what if the way we started made it something cursed from the start; vulgaris

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

 
Leliana had never imagined that one day sadness would swallow her whole.

She had never imagined the fissures that would run through her skin, the canyons that another could place within her, dragging their fingers through her flesh—leaving her hollowed out. She had grown up loved, if not misplaced. Her sister and her, sitting with their necks across each other’s back in the humid glory of Tephra under the watchful eye of Magnus. Her sister and her taking to the skies, wings unfurling gloriously underneath the painfully bright sun. It had been carefree and beautiful and easy.

So easy.

But then the skies had turned stormy and she had turned to face it. She had been swallowed by the hurricane, whipped by the winds and battered by the driving rain. She had been drenched in the tsunami—and the worst part, the part that she could never come back from, is the seed of desire it had planted in her. It had turned something pure within her and morphed it into something she did not recognize. It had turned into something she could not understand or name or, more often than not, even confess.

It left her hazel eyes peering into the shadows more times than she cared to admit.

Looking for the ivory sheen of skeletal armor and the coppery tang of blood in the air.

So she finds herself in the dark tonight, near the roar of a river she has never seen. She finds herself exhausted from a flight that pushed her to her physical limit, elegant neck slick from the effort. Her dapples sides heave as she drinks in the autumn air, the silver of the moon washing her with milky light. Her wings are leather and bone, the red dragon of them curled protectively around her  as she tips her head back to look upward. She does not know how she ended up here. She does not know who she is or what she is doing anymore. She cannot dip her fingers into her chest and find a heart that she recognizes. 

She is lost, and she has no idea how to go about finding herself again.

 

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow

@[vulgaris]