#╰ ･:･ ♡ // thread › ❛ codename: knight.

[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