 I can remember a time when I was so afraid when even my shadow wouldn't follow me Winter. There was something vastly lonely about the winter months in a land. There were no colors outside of the simple white of the snow, the blue of the sky, and the green of the coniferous forests. The dull browns, the blackness of night, it could make an entire land look depressingly bleak. Especially when that winter had come, the first winter without either of her parents, the first winter in Beyond. it had been even more depressing still when she would catch them watching her. Marcelo, Aletta, Malachi, even Ori occasionally. They had handled her with kid gloves, desperate for answers but scared to ask the questions. It would have been enough to drive a single person mad, desperate for someone, anyone to be rude to her, to get angry, to show her anything but that sympathetic smile and quiet look of pity. When spring had come though, Elaina had found friendship in her cousin, Lilli, the crimson girl that Elaina has been so desperately looking for. And with the coming of spring had meant her godfather had returned to her, and the healer that had been present at Elaina’s birth. It had almost been like the family was once again reunited. With the exception of her parents that had weighed on her shoulders and ached her young heart. Now, Elaina has been alive longer without her parents beside her than she has known them. The feelings was—strange, to say the least. Elaina wonders if she had even been given a chance to really get to know her parents. Their faults, their strengths, their trails, instead of having perpetually looked at them through rose tinted glasses. Valerio had told her stories of when her father had first come to Paraiso as a testosterone filled two year old stallion, and how he had rebelled against Valerio’s kind nature. Elaina had known none of this, her father never having gotten around to telling her the story, it would seem. When she returned to Windskeep years later, she learned things about her mother that she had never known. These stories, while they warmed her soul, caused her to bite her lip in sorrow. Elaina realized how little she knew about the parents that had created her. The more she learned, the more she felt as though she had been living with complete strangers. She startles, that golden head quickly lifting upwards in surprise. “Wow,” she says after her heart settles. “Quite a trick sneaking up on someone,” she says with a laugh, those amber eyes drifting downwards for a moment before finding his own glowing eyes. “You have nice eyes,” she says, strange eyes, different eyes, but nice all the same she thinks. “I was just,” she hesitates, she doesn't want to sound stupid, but she knows she is about to. “I was looking at the dead flowers I found,” she offers, point blank. “Winter sucks,” she says and can hearing the scolding in the back of her mind from Cherish. ‘Ladies do not say sucks.’ Yeah, ladies don't do a lot of things. Ladies don't fight, they don't travel off on their own, and they certainly don't talk to strange men in the woods. “I’m Elaina.” benjamin and beylani's sunflower-girl |
@[Vadar]