[open] someday i'll find the strength

[Elliana]

kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul

S

he closes her eyes, feels the soft flow of the wind through her hair, skimming over her body like a lover's hands, tugging at her ankles and her face and her neck like the tide, and she knows, more than she has ever known anything, that it had been time to move on. That she was right, that her and Leo both were, that her mother's ghost had been. It was time. Terrastella, Khiyaal, neither could manage to hold Elliana where she stood.

She is still the same Elliana, she likes to think, even if it is not true, cannot be true, not after everything she has seen, done, lived through. She is still quiet, in the ways she speaks, her movements. But move past that quiet little girl and her love of a boy who was born from the ocean and destined to return there, move past everything that has been slowly killing her over the course of her life, all that loneliness and fear that she would never dare show or accept, all those things bunched into the entity that is Elliana as she moves, ghostlike, through the cradling arms of the trees and to the sound of a running river. An image, a sound that makes her ache in places that she had almost forgotten about, existing only because she wont let them go anywhere, burning because she hasn't the strength to smother such a flame.

There is another fire, an ambitious flame that has been ignited without any real purpose. It burns now, not a wildfire, but a gentle, glowing candle in the infinite darkness that sits in waiting within Elliana’s chest, waiting to bleed out.

Elliana has found purchase beside the moving water once more. She follows it, like so many have before her (mother, godmother, cousins she does not know). It leads her to them. There is no hesitance in Elliana as she strides wraithlike towards him and her, the strange creature (or at least, she would think him strange if not so strange herself) and the girl with a marking, same as her own, but lacking the same placement. Hello, she says, and her brows crease and her lips purse before they drop into a frown, right to the bottom of the uncanny valley.

She stands there, staring at them, waiting (for something), with a complacency that hurts.

@[Rannoch] @[Thrum] elliana speaks

elliana
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Sorry, I had to, Rannoch is amazing!