10-09-2021, 08:37 AM
H
er stomach flips and flops, a fish gasping for air, wide mouth, gaping, eyes rolling in the back of its head. She is only now all too aware how dark it was. In the middle of the night, in the dead of night, the evening gloom. She is frightened. Elliana is scared. Scared and yet intrigued. There is something lurching in her chest, a line casting a hook into that fish’s mouth and yanking in forward in a shriek of pain. She is resistant, standing there with a hook in her mouth ready for the sharp tug, and yet she flies forwards, flying limbs. And Elliana makes her way into the woods, singing: “And we all sit around the fire
We feel a little warmer now.”
Her body kicks and tumbles and rolls and twirls.
“And we all sit around the fire
We feel so much better now.”
She spins and sa-shays, and cartwheels, and frolics.
Until those steps become skips and those jitters are shaking hands, a goody basket suddenly grasped in her palm. Elliana has always been a little girl with wide eyes as if trying to take in the world in its entirety. And she stands as such as she halts in her trail. It is as if the sudden recognition of her body having morphed into something entirely different causes her to grow uncoordinated and imbalanced, in much the same way a cut doesn’t hurt until you see the blood. She crashes into the forest floor, the crunch of leaves rippling around her like the cracking of bones. The red hood slides down and onto her shoulders, revealing long blonde hair that quickly streams down her shoulders.
Shakily, she places those strange two feet underneath herself and rises up on knocking knees and unsteady arms that reach out sideways to balance herself. An invisible tightrope springs in front of her as she walks carefully one foot and then the other. Eventually, she finds that steady skip as she throws that hood back over her head—least the wolf finds her.
It is terrifying, exhilarating, chilling, and gratifying, this feeling in the woods. The girl with those devastatingly glass blue eyes. Strange things swoop down and close to her head and the girl ducks down, laughing. And whether those are giggles of enthrallment or terror, I will not tell you.
Trick or treat.
The tree branches, she had not imagined it, those arching branches reach towards her. She thinks for just a moment, let them take her, let them take her far, far away. To where Po fights gods, and where twin unicorns sit waiting for her with a rose to plant inside her chest. Let them reach into her chest and pull out her heart to make room to grow a garden.
(Of dread.)
(Of trepidation.)
The rushing of a river is seemingly the only thing to back those shaking trees away from her. Blue eyes close with a sweeping blink of long lashes before opening once more to the scene before her. As a pumpkin bobs past her like a bouy of fear rather than one of hope, Elliana steps into the current because she is more her mother’s daughter than she would ever want to be. But it is not Elena that comes to Elliana in this moment—but her flower horse. “Elliana,” Po says to her in a whisper brushing the back of her mind. “Stay clear of the River, but should you come too close: flow, do not fight.”
An enigma to the end, both too trusting and too apprehensive, that little girl lets go, shuts blue eyes. She raises an unfamiliar hand and pinches it against her nose, a strange action for the once equine, but one that feels right in the moment. That face is scrunched in an unattractive way, from fear? From concentration? She thinks she would rather be any where but here.
Even at the top of the world.
Elliana was raised on first a cliffside and then a castle, but dancing next to the edge of cliffs is where her heart will sing. So when the girl emerges from the river unscathed (teeth chattering, new skin bumpy with cold, and limbs shaking with ice) she looks to the mountain path and thinks of it not as a challenge—
But just the dance partner she has been waiting for.
She speaks like this.
some are ghosts before they are dead.