#╰ ･ JERITZA ✱ ∶ the angel¸ who does not yet speak the language of bodies¸ is afraid.

[venalier]

CODENAME: KNIGHT.

          in the story, there is a knight & a dragon. she’ll never forget it. at first, when she’d picked up that old tattered copy of memory of the hills ( evidence that it had been well-read and well-loved, ha! goes to show everyone that she wasn’t the only person on this good green earth that’d liked the book ), she’d only been meaning to talk to the projectionist about an uncommon shared interest — or what she’d like to assume was an interest. she hadn’t actually had intent to buy it, not with her own copy rescued from the annals of some dusty secondhand store sitting back home.

          in the story, there is a knight and a dragon.

          to know that, and to know the plot like the back of her hand, was one thing. to be looking for said knight, a knight whose face she’d never truly stopped to envision but ( maybe unsurprisingly, for anyone who knew her ) had at some inexplicable point in her tenure with the novella had begun to imagine might look something like herself, was something else completely.

          she pauses for breath beneath a vanilla-lit sky, squinting at the ramshackle walls denoting the start of the nearby village — feels the grass tickling at her ankles, and looks down. and thinks the curvature of this hill, against this sky, against those clouds, that something about it feels like she might’ve been here once.

          she brushes it off as having read that story one too many times; the village had been such a homogenous centerpiece of the novel — in fact, that was the whole point! what so many of its critics failed to understand because they couldn’t look past the lack of a fast-paced plot — of course it would feel familiar to her at this point. in spite of herself and the urgency ( and absurdity ) of this rescue mission, she can’t help but indulge herself in an elated grin here where no one’s looking. her! inside a storybook! oohh, she wishes she could tell mitama about this. you can’t go inside a poem, so she thinks she has one up on her here.

          moment of giddiness satisfied, she sets herself back to work, imagining that she might be on any other mission of a similar nature — a missing person’s case, and the current lead is a knight, known to challenge passersby to tests of strength. thinking of it like this is the only way to keep herself from getting distracted, too caught up in seeing through firsthand the events of the story around her and wondering, briefly, if this is a little like what it must be like to be clairvoyant. and then feeling a little bad, because that seems unfair to the lives of the ones around her, even if most of them are only characters.

          “excuse me!” there, at the foothills before the village, stands the knight, strident in a gentle off-white and red, nobly trimmed in gold. long, pale hair obscures her turned back, but it’s not like there could be anyone else. instinctively, caeldori reaches for her weapon, a smile at the ready. “dame knight, you’re here to test travelers trying to get into town, aren’t you?” the curve of her polearm gleams with the flash of the storybook sun as she spreads her legs shoulder-width apart, steadying herself. “my name’s caeldori, and i’ll accept your challenge.”

      ♡   //    @lualamina

[venalier]

EVEN ODDER PARENTS.

it felt better and better to get away. each year, it seemed, the grounds of the academy closed in further. its walls loomed higher. each year, the strategies she had developed consciously or unconsciously to cope numbered greater, and their efficacy continued to dwindle. it became difficult to keep her mind focused during her morning runs and stretches; she caught it drifting away more and more during drills, classes, study halls, stable duties. work was no longer a comfortable respite, but a heated cage for her troubles, busy hands breeding an even busier mind circling the same paths with no resolution.

so far, she’s found breaking past garreg mach’s borders to be one of the few things that helped, however temporarily. though she suspected that it too would only be so sustainable a solution, for now she took solace wherever she could find it. no mission or errand was too menial — small monster nests, neighboring village repairs, running correspondences? if she could watch those sandy-grey fortifications peel away far beneath her to the drum of belle’s wings and imagine that her thoughts too could become such a miniscule speck shrouded in a panorama of budding greenery, she’d take it.

albeit even in stories, the castle in the sky crumbles eventually.

frowning, she scans the plateaus below and loosens the grip of her thighs as a signal to prepare for landing. “let’s take a break.” the pegasus snorts as though sensing that this isn’t exactly the reason why she wants to stop here, but eases the rhythm of his wingbeats nonetheless. as they descend through the cold mist of the post-dawn air, caeldori catches the movement of something small that’d blended in previously with its surroundings.

someone’s there?

a lone traveler, or a hunter checking his traps in the morning, are her first guesses, but both are dismissed as the colors and pale raiment of the church come more clearly into view. she lands with curiosity, dust swirling about her ankles as she dismounts.

her eyes widen. she’s seen that— face, before; that hair. “... you’re...” they hadn’t belonged to a storybook character? ( it’s harder and harder to be sure now, sometimes, after the recent events. reality is still like a summer storm: too loud and too quickly gone. ) then something moves in his hands, small and dark. “oh, what... is that?”

    ♡   //   @lualamina