06-09-2021, 07:51 PM
.
The despair descends upon her far before the boy, an omen preceding the act itself. To find herself greeted at once by the hopelessness of this reality further defamiliarizes that feeling from whence she came, just: of everythingness, of oneness, of unique and sublime belongingness. Lillia quivers, once. In the wake of eternity's serenity, the pain of reality feels at once like an old, loveless friend and a new, agonizing enemy.
Her glow weakens and her grasp on time flickers; Lillia releases it entirely when she sets eyes on him, figuring to preserve herself instead of prostrate herself before his angst. Clutching her wings to her ribs, she reminds herself to breathe (that strange, conscious and unconscious mechanism which this life demands of all its creatures) and feels uncertain of what comes next.
Longs to fast-forward through it.
Wills not to.
Can you smell it, too? The boy asks. Beneath his aura of misery Lillia notices his features, icey, cracked, and yet as angelic as she; alike, yet opposite in regards more felt than seen or understood.
Seconds pass before she registers his question at all.
Inhale.
But the warmth of the only breeze she's ever known greets her. This gust so like the last, indistinguishable, almost, yet tantalizing in its newness to her summoned consciousness. She wonders, what is there to smell? and figures that she must answer with the truth.
"I cannot," she speaks to the boy across from her in a pleasant, blank tone, one not absent of curiosity but not bustling with it, either. Searching the stranger's eyes, Lillia thinks, but then -- yes, she must. She must, for him.
In a blink the afternoon sky flashes to night, hours passed in a breath. Her body punishes her for this act of temporal manipulation and, as she retreats from the mental place where she stores her time magic, she nurses the aches in her body like newborns: feels for the first time the exquisite sensation of exhaustion after exerting herself in the presence of such hopelessness. For though he, this angel of despair, weakens her, for all that she has become in materializing here, an angel of hope, Lillia must do for him all that she can.
"Is it gone now?" She asks him, peering through the dim light of their semi-matching halos with a keen, soft-spoken interest.
Her glow weakens and her grasp on time flickers; Lillia releases it entirely when she sets eyes on him, figuring to preserve herself instead of prostrate herself before his angst. Clutching her wings to her ribs, she reminds herself to breathe (that strange, conscious and unconscious mechanism which this life demands of all its creatures) and feels uncertain of what comes next.
Longs to fast-forward through it.
Wills not to.
Can you smell it, too? The boy asks. Beneath his aura of misery Lillia notices his features, icey, cracked, and yet as angelic as she; alike, yet opposite in regards more felt than seen or understood.
Seconds pass before she registers his question at all.
Inhale.
But the warmth of the only breeze she's ever known greets her. This gust so like the last, indistinguishable, almost, yet tantalizing in its newness to her summoned consciousness. She wonders, what is there to smell? and figures that she must answer with the truth.
"I cannot," she speaks to the boy across from her in a pleasant, blank tone, one not absent of curiosity but not bustling with it, either. Searching the stranger's eyes, Lillia thinks, but then -- yes, she must. She must, for him.
In a blink the afternoon sky flashes to night, hours passed in a breath. Her body punishes her for this act of temporal manipulation and, as she retreats from the mental place where she stores her time magic, she nurses the aches in her body like newborns: feels for the first time the exquisite sensation of exhaustion after exerting herself in the presence of such hopelessness. For though he, this angel of despair, weakens her, for all that she has become in materializing here, an angel of hope, Lillia must do for him all that she can.
"Is it gone now?" She asks him, peering through the dim light of their semi-matching halos with a keen, soft-spoken interest.
Lillia
@Selaphiel