i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
Elliana may not speak of the memories, but they are there, drifting around her, waiting for him to pluck them from the sway of her emotions. The freedom and innervation of the thorns against her delicate skin twine between them, the fear and sorrow of those same thorns blinding a man she loves as a father in her dreams. She might not speak of it, but he sees it all the same.
Would it unnerve her to know her secrets are not secret around him?
He doesn’t ask. He’s not sure he wishes to know the answer.
And then she asks if he believes her ill-fated. He nearly laughs aloud at that, but the smile that comes to his lips in its place is tinged with a curious sadness. For all that he does not believe in fate, he knows beyond doubt that sorrow and grief still lie in his own future (and that perhaps the knowledge is why he avoids proclamations of destiny so fiercely). “If anyone is to be the ill-fated king, it would be me,” he replies after a moment of silence, his voice unusually somber. It does not last however. With Reave, it never does. “But I won’t don that crown just yet.”
There is a gleam of dark amusement in his blue gaze as he nudges her forward, the yawning vista of his home revealed. For a time she stands there in silence, the breathy ‘oh’ hanging between them. Reave, as familiar with the vast moors as he is with the backside of his own eyelids, watches her instead.
He tilts his head curiously when she finally breaks the silence, her words surprising him. This was not the direction he had imagined she would go, and yet it makes a perfect and terrible sense. In truth, he had never considered it so deeply. Even so, he already knows the answer. Knows it as deeply as the bones still beneath his skin. “No.” It is as simple as that. He is not rooted to this place as others are despite the affinity he feels. But land is just land, and he is far too untethered to tie himself to one place for the rest of his pitilessly long life. “Forever is a very long time.” A faint grin pulls the edges of his lips briefly upwards. “And this land is far too small for forever.”
reave
@Elliana