[open quest] do you think god stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he's created?

[Elliana]

kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul

S

Your silence will not protect you. She reminds herself of this when the call comes. She goes, because she thinks this is the only thing she can do. She could stay quiet (Elliana has always been very good at hiding) but there is something. She hopes this bring her something. (Those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous, she remembers, and she dismisses the thought, she was not the danger.) She rises from her sleep, not an orphan only because her parents are not dead, even though neither of them are there anymore.

Her minds feels entirely too quiet now within that voice booming in her head. She fills the silence in her mind, singing eulogies to those who have been lost. There's a religion in her silent song. She still thinks about turning back, but every muscle in her body contracts as she realizes she needs to keep moving forwards. And she sobs, deep in her heart, at the realization that she has no defense against whatever it is that is coming. She wonders if this is it, if she will be led to the grave the unicorns once showed her, dragged her to, promised her. But now, the shaking in her limbs, the sweat that hide behind the frost of her mane tells her otherwise, that this could not be it. “When you will go into it without fear, you will be. And we will find you when you are.”

“Until then — you can keep dancing.” Said as if a permission granted from a god.

So Elliana runs. She runs like a deer, leaping over rocks and trees with a careless sort of abandon. She runs like a sea over the sands, a star falling across the night-sky.

‘Elliana, what are you doing here?’ Comes Aeneas from the shadows as she makes her ascent up the mountain. He emerges, bright as ever, as if he were birthed from the sun and not from Day and Dusk’s matriarchs. “Aeneas?” She asks him, not believing, and maybe if this were a church and not a mountain she would clutch a cross to her chest and send a heaven bound prayer. ‘Come to the meadow with me, get away from here, it isn’t…safe,’ he says and she wants to believe him, wants to sink into that light of his skin. He is right, she knows beneath the whites of her bones and down, down, down, she knows he is right. ‘Turn back, Elliana—now.’ And it is the command in his voice that sends her mind back, back, back and she imagines herself screaming, but when she comes to her lips are as silent as the trees on a day without wind.

“I have to go, Aeneas,” she says and it breaks her, it breaks everything. She wants to stay, with him, with whatever light and warmth he offers her in this morning. And the expression on his face, it is too real to be just ordinary magic. (The space between a breath and a heart beat she thinks this is really him). She steps back, away from him, closer to the summit and to whatever call had summoned her. The shadows feel like a blessing from a god she does not believe in when they fill up again the space between them. “I’m sorry,” and she almost thinks she is as he dissolves into fireflies and is gone at just the same time she turns with a whip of blonde hair.

She summits and despite the weariness in her limbs, she manages to maintain a mask of composure and forces a diplomatic grin onto her face. She realizes she is not alone. Far, far from alone because there he stands like the skeleton of a fallen soldier in the sunlight.

Maybe she is not as good at hiding as she thought.

elliana speaks

elliana
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