[private] leave me here a little longer

[Elliana]

She is content in her loneliness, comfortable in the silence that has become her life. She is a constant where all else moves on, statuesque in both beauty and personality, a quiet thing as tough as stone but not entirely resistant to anyone deliberately trying to chip away at her. She is scarred, has endured her brother’s death, her mother’s lies, her father’s inability to truly see her, and yet remains steadfast in her faith that there is good in this world, and that good is all around her, inside her, inside everyone. She is not heartless; she misses her friends, but only wants them to be happy. She has been hurt, and she has found it in her heart to forgive them. She is remarkable in her solidarity, strange in the way she seems so unoriginal, happy in knowing that she holds in her tiny, soft hands everyone's darkest secrets and fondest wishes. She knows everything, and yet tends to completely disregard it for the eccentric, as she has so many times. She knows the stars and the flowers, knows them like her own heart, and the only sadness that has ever lingered there in that heart full of relentless passion for being alive and kind and steady, is because of him.

Po.
Her flower horse.
She loved him, once.

At the same time, he had also been someone else's and she had been too young to realize that the seeds of affection that burrowed deeper every day into her skin, the way she lit up when he smiled and wished every night that he would take her on some grand adventure was not just a longing to know the trees, leaves, and flowers as he did. It was a subtle, quiet longing for him as he was, for his embraces and for him, just once, to tell her that he was so proud of her, that he loved her, that he didn't want to be without her. But this never happened; Po had Thana, and Elliana, despite not understanding Thana and her strangeness, she loved her for that, for making her flower stallion smile the way he did, so she let that love fade into the background of her life, a constant, quiet pulse at the edge of every one of his thoughts, a prayer into her pillow when she went to bed.

Please let him be safe. Please let him be happy. Please let him come home, someday, because mommy and I need him.

Mom, Elena. She has not seen her in so long—

There is a lightness when she she stops worrying about her, that she really shouldn't anymore, a lightness to feel purposes, free. It is wonderful.

The late morning sun bakes the land a healthy green-gold and she smiles at the grasshoppers clicking as they sail through the air. None of this seems uncertain to Elli, doesn't seem as if before, this entire place was a stranger to her.

Aside from the drone of everyday life, the birds and the grasshoppers, the land is quiet. She is the lone stranger in a sea of old friends, fine with being near them but also fine without. She is here to converse; everyone is here to converse. Perhaps contradictory to her lone wolf attitude, Elliana finds pushing past that antisocial nature effortless and turns to a stranger, not the first she sees but the first she wants to talk to in a long time, and smiles such a beautiful smile at him it breaks her heart to know her mother isn't here to see it, that she doesn't know how happy her daughter can be out and away from her. Those bright, bright blue eyes, like a summer sky, are bright jewels set the shadowy gold of her face. She is happy, and she doesn't know why, but she has already decided that he is her friend.

There is still innocence inside her. Elli simply says “Oh, hello,” as if it answers all the questions in the world.

find her with the flowers. the roses, the marigolds. find her telling stories that she’s never before told

@Elliana

[bolder]

He is content in Hyaline.

Bolder has been given more than he had ever dreamed: acceptance. There is a surge of pride when he thinks of what he has become, and even more when he considers what he could still become. The beautiful thing that the young shifter was learning about his power was there could be no limits to it.

If he were to go to the Mountain, he could become something more than just an eagle or a wolf. He could have the talons of the raptor, the teeth of the hunter, and the rest could be left to him. Bolder could become whatever he wished himself to be.

But the Mountain is a sacred place. He has no intent to besmirch with his amateur skill. He would continue to learn under Mazikeen, and then when he thought he was ready, Bolder knew he would go to Tephra. He would seek out his Uncle and ask him what he thought of the Mountain.

That day has not come yet, though, so Bolder still practices.

Stalking the Forest as a literal wolf, the young shifter sticks to the shadows. He focuses on the scent of a rabbit and means to attempt to hunt. Not to kill, he reminds himself, though the metallic memory of blood makes him hunger. He pursues a hare that through the underbrush, and only after his shadow companion has cornered it, does Bolder feel a sense of success. The little creature cowers against a tree, and for a painstaking moment, Bolder feels his sharp teeth bare towards the rabbit in a warning.

But (this time), he does not kill it. He lets it leap away, shrieking its warning to any animals that might be nearby. Bolder snarls, and then lets it go.

Turning away, he becomes a young stallion with wings. His silver eyes widen because in his stealth, he hadn't noticed her. Had she seen him shift? Bolder eyes her suspiciously, though attempts to conceal it with a wolfish grin.

"How long have you been standing there?"



@Elliana

[Elliana]

‘The storm always passes,’ Azrael had told her mother in comfort, in console. ‘And there will be another one to take its place.’ She had snapped back. This was the first fight Elliana ever witnessed between her parents. She spent the rest of the night thinking, what are they talking about? She had watched the skies, there had been no sign of storms approaching, and certainly not a storm passed with another on the way.

Elliana does not remember this fight, if she had, she might have thought remembered the lesson as she takes a moment to star up and into the aching sunlight—and she might have thought it better to look further and beyond.

Petals fall from trees, float off of flowers like raindrops as Elliana turns to just the left to spot the owner of the voice.

Wolf. Wolf. Wolf. Screams a thought she has never had before, yet feels it has been with her all along. Wolf, he is a wolf, and many, many more things. She knows what her mother would say. Skin walker, shape shifter, face stealer. And tell her to get far, far, far away.

Under a thick mat of lashes, Elli’s blue gaze grows cool and almost bemused to his reaction. Those dark nostrils of hers flare and quiver as if she might cry or scream or laugh or cheer. “Not long at all, soul walker,” she says. Soul walker, the ability to let your soul reside in the body that is not your own. Thoughts, appearance, it may change, even instincts, but the soul remains intact. She's ruined and bruised but innocent yet, ignorant to the ways of the world in places not yet swallowed up by blackness and sin. “It was a pleasure to cross your path today,” she says and shifts her weight. Elliana really does turn to go; she pivots slowly but decidedly, each movement measured to be as efficient as possible, each stride calculated exactly the way she wants it to appear. She is beautiful in her desolation, beautiful in the way her blade mane drapes sadly across her forehead, hiding that ivory birthmark from prying eyes.

And then, in a moment, Elliana, so in love with loneliness, so content in her solitude, pivots back around and stares at him, her expression unchanged except for a certain metallic sheen to her eyes. Protests sear across her thoughts, feeble attempts to tell herself that this was bad, that this was a terrible decision, but they all extinguish as quickly as they were lit. Once, her life had been very black and white. Good was good and evil was evil. But Elliana, at heart, is an artist—and she knows that this world has color, color, color.

Besides—

There is something about the weight of his smile that asks her to stay a while.

Something that tempts her into it. “I’m Elliana, I come from far away.”

find her with the flowers. the roses, the marigolds. find her telling stories that she’s never before told

@bolder

[bolder]

"Soul-walker?" Bolder chimes back at her, as smooth in his reply as he is in his fluid stride.

The young stallion grins, and tilts his crescent-marked face towards her. She is pretty, he realizes, as his silver eyes roam her frame like he had roamed the woods as a wolf. There is still enough of that shape left in him that as he comes forwards, it is done with an almost predatory motion. "I've been called a trickster before," he tells her, and a mischievous glint sparked in his gaze. "Mimic, skinwalker," Bolder continues, no longer feeling the stigma that had once haunted him.

"But shapeshifter is the most common," the striped pegasus tells her.

Did she know what that was like, he wonders? Did she know what it was like to be denied who you were, while family pretended to claim you? To be called everything but what you actually were?

There is something sad about her, though. Even as Bolder considers the lovely lines of her, there is something about the way they fall that seems to inspire tragedy. There isn't much that he is good at, besides pretending to be something else. That he can do easily (thanks to the teachings of Gale and Mazikeen).

What to do about her sadness, Bolder isn't sure.

"Elliana from far away," he says, playing with the words until they lighten into something playful and teasing. "I am Bolder from Hyaline," he tells her, enticed into coming nearer to the young mare, and grins wickedly. "What brings you across my path?"



@Elliana

[Elliana]

Soul-walker. He repeats and she ducks her head to the side like a charming snake, such a sanguine grin on her face. But there are still ghosts in the silver blue of her eyes (a part of her has never left the forest, and her terror is too freshly buried, the grave too freshly dug, for her to think of anything else.) She blinks and she opens her eyes and is so very glad they are of the sky instead of the earth.

He speaks and it banishes a cobweb from her heart in that place where her adventure used to reside. “And what shape do you love the most?” She asks him, and there is a hunger gnawing at her stomach for the knowledge she does not readily know. The black-sea is rising against all her youthful, innocent bones. It's black as ore and as salted as a hundred tears. It's an endless storm in the silence between their rocks turned to weapon instead of earth. And it's fluttering inside her over and over again like a wave against the shore. Like it wants her to fly, to soar high above the earth like a god with not religion. She feels like an undiscovered beast, something more than a girl born of royalty.

Elli feels as if could be lost in a canyon miles deep as this boy's gaze meets her own and he rises like great rocky walls inside her chest. He is jagged mountain walls and she the deep, the sandy bottom, broken stones, lost gems that settle on the floor. She is as homeless as those creeping critters, left to crawl and scavenge, seeking an impossible sunlight, desperate for the cool air of the cliff side, just to sit freezing on the canyon floor when that sun sets.

She slides her back against the bark of a tree, leaning into the knotted bark to let the sting of it bite into her back, not quite as sharp as the teeth of a once wolf. But she does not push away from it, or turn, she likes it. It lets her know she is alive.

Sometime she forgets, like when she looks into his eyes that seem deeper than her soul and every part of the sea, that she is no ghost. Terrastella, her mother, they had made her feel like nothing, like the one broken thing in a world that talked so easy of walls and cobblestone.

Her eyes, sunlit salt water and summer skies, slide away from the pressure of silver storm cloud of his stare. He's too hard to hold in a look. She slides her rib-cage against the tree.

Her voice is a whisper of words, a soft, silver dusting of moonlight in a world lit by hot, summer sun. “Bolder.” His name is a sigh in the wind, tattered and torn like a leaf long reaching for the ground. It is something dark on her lips, a prayer to something feral and wild fluttering in her chest. “I know of Hyaline,” she says with a sweeping blink. Knows of it in stories, had explored its outer edges, curious of the place her mother once called home. “Freedom,” she responds. “Or trying to find it.” She whispers. “What is it like to be free, Bolder?”

Elliana suddenly decides to meet his gaze one more time as her question still leaves the taste of wet stone on her tongue. A smile, small and fleeting, takes the place of a shout on her lips. “Did your mother give you those eyes?”

find her with the flowers. the roses, the marigolds. find her telling stories that she’s never before told

@bolder

[bolder]

She leans back against the knots of the tree behind her like she is comfortable and Bolder continues to grin.

The memory of his wolf is still recent, and it makes it too easy to look at her with a ferocity that is most certainly primal. The white grin he flashes at her lacks the pointed teeth of that shape, but there is something (not that Bolder realizes it) predatory in that smile. He would capture her in the handsome curve of it, if he could, as he would with any prey.

"What do you know of Hyaline?" he asks, curious. What Bolder knows comes from the explanations of his Aunt, Mazikeen, who ruled the entirety of the East. They are a pack; they are family. He understands that their gifts are powerful ones, and it is for that reason only shifters are allowed there.

He comes striding forward in a way befitting of his name, and tilts his copper face towards hers. Bolder nearly laughs at her mention of freedom, but he doesn't. Instead, he considers what that emotion must feel like. The young pegasus is certainly freer in Hyaline than he had been in Taiga, but even that had come at a cost. He had left behind his parents, his sibling, the rest of his family for the chance to be finally accepted.

To finally learn what (or who) he was.

What he is now is a still-growing stallion in the presence of a pretty girl, and his dark nostrils flare at the sudden awareness of how close Elliana was to him.

"Could you tell me?" he banters back to her, "Because that is a feeling I have never completely known." Bolder is still grinning, but something causes it to falter. "I could tell you what it's like to lose yourself," he then continues, "as a bird on the wing. As a wolf on the hunt." Stopping, he adds, "but I don't think it is the same thing as being truly free."

Was she flirting with him?

Bolder rather enjoys the idea and it shows with a devilish glint in those silver eyes.

"My mother would probably be appalled at how frank I am being with you," he murmurs to her, feeling the heat of her skin against his, and takes another step closer. "But I won't tell her if you don't."

@Elliana

[Elliana]

Deep in her memories, locked away in a chest a certain blackness rattles and shakes. It wants her to recall, that something, to remember what life it was exactly that she didn't want to live. But she only remembers that brine sting of the sea in dreams and what came before that in flashes that are too quick to grasp. They flutter past her eyelids quick as dragonfly wings, shining in the way that blood shines under the moonlight.

(When she had been little (fresh from the woods, the wound on her chest not yet healed), she had whispered in her sleep about twin unicorns and a forest.)

A squirrel scurries past her feet she forgets what forgotten thing she was trying to remember in the first place.

(There is the smell of brine, and sea-rot, and tide-water. She remembers the taste of it as she swallows the air.)

Blue finds silver. There is a war in his eyes, she can pick out the darkness of it as well as she might find a sunflower in a field of dead grass. “Very little,” she admits freely. “My mother lived there once, a long time ago.” And she does not delve further to answer his question.

Her heart flickers like fireflies when he comes closer. Already she is leaning back again, away from the way his lips shape the word free. What does a man know of freedom, of sacrifice, of love? But then again, what does a child know? Had she known he was a god of many faces made mortal she would have told him that he knows even less than he thinks.

“I think it is different for everyone, I take whatever freedom I can find,” Even death. She doesn't say it but it's there in the sorrow stain that eats away the blue of her eyes. Let this skin of hers fade away, wither and die and leave only that soul behind.

It's her soul that carries the stories, not the flesh.

At his words, she felt her heart contract in her chest, youthful emotions swelling in her, emotions that did not feel youthful at all. She understand the humor in his joke, but her face remains passive. “As long as we are keeping lips locked, will you tell me a secret? Something nobody else knows?” She whispers as she widens the space between them and shrinks as much as a horse might be able to. Happily would she pull herself down to the size of a speck of dust so that she might forever disappear in the air. Her expression betrays no profound fear or trouble as she watches him carefully. She blinks passively, her mouth pressed into a thin line before it reorients itself it a smirk.

find her with the flowers. the roses, the marigolds. find her telling stories that she’s never before told

@bolder

[bolder]

Bolder sees the struggle in her eyes at the mention of Hyaline. He doesn't know why it is there, but the young shifter finds the fight fitting. Hyaline is the home of the Pack. They are a group of shapeshifters; many, like his cousin Myrna and Aunt Mazikeen, can be anything they wished. Others, like himself, were limited to certain shapes or forms. Many of them can be both predator and prey, breaking the natural laws, and struggling between magic and instinct.

So while he doesn't understand it, he appreciates seeing the conflict in Elliana's pretty eyes.

"Was she a member of the Pack?" he asks, wondering if she had been like his Grandfather, and lived in Hyaline during a different era. Bolder keeps some distance between them, not wanting his newfound companion to be uncomfortable. "I heard it was a sanctuary once." Hard to fathom such a thing now, his confident (and somewhat dismissive) tone says.

He grins again at the mention of freedom.

"That seems rather reckless," he teases, as if he wouldn't do the same, if given the chance. His silver eyes brighten, still enjoying their banter."But perhaps that is why I have never known it. Freedom is an absolute," Bolder continues, "One either is or isn't." There had always been something holding him back, and thus preventing him from completely embracing the ideal.

Then Elliana backs away, and Bolder has to fight the instinct that tells him she is something less than.

She isn't, he reminds himself, even if it was only quarry that has ever stepped away from him.

Staying where he stands and allowing the flaxen-maned mare the room she desires, Bolder's wildfire grin sparks again.

"What makes you think I give my secrets away for free?" he counters.

@Elliana

[Elliana]

Perhaps he is an old, jaded thing, hiding in young skin, who talks with a dismissive tone that hangs on him like ice upon the summer sea. But would he be as happy to die as she? Would he see it as freedom to let loose his words and soul and blood from the cage of flesh that chains them both so? Even if his soul can shift from one to another, it can never quite leave the trap it stays dormant in.

“Not sure, she was a diplomat though, at one point,” she says, leaving out how her mother went from diplomat, to healer, to Champion, to Queen.

“Freedom.” She repeats. The word comes as quick as a blink and it cracks with a certainty that is harsh against the tender softness of her parched lips. Freedom from this unholy skin she does not yet know well. Freedom from fear and sadness. Freedom from those black memories that seep like oil into the cracks and crevices of her soul and refused to contain any more than sea refuses to dry up to desert sand. “And you can think yourself free when are trapped, and believe yourself trapped when you are free,” she says. “So you might as well envision yourself how you wish,” she says.

If she dies she wants her soul to turn to dust with her bones, free at last to fetter way like a million fireflies on the breeze.

When he speaks again, the timbre of his confidence is enough to make her open her eyes. She watches him like the sea washes upon the shore. Her gaze touches his then washes away, back to the shadows, like a tide. Elli isn't brave enough to hold him in those summer-blue eyes. But she's brave enough to step towards him.

“I’ll tell you one,” she whispers, leaning closer until her breath touches his ear. “Close your eyes first, though,” she warns, pulling away and narrowing blue eyes.

When he opens his eyes, after maybe a few moments, or even a few moments longer than that. He will find an empty forest with a patch of blue sky above. Like the too blue eyes of a girl with a crescent moon hugging her shoulder.

find her with the flowers. the roses, the marigolds. find her telling stories that she’s never before told

@bolder