01-14-2017, 09:56 PM
Tephra was different than this place, all wide open space and blue skies that disappeared over even bluer oceans. The volcano at its heart had been both immense and beautiful, and the veins of molten red and gold lava that lay strewn around it had guaranteed that Ava was never afraid of the hazy dark.
But Taiga was different, so strange in comparison. Instead of those aching blue skies she had memorized from edge to edge, there were branches locked together like fingers, thin and skeletal and unending. She could see the sky behind them, past the wood and the thick green pine needles, but it was only in snippets, only in glimpses. Even the footing was different, inches of dried red and rust needles above the ridges of roots thicker than her legs- and it had changed something in her too, that eager recklessness. There was a new grace in the way she drifted between the trees, a learned ease with which she picked her way over the uneven footing.
Somewhere in the last few weeks, she had grown up. Between leaving the first home she had known and the friends she had made there, something had shifted within her chest. But there was something darker there too, a homesickness that had devolved into a loneliness that even her sister could not quite reach.
There is a sound to her left, and it ricochets between the trees and the fog until she cannot tell exactly where it came from. She pauses and turns, the turquoise of her brow furrowed deeply beneath the tangles of a dark and cornsilk forelock. “Hello?” It is just a single word from uncertain lips, a question rather than a greeting, and when no one answers her right away she takes a hesitant step forward, little more than a delicate turquoise silhouette outlined by the rolling fog. And then, even quieter, “Is someone there?”
But Taiga was different, so strange in comparison. Instead of those aching blue skies she had memorized from edge to edge, there were branches locked together like fingers, thin and skeletal and unending. She could see the sky behind them, past the wood and the thick green pine needles, but it was only in snippets, only in glimpses. Even the footing was different, inches of dried red and rust needles above the ridges of roots thicker than her legs- and it had changed something in her too, that eager recklessness. There was a new grace in the way she drifted between the trees, a learned ease with which she picked her way over the uneven footing.
Somewhere in the last few weeks, she had grown up. Between leaving the first home she had known and the friends she had made there, something had shifted within her chest. But there was something darker there too, a homesickness that had devolved into a loneliness that even her sister could not quite reach.
There is a sound to her left, and it ricochets between the trees and the fog until she cannot tell exactly where it came from. She pauses and turns, the turquoise of her brow furrowed deeply beneath the tangles of a dark and cornsilk forelock. “Hello?” It is just a single word from uncertain lips, a question rather than a greeting, and when no one answers her right away she takes a hesitant step forward, little more than a delicate turquoise silhouette outlined by the rolling fog. And then, even quieter, “Is someone there?”
Ava
sahm x newton