[open] calling to join them, the wretched and joyful

[elio]

elio

some say I should learn to cry but I only learned how to fight
and I know everything must die but nothing fades like the light

Mother's stories of the Afterlife always kept Elio's curiosity sated. He didn't know the loss of the death, of mourning, of ghosts. He didn't know what it meant to be haunted. He didn't know--he didn't know so much. He feels he knows too much now, with his wings strapped to his back by invisible, weight-bearing tethers.

He feels he knows so much and yet knows so little, wearing a dunce cap as he trudges blankly through Beqanna's common lands.

Far and away, dipping between heaven's clouds and earth's soil, Elio merely exists (and that just isn't, no it just isn't enough). It's a punishing world, one that chains him to his worst thoughts, his worst actions, and his worst fantasies. Regret, one might say; it's regret that haunts him, not his mother's translucent form, not his father's curse, not the cool absence of his siblings. He could have seen Lepis more in the months that led to her death. He could have, he should have, he would have--oh, he would have, if he had only known.

Again that emptiness of so much he does not know leaves him hollow and airy while the immense weight of guilt keeps him tied to the earth.

Just wake up, pleads the man barely holding his head above water in an ocean of life. An Elio of old--a bitter Elio, but an alive one, an Elio with even a shred of hope. His muscles are tired as he fights the ocean water, searching for the barest hint of sand against his hooves.

Lepis would not want him to drown, but it's not the hope in her lasting impressions that he focuses on. It's her face and his own suffering, the smell of burning flesh and the taste of salty tears. The regret, the ghosts, the memories he'll lose over the years.

He hates himself.

elio stop being dramatic challenge