[private] won't you stay?

[Lepis]

the rain that falls upon your skin it's closer than my hands have been He might not need the calmness that Lepis exudes, but she certainly does. It seeps toward him due to their proximity, the barriers that the dun mare has against accidental projection fallen apart as surely as the basket her son almost imagines. He can’t know this, or know that the inquiry he so neatly turns on her cuts so deeply. What has she been doing? Arguing with Celina, with Aten, with Pteron. Flinching from every golden figure in the woods and every copper one and especially the two together. Weeping when she thinks she is alone, or alternately battering the thick trunks with what feels like endless rage and frustration. The calmness quiets some of that, but she feels it chattering inside her. These days, she longs for the emptiness that had settled on her in the two weeks of Wolfbane’s absence. Feeling nothing was better than feeling everything. She is more sure of this now than almost ever before. “I’ve been thinking too,” she tells him, smoothing a wayward lock of his red mane back into place. “I was thinking maybe we might go to Loess.” The dun mare has always spoken of the place fondly to her children. It is her birthplace, her beloved home, full of hills and rocks and ridges and wide open skies.  “Maybe even to stay.” If she breaks the words up like this, it is just a little easier, it gives her time to watch his young face for a reaction. Though she stills sees the red and gold child he had been, it becomes easier each day to see the man he will become. “What do you think about that? Do you think that might be fun?” lepis, comtesse of taiga queen of loess | queen of sylva | queen of the south lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio

@[elio]