04-04-2021, 09:29 PM
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lora&display=swap" rel="stylesheet"><style type="text/css">.flower_container {position: relative; z-index: 1;width: 600px;background: #796363; font: 11px 'Lora', serif; line-height: 1.5; border: 1px solid #3f2823; box-shadow: 0 0 10px #3f2823; }.flower_container p { margin: 0;padding: 0;}.flower_message {text-align: justify; padding: 15px 20px;color: #3f2823;}.flower_name {font-size: 28px; color: #802121; }.flower_quote {position: relative; z-index: 10;top: -10px;color: #3f2823; letter-spacing: 3px; }</style><center><div class="flower_container"><div class="flower_message">It is as though the simple gratitude of being alone in her pain is enough to summon those that still remain, because out of the mist come the silhouettes of others like her, too solid and too broken to be anyone truly dead. They are ghosts only in the weary hollowness of their eyes, but even in their shared brokenness she can see a ragged purpose that brings them all together now. She wants to learn their names and memorize these faces, to know them even in death should this task come to that. But there are only a handful of seconds and her golden eyes find these faces for only as long as it takes to pick out one thing. A stallion who seems covered in ice, whose color is framed in a thousand perfect frozen scales. Another who looks so much like these beasts with his death and rot that she instinctively wants to recoil - but that isn’t what she wants to remember, and so she finds his face and is surprised to see that the color of his gold eyes are indiscernible from the color of her own. The third is more plain than the first two, but then she notices the almost iridescence of blue that dances across his skin. She wonders if any of them have memorized her in the same way.
But when the slavering monsters do find them and the riverside erupts like some kind of nightmarish war, these new companions are all stolen away from her. She does not see where they go or when they fall, if they fall, because there is only enough time to try and survive long enough to create some kind of difference in this war. Do the living have any idea that their fate rests on the shoulders of four strangers? That one of them is small and glass and born too broken to do anything but die? She had chosen to be a distraction to avoid the waste of what it would be if she tried to fight, yet it seemed that the choice had never been hers to make, that in fact she was the choice. She was who war wanted. She could not understand why or for what purpose fate had led her here, but when the first monster found her (smaller than the rest, sluggish in a way that would later make her wonder if her companions had tried to shield her) she hesitated only long enough to find her stride before she threw herself into battle.
This was not something she understood, not something that came easily. But love did, and it was enough to hear the struggle of her companions, to be reminded of what they all stood to lose if this wasn’t enough. She fights and she holds nothing back, crying out as her delicate glass body is reduced to spiderwebs and then to larger fissures, as pieces chip away until there are pockmarks scattered throughout her body like a hundred desperate constellations. Pain is a wedge in her chest, a weight on her shoulders that slows her, and each misshapen thing that throws itself against her body leaves her feeling broken inside in ways that no one will ever see. It opens a chasm inside her, makes her forget why she’s fighting so hard until she is once more beside the boy with those golden eyes and she is reminded how easy it is to love a stranger, to want to keep him safe, to keep all of them safe.
But it isn’t enough, and when she has given everything she has to fight the monsters, she finds herself being pushed back until the river is at her heels, her hocks, and then over her head. She screams at the sensation of falling away, at a world turned upside and unfamiliar, at the water that slithers like a snake inside her mouth and down her throat, coiling in the pit of her fractured chest until she cannot breathe. She had closed her eyes at some point, perhaps when the ground disappeared from beneath her, and when she finally remembers to open them again there is only darkness waiting to greet her. This is death, she thinks, and she is sad but not surprised, had always heard the death knell hidden within the summons. But she had not expected death to be like this, to be this falling, drowning foreverness, this dark isolation. There is no ice, no gold, no flash of blue. There is only the cold and the dark and this weightlessness in her fissured stomach that makes it hard not to slip away, to give up and give in.
She isn’t sure when the water ended and the falling began, but perhaps that was the moment. The last moment.
She wonders if there will be a body to find anywhere, something small and so broken, with more fissures than trees have branches, more chips than there are stars in the sky.
But then suddenly she is standing before a fae that is both familiar and not, and it feels like a dream in the way none of this makes sense anymore. There are too many shattered pieces, too much that has been broken, and she is sure that she is not enough to piece it back together. But she tries. The fae speaks and the sound of the voice is like the wind sweeping past her, something too far away to catch, but then it doesn’t seem to matter because Flower realizes the words have already carved out a home in her head with a ferocity that makes her wince and cry out in muted surprise. But the answer is an easy one and like the ones that came before, her decision is a gift she gives freely. <i>“Anything.”</i> She says, quiet despite feeling deafened by the fae’s words. <i>“If there is anything more of me that you need, it is yours.”</i>
</div><p class="flower_name">FLOWER</p><p class="flower_quote">i'm only steady on my knees</p></div></center>
But when the slavering monsters do find them and the riverside erupts like some kind of nightmarish war, these new companions are all stolen away from her. She does not see where they go or when they fall, if they fall, because there is only enough time to try and survive long enough to create some kind of difference in this war. Do the living have any idea that their fate rests on the shoulders of four strangers? That one of them is small and glass and born too broken to do anything but die? She had chosen to be a distraction to avoid the waste of what it would be if she tried to fight, yet it seemed that the choice had never been hers to make, that in fact she was the choice. She was who war wanted. She could not understand why or for what purpose fate had led her here, but when the first monster found her (smaller than the rest, sluggish in a way that would later make her wonder if her companions had tried to shield her) she hesitated only long enough to find her stride before she threw herself into battle.
This was not something she understood, not something that came easily. But love did, and it was enough to hear the struggle of her companions, to be reminded of what they all stood to lose if this wasn’t enough. She fights and she holds nothing back, crying out as her delicate glass body is reduced to spiderwebs and then to larger fissures, as pieces chip away until there are pockmarks scattered throughout her body like a hundred desperate constellations. Pain is a wedge in her chest, a weight on her shoulders that slows her, and each misshapen thing that throws itself against her body leaves her feeling broken inside in ways that no one will ever see. It opens a chasm inside her, makes her forget why she’s fighting so hard until she is once more beside the boy with those golden eyes and she is reminded how easy it is to love a stranger, to want to keep him safe, to keep all of them safe.
But it isn’t enough, and when she has given everything she has to fight the monsters, she finds herself being pushed back until the river is at her heels, her hocks, and then over her head. She screams at the sensation of falling away, at a world turned upside and unfamiliar, at the water that slithers like a snake inside her mouth and down her throat, coiling in the pit of her fractured chest until she cannot breathe. She had closed her eyes at some point, perhaps when the ground disappeared from beneath her, and when she finally remembers to open them again there is only darkness waiting to greet her. This is death, she thinks, and she is sad but not surprised, had always heard the death knell hidden within the summons. But she had not expected death to be like this, to be this falling, drowning foreverness, this dark isolation. There is no ice, no gold, no flash of blue. There is only the cold and the dark and this weightlessness in her fissured stomach that makes it hard not to slip away, to give up and give in.
She isn’t sure when the water ended and the falling began, but perhaps that was the moment. The last moment.
She wonders if there will be a body to find anywhere, something small and so broken, with more fissures than trees have branches, more chips than there are stars in the sky.
But then suddenly she is standing before a fae that is both familiar and not, and it feels like a dream in the way none of this makes sense anymore. There are too many shattered pieces, too much that has been broken, and she is sure that she is not enough to piece it back together. But she tries. The fae speaks and the sound of the voice is like the wind sweeping past her, something too far away to catch, but then it doesn’t seem to matter because Flower realizes the words have already carved out a home in her head with a ferocity that makes her wince and cry out in muted surprise. But the answer is an easy one and like the ones that came before, her decision is a gift she gives freely. <i>“Anything.”</i> She says, quiet despite feeling deafened by the fae’s words. <i>“If there is anything more of me that you need, it is yours.”</i>
</div><p class="flower_name">FLOWER</p><p class="flower_quote">i'm only steady on my knees</p></div></center>