02-13-2022, 03:03 PM
BUT I HOPE I NEVER LOSE THE BRUISES THAT YOU LEFT BEHIND
She knows now that she is not imagining what is trying so hard to grow between them. It washes over her like a wave when he returns her touch, when he seems to shift closer to her in that subconscious need for more—the need that matches her own, and she almost gives into it. But there is always this ever present feeling of needing to be careful, that the flickering flame was still too fragile and that she might extinguish it rather than feed it.
There was so much of this world that Voracious still didn’t understand, and there is a part of her that thinks what he is feeling is only because he doesn’t know any better—that maybe his attachment to her is only because she had been there when he escaped that other world, and had been one of the few to maintain contact with him in this one.
She was familiar, and maybe that was all there is to it, and perhaps he would realize that later.
“We’re both lucky,” she tells him quietly with another cautious smile. Would she have followed that floating light as the slightly cynical adult she is now? She isn’t so sure. Young Aislyn had been stupidly fearless in a way she wasn’t anymore; she doesn’t think this adult version of herself would have walked through that door in the middle of the woods. She is lucky the light had found her before she had learned to question and doubt everything she comes across. She is certain Voracious would not have remained where he was—she knows he would have found a way out, somehow. But it wouldn’t have been her that he is standing with had she not been foolishly brave enough to risk entering a realm she may not have returned from.
“I don’t really live anywhere, either,” she begins, having once again taking a step closer alongside him, until his wings nearly brush her sides if she were to shift even a breath closer. “I’ve lived in a few places, following my parents mostly, but I never stayed.” The first-born of their children, Aislyn had been born before Atrox and Ryatah developed into the rock-solid pair that they were now, but, perhaps by some strange twist of fate, they had always lived in the same place—first Tephra, and later Hyaline. But the circumstances surrounding her birth had been peculiar to say the least, and it was actually just across the border in Taiga where she had been born—under a cloud of smoke and surrounded by unnatural darkness. “I want to show you Taiga,” she tells him, a cautious hope alighting in her brightly colored eyes. “It’s where I was born.”
There was so much of this world that Voracious still didn’t understand, and there is a part of her that thinks what he is feeling is only because he doesn’t know any better—that maybe his attachment to her is only because she had been there when he escaped that other world, and had been one of the few to maintain contact with him in this one.
She was familiar, and maybe that was all there is to it, and perhaps he would realize that later.
“We’re both lucky,” she tells him quietly with another cautious smile. Would she have followed that floating light as the slightly cynical adult she is now? She isn’t so sure. Young Aislyn had been stupidly fearless in a way she wasn’t anymore; she doesn’t think this adult version of herself would have walked through that door in the middle of the woods. She is lucky the light had found her before she had learned to question and doubt everything she comes across. She is certain Voracious would not have remained where he was—she knows he would have found a way out, somehow. But it wouldn’t have been her that he is standing with had she not been foolishly brave enough to risk entering a realm she may not have returned from.
“I don’t really live anywhere, either,” she begins, having once again taking a step closer alongside him, until his wings nearly brush her sides if she were to shift even a breath closer. “I’ve lived in a few places, following my parents mostly, but I never stayed.” The first-born of their children, Aislyn had been born before Atrox and Ryatah developed into the rock-solid pair that they were now, but, perhaps by some strange twist of fate, they had always lived in the same place—first Tephra, and later Hyaline. But the circumstances surrounding her birth had been peculiar to say the least, and it was actually just across the border in Taiga where she had been born—under a cloud of smoke and surrounded by unnatural darkness. “I want to show you Taiga,” she tells him, a cautious hope alighting in her brightly colored eyes. “It’s where I was born.”
A I S L Y N
@Voracious
