09-26-2021, 09:25 PM
It is an unceasing wonder that even the warmth of this man with eyes the color of every summer sky and a smile bright enough to rival the light of the sun cannot reach to thaw the ice that lives inside her chest. She thinks there might be more of it every day, that there are new layers inside her like rings of growth within the trunk of a tree. He is the closest thing to solace that she has yet discovered, and though it eases something inside her to be near him, the secrets she keeps hold them apart. She knows she should let him in entirely, let him know these broken parts of her heart, the ragged weariness of her soul, she even knows he would accept it all. That he would care for her no differently than he does now. But admitting it to him feels like it would be setting those truths in stone, making them permanent in a way she still pretends they are not.
So she lives behind a mask of light and sunshine, lies past smiles that don’t reach all the way to those beautiful molten eyes. It is easy to do so when almost everyone would like to pretend that the dark didn’t happen, as though if they do not acknowledge it then it will never exist, never find them again.
She thinks he is different, that he does not build a life around pretending, but she is not sure.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” She asks in a way that is so delicately evasive, smiling at him with a practiced kind of levity that bleeds out of the fractures of brokenness inside her eyes. “It seems as though almost everyone has gone already. All the families that have been there since the beginning, raised there as children and then raised their own children there.” There is a furrow in her brow when she pauses, her eyes wandering from his face to track the path of her shadowed thoughts as they draw a frown to her dark mouth. “I thought I would raise my own children there someday.” She admits, blinking once and returning her gaze to him. “But I suppose so much of that will not be true.”
She turns from him to hide the way pain etches itself like fractures of dark throughout the delicate glow of her golden face, pretending instead to stretch and sigh and reach out to brush her lips over the velvet soft petals of the flowers beside them. Aureline is so unlike her mother, so unsuited for a family. But she only knows who Isle has come to be and not the wary, wildling creature her mother had been at this age. Neither does she understand the ways in which Isle had been broken, both her trust and her heart, before she became this culmination of love and kindness that Aureline is so familiar with.
“Where will you go now?” She wonders aloud, abandoning the flowers to look back up into Svedka’s snow-pale face. “I doubt Tephra will be safe for a long while. And even once it is, I imagine it will no longer feel like home to many of us.” She does not mention how the humid volcanic forests had stopped feeling safe a long time ago. That when she smells the smolder and the sulphur, the volcanic ash, she is reminded of the way her father had been reduced daily by the same dark that had wrapped strangling fists around her throat. Tephra has not felt safe for a very long time, and Gale had nothing to do with it. If anything, he was the perfect mask for her to hide behind, the perfect reason to leave and not be questioned.
aureline
dear wilderness, be at your best
her armor is thin as the fabric of her dress
@Svedka