[private] never let me go

[crania]

The first thing her mother said was this: the world is waiting.
So the first promise the tree-daughter ever made was this: she would not keep it waiting long.

It had taken only days for her to understand what it meant to want to swallow the world whole. (Was she wrong to think that the world could belong to her, though? Children are fools, certainly, but was it so outlandish to think that she could not take a piece from every part of it and make it her own? Perhaps the nymphs are the greatest fools of us all.)

And it had taken only weeks for her to strike out on her own. (Almost certainly bolstered by her mother’s magic because a journey to the Playground from Tephra is too great a journey for a child of only a few weeks.) But she goes and she does not stop to consider consequences. She goes and she does not tire. She goes and she thinks this is what it means to swallow the world whole. 

She arrives at the Playground and she thinks herself a faerie, light-hearted and gleaming in the sunlight. Such rapturous laughter as she dips her nose to kiss each flower, faces upturned. (Too young to know that it is her they turn their faces up to, not the sun. She is their sun, this stark white child in the middle of all this green. She does not yet know that she is magic.)

i cannot frown underneath
fractured moonlight on the sea

crania