05-30-2021, 10:45 AM
S
he looks at him in a way that is infuriately cool, and says nothing, instead she finds a spot on that pointed ensemble of his and lingers there, concentrating on nothing in particular. In truth, Elliana looks at home only when she is not.
Should she have been an empath such as her mother once was she might have have delved into his discomfort, tried to lessen it so, tried to turn off that grief or at least dull the ache until it became only a quiet thrum in the back of his mind. Instead, she just looks at him as if waiting to see if he would collapse like her sandcastles or hold himself as solid as the stone in Dusk Court.
She is not cold.
Just indifferent.
Find them. He says. And never before has she wanted someone to disappear with a single blink of blue eyes in their direction. She looks like ice when she finds his gaze, content enough to freeze him in his spot. I dont want them, and perhaps in her apathy, this is the one way Elliana is cruel. We may be bound by blood, but not by bond. I do not know them. It is only slightly a lie. She had met Lilliana, once, a long time ago on the shores of Paraiso, but the meeting had been short and Elli had been young. She knows Lilliana mostly through the stories she was told, stories she has started to question if they were even true. She knows of Nashua and Yanhua, and there was a girl too, but Elliana never learned her name. But where their roots grew long and thick as the redwoods she heard stories about. Elliana had no roots at all, just dandelion seeds desperate to catch a breeze. I do not put as much stock in family as my mother would—nor apparently as you do.
She moves away with the conscious slowness of someone who was too lost in her own head to truly care what had been thought by another. You cannot say that about magic when you yourself bleed the very essence of it, she says with narrow blue eyes. She sounds like her father, her real father, Tenebrae, and she is only slightly aware of it.
She watches him in a heavy silence. A silence that soon grows deafening. Find your own way, Leoniidas, or drown in your grief. She stares at him with blue eyes that hold none of the warmth of her mother, but neither are they outright cold. She watches him, and it is seeing the hurt smeared across his face like Halcyon warpaint that she softens her. She could still be Elena’s daughter after all. Rise your head above this ocean of sorrow, Leo, and we will find each other again. and she snatches the flower from his hair and lets it cascade onto the forest floor, crumpled and broken.
It is only when she is away from him that the trees begin whispering, something she cannot quite understand and she wonders—
..but nightmares are dreams too.