I guess I've got a taste for poison; I've given up on ever being well
I keep mining the horizon, digging for lies I've yet to tell
He is so much larger than she.
And she is young still but she can tell that he has to concentrate on softening the edges of his smile.
She wonders if he is a thing that people fear, if she should fear him, too.
But she does not know how to fear things when she knows that the rocks and the trees and the flowers will come to her aid, they will fight for her.
So, when he smiles at her, she smiles back. It is a bright and beaming thing and the act alone makes her heart swell, makes the flowers at her feet stir. She knows the name Vulgaris, but only in passing. Her mother had mentioned him once, she thinks, but she does not remember in what capacity. She has done enough wandering to know how to find Tephra and she delights at the knowledge that she will be able to help him after all.
“I can help you find your son!” she yelps, proud and eager. “I know where Tephra is!” Perhaps someday she will learn how to talk in anything other than exclamations, she will soften, but it is her hope that the world will not wear her down.
He inches closer to her then and the muscles pull taut just beneath the surface of her skin. It is a primal reaction she is unfamiliar with, this sudden, bone-deep impulse to flee. But she buries it, swallows it down, goes on grinning at him. She blinks up at him when he speaks next, asks her to forgive him, asks after the names of her parents. She brightens even further when she thinks of her mother.
Before she can answer, rolling her mother’s name across the surface of her tongue, he offers up his name. Larva. The name chases a shudder down the length of her spine but she does not let it unsettle her. “My name is Lovewell!” she nods then, “my mother’s name is Darling! I don’t know who my father was, my mother has never talked about him much.”
There is no sadness in her tone when she says this. She trusts her mother, she always has, and has never questioned her mother’s reasons for keeping it just the two of them. It occurs to her that he might know her mother and she takes a step toward him, her eyes bright and wide. “Do you know my mother?”
Lovewell
@[Larva]