05-27-2021, 10:42 AM
E
lliana once watched her mother go to the sea, place her soul inside a bottle and toss it over a cliffside. She has no way of knowing this, but that night, her mother wished that bottle all the way to Beqanna’s shores, with a red haired woman waiting for it.
Their last night in Khiyaal, Elli’s dreams had been rich with the sea and the ship she had rode upon. Sea water tangling itself within her skin, sand gritting itself between her teeth. She can still recall the way the ship had lurched and lunged, as if fighting some great enemy. (“How long has the ocean and the sky been at war with each other?” She asked one sunny day, her small frame leaning against Torix’s own.) Maybe it was this day, maybe another, that a chasm was opened inside her chest to the world of exploration. It had always been there (the sea, adventure, wildness, storms) but it took new life, like a dandelion seeds after a child sends itself seeds scattering. It had only taken a small gust to blow her away.
Ellliana had not seen much of a point of staying in Novus, and even less so after her brother slipped beneath the waves. Her mother had needed her, her father by bond and not blood, had wanted her to stay, and maybe, the concerns once expressed by a Terrastellan were true, that Elliana’s heart was far too tangled to to fully feel beneath the weight of ivy vines and stone walls.
She does’t notice him twitch, him tumble inside his own body, she has never been concerned with the facts of small things, she is a daughter of the ocean, and the ocean does not concern itself over ripples lest they turn into waves. You cower, she says, a painfully obviously observation, and all at once she shifts, from dreamer to the shadow watcher her father would have loved if he had watched her grow. If I learned anything from the stories of my mother, this is not the place to do so, she says, almost harshly, but there is enough of Elena’s flower petal voice to keep the landing soft, if not a bit too steady.
She pulls always from him, looking around the woods. She doesn't know it, cant possibly know it, but she looks like her mother here, and whether her head would lift with pride, or ears would fall back into a mess of moonshine hair with annoyance, she cannot answer. It is only seen here, how time has truly come to affect her, in more ways than just what Leo has caused. Her body has blossomed, like her mother’s sunflowers in their garden, the youth sheds like a winter coat from her body as curves begin to take their place, like sharp kisses in her hip bones, and the shadow beneath the curve of her cheek. My mother, she lived in Hyaline when she was here, she states out loud, piecing together stories. And when magic brought her back, she spent some time in the Taiga, beneath its trees, I think I still have some family there. Cousins, my godmother, she says. Her godmother. Lilliana. Her namesake. She both resents and leans into the pedestal her mother placed inside her name to live up to. The Lilli who was the captain of all her childhood stories. It is only now, under the cover of the trees that she starts to wonder if all those stories were true.
It is then those sky blue eyes (her mother’s eyes, her grandmother’s eyes) find a stray flower, wandering among the grass, a shade of purple among green (Are you lost too? Elliana longs to ask). She plucks it from the ground and places it in the tangle of his locks. Do you remember what you asked me when we first met? She asks him because Elli is doomed to remember every conversation and every story someone tells. Shall we find some strange magic?
Night may belong to the ghosts and the memories.
But it belongs to the dreamers too—and the ones who wish to be.
..but nightmares are dreams too.