09-26-2021, 09:07 PM
‘The storm always passes,’ Azrael had told her mother in comfort, in console. ‘And there will be another one to take its place.’ She had snapped back. This was the first fight Elliana ever witnessed between her parents. She spent the rest of the night thinking, what are they talking about? She had watched the skies, there had been no sign of storms approaching, and certainly not a storm passed with another on the way.
Elliana does not remember this fight, if she had, she might have thought remembered the lesson as she takes a moment to star up and into the aching sunlight—and she might have thought it better to look further and beyond.
Petals fall from trees, float off of flowers like raindrops as Elliana turns to just the left to spot the owner of the voice.
Wolf. Wolf. Wolf. Screams a thought she has never had before, yet feels it has been with her all along. Wolf, he is a wolf, and many, many more things. She knows what her mother would say. Skin walker, shape shifter, face stealer. And tell her to get far, far, far away.
Under a thick mat of lashes, Elli’s blue gaze grows cool and almost bemused to his reaction. Those dark nostrils of hers flare and quiver as if she might cry or scream or laugh or cheer. “Not long at all, soul walker,” she says. Soul walker, the ability to let your soul reside in the body that is not your own. Thoughts, appearance, it may change, even instincts, but the soul remains intact. She's ruined and bruised but innocent yet, ignorant to the ways of the world in places not yet swallowed up by blackness and sin. “It was a pleasure to cross your path today,” she says and shifts her weight. Elliana really does turn to go; she pivots slowly but decidedly, each movement measured to be as efficient as possible, each stride calculated exactly the way she wants it to appear. She is beautiful in her desolation, beautiful in the way her blade mane drapes sadly across her forehead, hiding that ivory birthmark from prying eyes.
And then, in a moment, Elliana, so in love with loneliness, so content in her solitude, pivots back around and stares at him, her expression unchanged except for a certain metallic sheen to her eyes. Protests sear across her thoughts, feeble attempts to tell herself that this was bad, that this was a terrible decision, but they all extinguish as quickly as they were lit. Once, her life had been very black and white. Good was good and evil was evil. But Elliana, at heart, is an artist—and she knows that this world has color, color, color.
Besides—
There is something about the weight of his smile that asks her to stay a while.
Something that tempts her into it. “I’m Elliana, I come from far away.”
@bolder