05-31-2021, 02:51 AM
este
She does not remember much from the time spent in the dark.
She remembers being too weak to stand most days, and too weak to even open her eyes on others.
She remembers her mother trying to heal her, and how it kept her just barely hanging on, clinging to a promise that the sun would come back soon and she would not have to fight this hard forever.
That first day when the sun finally did breach the darkness felt like someone breathing life directly into her lungs, like someone had injected a shimmering light into her veins. She could not even compare it to being born again, because she had been born into darkness and fragility. No, it felt like being born for the first time, to see the world washed in golden light and to feel the way it seemed to seep beneath her skin and pooled into the core of her.
It took weeks for her to gain enough strength to travel, but once she can, she goes north—searching for the impossibly dense forest her mother said existed.
When she was younger and weak she had nothing to go off except her mother’s stories. She could not see this wide world for herself, and even if she could it only would have been cloaked in darkness, anyway. She asked Ryatah to weave her stories, to paint her a world of color and light, to give her something to dream about besides death and darkness. And she does—telling her of far-off jungles and shores that did not belong to Beqanna, and then the valleys and dales that once did, but now crumbled to dust.
There are galaxies and illusions and other stories of her father, though unbeknown to her most of those are glossed over or watered down, and stories of a chamber with a heart that pulsed beneath it—Ryatah’s own stories of romance, spun to appeal to her daughter’s imagination.
And there was Taiga, too, with trees that grew so tall they blocked out the sun, and shadows that came alive.
Taiga seemed closer than galaxies and lost kingdoms, and armed only with the light she now harbored inside of herself she had followed a path north, walking until the mountainous region of Hyaline shifted into a dense forest.
The trees started out sparsely at first, and Este walked easily through the dappled light that strained through the tops of them. It was only marginally warmer here than it was in Hyaline, but the landscape itself was different enough to keep her captivated. So much so that she did not realize the trees were growing taller and closer together, or that the sunlight from above was starting to dim as it struggled now to penetrate the canopy. Darkness stretches across her now, and while she could have called upon her light she chooses to wait, letting the shadows settle onto her shoulders, wanting to feel what their weight is like when they do not have the power to kill her.
She was an angel of the light once trapped in the dark, and instead of staying away from it she goes back to it, smiling.
When she finds him, it is entirely by accident.
He materializes from the darkness, cloaked in shadow, with the white parts of him glowing like a million stars had chosen to make their home against his skin. She gasps in surprise, her dark brown eyes widening, and without meaning to, she begins to glow—not warm and golden like her mother, but instead a radiant rose-gold that emanates softly from her dove-gray body, illuminating the similarly colored dapples that lay scattered across her shoulders and back.
She is about to leave, to hope that if perhaps she simply tucked her chin and quietly slipped away that he would not follow, when her eyes catch the gold of his own.
The familiarity strikes her so immediately that she is frozen where she stands.
When at last she smiles it is small and shy, her voice a breathy whisper when she says, “It’s you.”
She steps forward, no longer afraid, looking up at him from beneath doe-like lashes and a look of unmistakable wonder on her young face. “I remember you, from that day in Hyaline. There was a storm,” she does not know why she is desperate for him to remember, perhaps because she herself is not so convinced that it had not been another fever dream—a stranger standing over her, but she was far too weak to even say anything to him. She just remembers he was dark with skin that looked like it had been kissed by frost, and with eyes a shade of gold that she had known, even then, there was nothing in the natural world to compare them to.
“I know I was so sick, and you look different now from how I remember you that day but,” she pauses, shaking her silver head with a soft, wispy laugh, “I would recognize your eyes anywhere.”
She remembers being too weak to stand most days, and too weak to even open her eyes on others.
She remembers her mother trying to heal her, and how it kept her just barely hanging on, clinging to a promise that the sun would come back soon and she would not have to fight this hard forever.
That first day when the sun finally did breach the darkness felt like someone breathing life directly into her lungs, like someone had injected a shimmering light into her veins. She could not even compare it to being born again, because she had been born into darkness and fragility. No, it felt like being born for the first time, to see the world washed in golden light and to feel the way it seemed to seep beneath her skin and pooled into the core of her.
It took weeks for her to gain enough strength to travel, but once she can, she goes north—searching for the impossibly dense forest her mother said existed.
When she was younger and weak she had nothing to go off except her mother’s stories. She could not see this wide world for herself, and even if she could it only would have been cloaked in darkness, anyway. She asked Ryatah to weave her stories, to paint her a world of color and light, to give her something to dream about besides death and darkness. And she does—telling her of far-off jungles and shores that did not belong to Beqanna, and then the valleys and dales that once did, but now crumbled to dust.
There are galaxies and illusions and other stories of her father, though unbeknown to her most of those are glossed over or watered down, and stories of a chamber with a heart that pulsed beneath it—Ryatah’s own stories of romance, spun to appeal to her daughter’s imagination.
And there was Taiga, too, with trees that grew so tall they blocked out the sun, and shadows that came alive.
Taiga seemed closer than galaxies and lost kingdoms, and armed only with the light she now harbored inside of herself she had followed a path north, walking until the mountainous region of Hyaline shifted into a dense forest.
The trees started out sparsely at first, and Este walked easily through the dappled light that strained through the tops of them. It was only marginally warmer here than it was in Hyaline, but the landscape itself was different enough to keep her captivated. So much so that she did not realize the trees were growing taller and closer together, or that the sunlight from above was starting to dim as it struggled now to penetrate the canopy. Darkness stretches across her now, and while she could have called upon her light she chooses to wait, letting the shadows settle onto her shoulders, wanting to feel what their weight is like when they do not have the power to kill her.
She was an angel of the light once trapped in the dark, and instead of staying away from it she goes back to it, smiling.
When she finds him, it is entirely by accident.
He materializes from the darkness, cloaked in shadow, with the white parts of him glowing like a million stars had chosen to make their home against his skin. She gasps in surprise, her dark brown eyes widening, and without meaning to, she begins to glow—not warm and golden like her mother, but instead a radiant rose-gold that emanates softly from her dove-gray body, illuminating the similarly colored dapples that lay scattered across her shoulders and back.
She is about to leave, to hope that if perhaps she simply tucked her chin and quietly slipped away that he would not follow, when her eyes catch the gold of his own.
The familiarity strikes her so immediately that she is frozen where she stands.
When at last she smiles it is small and shy, her voice a breathy whisper when she says, “It’s you.”
She steps forward, no longer afraid, looking up at him from beneath doe-like lashes and a look of unmistakable wonder on her young face. “I remember you, from that day in Hyaline. There was a storm,” she does not know why she is desperate for him to remember, perhaps because she herself is not so convinced that it had not been another fever dream—a stranger standing over her, but she was far too weak to even say anything to him. She just remembers he was dark with skin that looked like it had been kissed by frost, and with eyes a shade of gold that she had known, even then, there was nothing in the natural world to compare them to.
“I know I was so sick, and you look different now from how I remember you that day but,” she pauses, shaking her silver head with a soft, wispy laugh, “I would recognize your eyes anywhere.”
BUT WHO COULD STAY?
