[private] I've pulled you in, nowhere to hide now; Elliana

[Reave]

i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high

She sees the world so differently than he. It is there, written into every eddy of her memory. She sees so many as special - far more than she. But she is wrong. It is she who is special. Only she who is able to paint them into beautiful creations despite their host of sins. Just as she crafts him into something far more in her mind, like she has done to those that came before him.

But this time, she had slipped into the wrong canvas. He does not release those he cherishes so easily, and she has too quickly become one of those cherished ones. It’s difficult to say what he could be if she pulled on the wrong strings, but he is certain it would not be beautiful.

He could so easily be a monster.

Yet he cannot keep himself from her. A smarter man would have left, extricating himself from the tangle of her beautiful wants. Reave does not. Instead he tangles himself deeper, snaring irrevocably into the web of her future.

She says nothing of his compliment. Perhaps she knows just as he does what a wanton, desperately terrible idea this is. He hopes she does, at least. It would be all the more thrilling to know she too desires the chaos of this temptation.

The words that fall from her lips say nothing at all, yet he hears everything in them. Sees everything in the shiver that races across her skin. He presses closer, breath warm as he exhales across her skin. He could not draw her into his embrace to offer warmth. The bones protruding from his skin would not allow it. But he knows it is not the cold that makes her shiver anyway.

A faint smile curls briefly across his lips.

“Shall we find somewhere warmer?” he breathes against her skin.

reave

@Elliana

[Elliana]

kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul

S

unlight is everywhere, glittering gold off the bright leaves of the storybook garden they stand within.

They tell themselves she is lonely. That she avoids their eyes because she is shy, cold, torn apart first by the death of her brother then her mother’s depression and madness, then Po vanishing into the world to vanquish gods, and then leaving her friends, her only friends, behind. She is not lonely. She is not sad. Elena’s shadow daughter, Lilliana’s ghostly god-daughter is quiet and reserved because she is thinking, always thinking, those mental cogs turning like the beating of her heart.

There are still times that she feels lost without the guiding hand of her mother on her back, she had always been Elli’s shield, and at some point, some point, her mother became so weak or so very strong that she could not throw her daughter a line for fear that she herself might have been pulled overboard as well.

Silence blooms (like flowers, or the red poppies of blood on white) between them and she itches to fill it. Instead she bites against her tongue, not so sharp to draw blood, but enough to stem any words that buzz like summertime bees as she stares blue eyes up at him.

He is made like a stag and she is made like a bird, a swallow to dip and soar and never really land.

When he touches her, folds tighter into her she instantly regrets it, that offering of her shoulder pressing into his own. Her skin crawls where his fire touches the cool moon-glow of her skin. Elliana thought that perhaps this skin was ready to feel, to know the way it bends under a touch.

But oh how wrong she was.

Elliana is always wrong and this skin and her soul feel like acid in the places where they touch and tangle.

“I think I shall go for a walk,” she says and entirely untangles herself from him with such grace and ease in the same way the sea can slip between any crack, no matter how small. “I find I do my best thinking when there is a chill in the air.” She remarks and turns, finally turns to leave. But even Elliana is not immune to the charms and smile of pretty boys with bones of pearl white and skin like spun gold. “Get yourself somewhere warm, Reave,” she says, but instead of concern in those blue eyes there is only a cool ferocity. “Before you freeze to death out here.”

@Reave elliana speaks

elliana
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