11-01-2021, 02:28 AM
I L I A N A
She shakes her head, brushing off her sister’s compliment with a slight roll of her rose-gold eyes, and she sighs and says with a smile. “If you insist, I suppose I won’t argue with you anymore.” She didn’t necessarily believe her, but she also knew Baptiste wasn’t going to weaken her stance on the subject. If she had any idea how her sister thought of herself, though, she would not have been so quick to yield; the idea that Baptiste could not see herself as anything but the radiant and exemplary creature that she is was not something Iliana would have been willing to drop.
She thinks that sometimes she sees a shadow cross her sister’s eyes, but it is always so fleeting that she decides she had imagined it.
She thinks that sometimes she detects the traces of some kind of sorrow when she laughs, but she doesn’t see how that could be, and she brushes it off.
Because her smiles and her laughs are always too genuine, too pure, for there to be anything lurking beneath the surface, and Iliana was just foolish enough to think that being a twin had linked her heart to her sister’s in such a way that surely she would notice if she was unsettled by anything at all.
“Turns to stone?” she repeats, her eyes widening a little before she frowns. “I don’t think I could. I like the sun. And not being stone,” she finishes with a small laugh, and then she thinks of Vital, the boy that she had met in Hyaline. “I met someone interesting, too. He can shift into some sort of firebird? I’ve never seen that kind of bird before, so I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s pretty.”
She thinks that sometimes she sees a shadow cross her sister’s eyes, but it is always so fleeting that she decides she had imagined it.
She thinks that sometimes she detects the traces of some kind of sorrow when she laughs, but she doesn’t see how that could be, and she brushes it off.
Because her smiles and her laughs are always too genuine, too pure, for there to be anything lurking beneath the surface, and Iliana was just foolish enough to think that being a twin had linked her heart to her sister’s in such a way that surely she would notice if she was unsettled by anything at all.
“Turns to stone?” she repeats, her eyes widening a little before she frowns. “I don’t think I could. I like the sun. And not being stone,” she finishes with a small laugh, and then she thinks of Vital, the boy that she had met in Hyaline. “I met someone interesting, too. He can shift into some sort of firebird? I’ve never seen that kind of bird before, so I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s pretty.”
-- the shadow is mine, and so is the valley
@baptiste