[private] we are brave, we are bruised; despoina

[Elliana]

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S

omewhere, a wolf lifts her head to bay at the moon before hunting.

She has not thought of Terrastella in some time. Back there, in her birthland, that is is where the thoughts of her Po are tenfold. That is where her mother, bless her soul, tortured her father and her father has tortured her mother. Neither of them meant to do it to the other, but she could see it in them, and she knows, even now, they’re tearing each other apart. There are memories from there, still though, that she might not have remembered were they were not printed into her bones like scars. She can feel them aching there.

Elliana turns into the darkness and she can hear it breaking, can see the cracks of it deepening as her blue eyes slice through it. And for one terrifying moment, she thinks this darkness will be eternal. It will not. It will not. It will not. She breathes and opens those glacier cut eyes once more.

The darkness of the forest, beneath the church-steeple pines, now, is not like true darkness to her. In each shadow, and each shadow pressed upon a shadow, she can see a hundred colors laid down upon each other. She can see the faded rust of pine-needles, the violet darkened where a field mouse hurries past, the blue of a bruise where the light almost dapples the edges of a shadow tree. Madness lives in the moonlit forest tonight, gathering like twilight darks in the tangles of their shadows over the loam. Elliana can feel it in the wind against her cheek, a kiss of ghost petal, a memory of her mother’s touch before she went off to sob at the grave of a son who was no longer drowning in water, but in soil. Beneath her hooves, beneath their shadows tangling, she thinks she can feel the ebb and flow of all the life that once lived here, buried beneath a sea of soil, ash, and compost.

And suddenly, she is no longer in the trees. Elli is thinking of the sea, as she stands in the autumn forest and listens to the hush, hush, hush of leaves all around her. In it she can hear the echo of the ocean. When the scent of maple trees reaches her, she is almost surprised it is not that of ocean brine. That alone makes her peer into the space between all those trees.

Somewhere, a wolf lifts her head to bay at the moon, the body of a fallen deer at its feet.



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..but nightmares are dreams too.

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