09-08-2021, 04:16 PM
liesma
He does not touch her.
Just as her father had not dared touch her mother.
(Her father had told her as much. He told her secrets like poetry when it was just the two of them. He had never dared allow himself to sully something so perfect, he’d said, but Liesma does not think this is the reason the boy does not touch her.)
He comes closer, enough that he could touch her if he wanted. And the flames that had flared along his spine are gone by the time she says. “Be friends with me,” she says and, if she had smiled, it might have seemed as if she were teasing. But she just looks at him with those deep black eyes and this is said as honestly as everything else she has told him.
She does not have friends that are like her, though she does not tell him this. Not that it would embarrass her, but because she does not want him to feel as if he is under any amount of pressure to be any kind of friend in particular.
She knows nothing of his home. Only of Tephra, where her father had wandered from and then found her mother and vowed never to leave her. He had not returned and they had instead found their home in the common lands, roaming, nomadic. Because there was no place powerful enough to hold them, she thought. Because they were too big and too beautiful to stay in one place for long.
“I’m from no place at all,” she tells him. Her parents are her home and she almost says as much, but recognizes that this might sound silly so she swallows it instead.
She tilts her head, her wings stirring just barely, when he confesses that his friends cannot be seen by anyone but him. Her brow darkens with confusion and her breath hitches when the embers are disturbed by something unseen. It is not fear, no, but something she does not have a name for. A kind of morbid curiosity, perhaps, as she reaches her nose into the space where she thinks the thing might be but feels nothing at all.
“Are they nice?” she asks and then shifts her attention back to the boy. “My name is Liesma,” she tells him, still without smiling. “What’s yours?”
Just as her father had not dared touch her mother.
(Her father had told her as much. He told her secrets like poetry when it was just the two of them. He had never dared allow himself to sully something so perfect, he’d said, but Liesma does not think this is the reason the boy does not touch her.)
He comes closer, enough that he could touch her if he wanted. And the flames that had flared along his spine are gone by the time she says. “Be friends with me,” she says and, if she had smiled, it might have seemed as if she were teasing. But she just looks at him with those deep black eyes and this is said as honestly as everything else she has told him.
She does not have friends that are like her, though she does not tell him this. Not that it would embarrass her, but because she does not want him to feel as if he is under any amount of pressure to be any kind of friend in particular.
She knows nothing of his home. Only of Tephra, where her father had wandered from and then found her mother and vowed never to leave her. He had not returned and they had instead found their home in the common lands, roaming, nomadic. Because there was no place powerful enough to hold them, she thought. Because they were too big and too beautiful to stay in one place for long.
“I’m from no place at all,” she tells him. Her parents are her home and she almost says as much, but recognizes that this might sound silly so she swallows it instead.
She tilts her head, her wings stirring just barely, when he confesses that his friends cannot be seen by anyone but him. Her brow darkens with confusion and her breath hitches when the embers are disturbed by something unseen. It is not fear, no, but something she does not have a name for. A kind of morbid curiosity, perhaps, as she reaches her nose into the space where she thinks the thing might be but feels nothing at all.
“Are they nice?” she asks and then shifts her attention back to the boy. “My name is Liesma,” she tells him, still without smiling. “What’s yours?”
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
@Fyr