Perhaps she should startle.
Perhaps when the clatter of river rock giving way underfoot reaches her ears, followed shortly by the gentle swish of long-grass as it parts, instinct should have come to life inside of her and sent her heart slamming up against her ribs.
But it doesn’t.
Instead of feeling her legs wind up like tightly coiled springs, instead of running like Loveliar would have begged of her, she only looks up from the blood she’d been eyeing, meekly, from under the dark curl of her eyelashes and blinks softly. A veil of spring sunlight breaks through a canopy of leaves somewhere overhead and when it reaches her skin it refracts off the sheen of her flesh, still slick with sweat be it from fever or nightmare, or both. She shivers when a cool wind skirts the meadows edge, but it isn’t from fright. Maybe it should be. Maybe something inside of her is fundamentally broken.
Maybe that simple wrongness is why she chases absurdities like the one that stands before her instead of hiding from them.
And she’s certainly never seen anything quite like what is here, now, gathered before her bed of wildflowers and long grass; more fairy than horse. She looks as though she’s been plucked from a dream, all rough birch-flesh and languid, heavy branches still tangled with imagination; the kind of vision that might remind you of Ophelia with garlands of wildflowers strewn tangled through her hair while she drowns in the most beautiful way imaginable (as if death could ever be so clean).
It never occurs to her that perhaps what stands before her now, dripping in leaves and weeping boughs, is a creature she should not want to know. Why should she run? Why should she be afraid?
(Her heart yearns the most for the strange and unusual.)
So Glassheart, still hazy from her dreams or fever, smiles through the blood that runs in rivulets across and down her lips. With an easy placidity she watches as plants sprout from nothing to live and die at this creature’s careful whim, and as she does so she does not think to question why. She is used to things wrapped in magic (be it lightning, or earth), and she has come to like them, perhaps more so than will ever be good for her.
A salve floats between two strangers for a moment, and then it is gone.
With a short exhale and twitch of her nose she finds the bleeding ends, and though she is still without the energy to stand in the company of her newly found companion she blinks the sleep from her eyes and shakes her head as though the fever could be lifted as simply as though it were a veil draped across her face. She does feel better, however temporarilty.
“Hello,” she says, mother nature come to life.
“You have pretty eyes.”
It’s those four words that reminds her then that her body is ruined, dying. There were parts of her, at first, that mourned her impending demise — instincts, quickly quelled by the rather compelling realisation she leaves no devastation behind her. She is only a blip in time; nothing more than space dust. Cordis would mourn her, briefly, for what was left of Spyndle that she could not have to keep, but they would find another way without her as a medium. Love like that didn’t just end. Things like Glassheart did.
“What are you?” She asks, wincing as a barb cuts through the hip she leans against the dirt. It is shielding by earth and her body, so neither will notice and both will only assume the contagion. If only they knew.
“You’re beautiful.”
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Noori]