She is content in her loneliness, comfortable in the silence that has become her life. She is a constant where all else moves on, statuesque in both beauty and personality, a quiet thing as tough as stone but not entirely resistant to anyone deliberately trying to chip away at her. She is scarred, has endured her brother’s death, her mother’s lies, her father’s inability to truly see her, and yet remains steadfast in her faith that there is good in this world, and that good is all around her, inside her, inside everyone. She is not heartless; she misses her friends, but only wants them to be happy. She has been hurt, and she has found it in her heart to forgive them. She is remarkable in her solidarity, strange in the way she seems so unoriginal, happy in knowing that she holds in her tiny, soft hands everyone's darkest secrets and fondest wishes. She knows everything, and yet tends to completely disregard it for the eccentric, as she has so many times. She knows the stars and the flowers, knows them like her own heart, and the only sadness that has ever lingered there in that heart full of relentless passion for being alive and kind and steady, is because of him.
Po.
Her flower horse.
She loved him, once.
At the same time, he had also been someone else's and she had been too young to realize that the seeds of affection that burrowed deeper every day into her skin, the way she lit up when he smiled and wished every night that he would take her on some grand adventure was not just a longing to know the trees, leaves, and flowers as he did. It was a subtle, quiet longing for him as he was, for his embraces and for him, just once, to tell her that he was so proud of her, that he loved her, that he didn't want to be without her. But this never happened; Po had Thana, and Elliana, despite not understanding Thana and her strangeness, she loved her for that, for making her flower stallion smile the way he did, so she let that love fade into the background of her life, a constant, quiet pulse at the edge of every one of his thoughts, a prayer into her pillow when she went to bed.
Please let him be safe. Please let him be happy. Please let him come home, someday, because mommy and I need him.
Mom, Elena. She has not seen her in so long—
There is a lightness when she she stops worrying about her, that she really shouldn't anymore, a lightness to feel purposes, free. It is wonderful.
The late morning sun bakes the land a healthy green-gold and she smiles at the grasshoppers clicking as they sail through the air. None of this seems uncertain to Elli, doesn't seem as if before, this entire place was a stranger to her.
Aside from the drone of everyday life, the birds and the grasshoppers, the land is quiet. She is the lone stranger in a sea of old friends, fine with being near them but also fine without. She is here to converse; everyone is here to converse. Perhaps contradictory to her lone wolf attitude, Elliana finds pushing past that antisocial nature effortless and turns to a stranger, not the first she sees but the first she wants to talk to in a long time, and smiles such a beautiful smile at him it breaks her heart to know her mother isn't here to see it, that she doesn't know how happy her daughter can be out and away from her. Those bright, bright blue eyes, like a summer sky, are bright jewels set the shadowy gold of her face. She is happy, and she doesn't know why, but she has already decided that he is her friend.
There is still innocence inside her. Elli simply says “Oh, hello,” as if it answers all the questions in the world.
@Elliana