrace is a comfort, but she finds that it suits her well enough for now. Walking through the dappled, sunlit woodland is like reliving her best dream. And for a mind that is mostly blanked of its memories (for the black hole that has deleted her mother’s face, her father’s name) it is easy enough to recall the few good ones.
Vael crunches over the thin snow and thinks of nothing. This is easy, too, because she has so little to dwell on, to reminisce. Only the vague feeling of not belonging nips at her heels. Or rather, the feeling that she belongs somewhere else. I am not meant to be here, the almost two year-old has thought to herself a million and one times now. I am not meant to be alone, but I am. So I must deal with it and move on. The ache in her breast is harder to ignore, though. The careful halving of her heart with a surgeon’s precision is not nothing. Salt. The name is ironically sweet on her tongue, the only one her mind had held onto in the turbulence. She won’t forget it ever.
The inky girl does not fear the crack of bone that sounds from behind a curtain of ropy, dead vines and naked deciduous trees. Normally, she would turn her cheek and retreat to the sanctuary of the deeper woods. But today, Vael is pensive and impassive to the placement of her feet. A dark and deep well of loneliness resides within her. She has never drawn from it, never quenched her thirst on the temptation – and oh, has it tempted her – but now, it overflows. Gold and black pushes boldly through grey and rot and he is there, her savior.
And he is asleep.
“Oh – ” slips into the cold space between them before she clamps her jaw tight. She pulls back, instinctive. Worry churns her stomach at having possibly woken him. The vines she had flung apart with abandon now knock against her shoulders, her head as she tucks herself into the forest again. Not bright enough for this world, not by half.
Vael
and I swear I'm not a pretender