i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
Mother’s are a strange thing. At least to Reave, who has twice the number of most. Lilliana is everything that is soft and kind. She had raised him to know love, and if he were not her favorite one would never know it. Brazen had not raised him, caught in deathly slumber as she had been. She had been re-born to find him a wild youth, lost to the throws of emotion he didn’t yet understand. Though she is not unkind, there is a hardness to her that Lilliana lacks. Like Elliana now, Brazen had been raised by an emotionally absent woman. Instead she had taken after her father - Reave’s grandfather. She had taken to war. And she had taught Reave this in the spare moments he was most receptive.
So Reave had been made at the hands of a woman who sewed kindness and a woman who sewed war. The ultimate dichotomy. The one that Reave would forever carry in his breast. The one that would define all the days of his future. If he is a cathedral, it is only because it is what they made him to be.
Elliana though, she had been crafted far differently. There is an acceptance of her lot in life that Reave cannot fathom. That he cannot do anything but find it fascinating. It gives her a self-peace that, though he does not yet know it, could serve as the perfect foil to the chaos in his own soul.
As she peers at him with a curious sense of lightness and surety, visions swaying like fireflies through them, he finds he rather enjoys the way she reacts to his teasing. As though he were the rain or the snow or the sun and she only had to find it within herself to accept his foibles. And so, just as she had found herself suddenly so very sure of him, so too does he of her. After all, don’t cathedrals have crypts?
It’s a curious thing to watch the story of her life in the play of her emotions. Reave had once imagined everyone had this talent, though he had long since grown to realize they most assuredly do not. Would she be uncomfortable to know he could so easily untangle even her darkest and most well-kept secrets? Though, as he watches her, he has to wonder if she truly has very many genuine secrets at all.
The ghost of a smile crosses his lips when she plucks the flower to place in the flaxen strands of his mane. He doesn’t resist, instead favoring her with a curious look. As is his wont however, he cannot seem to resist the urge for some ill-timed humor. “But when the flowers fade you will be left only with bones.” The almost-smile grows into a grin then, a strange kind of omen growing in the gleam of his blue eyes. “And those I will always have.”
Then she asks him the strangest thing of all. He had never thought much on the armor that punctures his skin. To him it simply is. He had watched the way it grew on his mother when she had woken from death and had known the same would happen for him. There is pain, but isn’t there always in life? So though he favors her with an odd look, he does not deny her desire. “If you wish.” After a moment, he adds with a faintly dismissive shrug, “Though, unless you plan to trail me like a shadow, by tomorrow it will be as it was.”
reave
@[Elliana]