(Everything is different, but it will always be the same.)
She remembers the words as though she’s only just heard them, like she can still see the morning mist that veiled the meadow that day, like she can still feel the cool earth against the side of her face as she breathed in sweet dew and the soft decay of red maple leaves. It’s gone, though. All of it — that warmth, that lightness, that freedom to just be. Gone.
And Eilidh is no stranger to absence, but this is new and different. Deceptive, because the world still looks the same.
Nothing is missing. She still feels the crisp autumn wind sliding through the fractures of leaves, rattling gently on their branches. The sky is still clear and dark, and endless. Like the earth hasn’t tipped on its axis — like it isn’t bleeding devastation through freshly gaping wounds too large and gangrenous to even think about sewing shut. Like nothing is wrong when everything so badly is broken. Here, in the moonlight, with the soft flickering of a thousand gentle stars above her, it isn’t what you expect an apocalypse to look like.
But the sickness is everywhere.
With it came the fairies, who had laid an impossible decision before her and told Eilidh to choose: stay and die, or go and live. And the rational parts of her knew that it was a simple decision, but the sad, aching parts of her can’t comprehend life that isn’t here, in the meadow. It seems as though a thousand times she’d tried to leave. As though a thousand times Eilidh had made it as far as the river, but everytime she got so far the memories would break across her like waves and her resolve would crumble like it were only made of smoke and ash.
What was it to live without the twin oaks and their dappled shade, or the mound of churned earth just behind them that housed her mother’s bones (or, maybe, starlight catacombs) under veils of wildflowers? What was it to live without wading in the river with the warmth of the sun on her back and that wild oak with the twisted trunk just off to the right, witnessing everything?
What was life without Moselle?
Today she is trying again, weaving through the bramble and bracken with purpose. From deeper in the thickets she can hear wheezing, and she holds her breath even if she’s not certain she wants to live through this.
Because her mother came from the stars, and it had felt like all her life it had been just for her.
Because she can’t leave her here alone.
Because.
“A light in the darkness,” she repeats, her mantra — her lifeline. And then, when she rounds a curve in the path and sees him before her, an impermeable mass shrouded in shadow:
“Are you alive?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Tiphon] I hope the new thread is okay, but let me know if you want me to edit and add to the original with the plague situation and all.