a little bit of lavender for luck; any

[Elliana]

H

er mother told her a story once about the wind and the woman who fell in love with him. It was a long story, but it ends with the girl standing alone on a mountain, and the wind blowing half way around the world. It ends with them asking if she was sad, and her saying she knew he would be back, that the wind is such an unstoppable thing—it would tear down mountains and cross oceans to get to where it wants to go. They ask her how long she will wait. She said forever and a day, until a winter breeze tickles her ear, and sparkles snowflakes on her eyelashes.

Elliana can remember thinking how silly, to wait. She would never wait.

How long has it been, she thinks.

How long since what, little shadow-girl? How long have you been away from home? Or how long since he left you and took a part of you with him? How long since she abandoned the little girl Elliana and replaced it with something similar but not quite all the same. How long since her mother stopped worrying over her every move and started to worry about bigger things, nothing at all, and then everything at once?

How long has it been since she decided she never wants to go back?
Elliana has learned to not grow melancholy over a bit of lost self.

When she looks at the trees, haloed like gods in the light, she tries to see only something holy enough to live in her dreams. There is a piece of her that wants to find that grave that sat wide and gaping, ready to swallow her whole should she only ask for such a thing.

She finds her, in the forest and Elliana is unsurprised, she always came across another when she started to feel lonely. A social butterfly that hides in its cocoon. Altogether, a contradiction. Her breath makes the same hush, hush, hush sound that she makes at Aela when she gallops off to burn the world. And Aela is far more dangerous than any other creature Elliana might encounter. “Do you ever wonder why the seasons change?” she asks her, this strange, looking at her with those too glassy blue eyes. “Or why it can’t always be autumn?” When things are dying but not dead, she thinks but does not say.

Elliana has always been one to see the art and not the decay.

some are ghosts before they are dead.

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