DWC - 17 Aug - Day 1 - Ethereal / Calculate
On a quiet afternoon that easily could have been a lazy one, Laeynna was anything but lazy. But then, that had never really been her style. She always had to be doing something. Always had to be doing. If she wasn’t, when she wasn’t, she interpreted it as wasting the time that she had been given. She had not gone through hell and high water to treat that time as nothing.
And today…
Well. It was a pleasing thing to occupy her time with.
She enjoyed studying. In fact, she’d enjoyed coming to study the Light, its intricacies, and all of the profound things that it came with. Just studying it had provoked her to think about so many things in life—and life, in general—in considerably different ways. Of course, she assumed therapy had something to do with that as well. It was all a process.
But this afternoon was not meant for study. At least, not of that kind. With a fond, light smile, she eyed the letter she had received. Although it was addressed to her, there hadn’t been any other distinguishing marks about its exterior. When she opened it, however, she found herself growing pleasantly warm. It had been from her sister. Ankalei had made the kind of request that Laeynna had never imagined receiving from her, of all people. Unfortunately, that had also come with something of a time limit, and Laeynna wondered if her twin had to self-coerce to even get the letter in her direction.
Ankalei wanted something for… unconventional garb. Flowers. In her letter, she included a broken piece of… Well. Laeynna couldn’t readily identify what it was. Glass? Porcelain? Maybe it was both? She suspected it was actually melted down and swirled together. Ankalei had wanted something that would match in colour scheme to that. So after a couple of days ruminating, Laeynna paid a visit to the family estate south of the city and plucked what she felt was a decent amount of inspiration from the garden. Although she’d made mention of it to her father, she hadn’t much lingered beyond that, simply issuing him some reassurance that no, she’d not forgotten she was meant to arrange dinner with him and her mother.
And her other half, which she was still dragging her feet on, knowing very well she didn’t want any of them to spend extended time with one another. But she couldn’t run from that forever either. Andaeros thought he knew what he was in for. Laeynna was certain he didn’t. Sure, maybe an inkling, but he didn’t really know, and she didn’t really want him to know.
Scrunching her nose as she stared down at the project she’d begun, her thoughts forcefully shifted. She could continue to worry about all of that later. Tilting her head, she looked at what she’d sketched out, which was incredibly rough and really only there to provide inspiration and minute guidelines on what she wanted to make. Then her gaze, largely peridot with the smallest flickers of gold, moved over to the actual project on the table, which was… Well. After days of working on it here and there, and trying to keep Rags from playing with flower pieces, she felt like the end result sort of matched what she had.
Taking a step back to eye the full piece, she began to pace from side to side. Through the clever use of flower petals, carefully pieced together, and fed through thin lines of bendable bark, she’d been able to create a billowing effect, which she then layered in full blooms and smaller ones alike, flower heads, fern leaves, and wispy bundles alike. It consisted of flowers of all kinds. She didn’t know what sorts Ankalei liked and she could have asked, but she questioned if her twin even found favour with them. In the end, she suspected her sister might have preferred the skirt was made from things that Laeynna liked.
…Didn’t that make it more special? The very notion warmed the botanist’s heart.
“What are you missing?” she asked aloud to herself and she was nearly certain she’d heard Andaeros grumble from the kitchen. Probably something about how he hadn’t been able to use the table for his coffee since she’d started this whole thing. He’d been an awfully good sport about it. She’d have to do something special for him.
Laeynna paced a few steps more, tipping her head this way and that. She wanted it to be special. Unique. A purely Laeynna creation. And then she lit up. Proverbially. Figuratively. Literally. “Oh, I know…” Approaching the skirts, she admired each individual line where flowers draped. And at the very end of the first one, as if testing out the idea, she rested a fingertip to the bottom petals, infusing them with soft shimmers of Light. A modest ripple of gold gradually spread up each individual petal in nonsensical lines.
Studying the first attempts to the idea circulating about her head, after a moment’s consideration, she nodded. Yes. That was what it needed. The skirt had been done in all shades of blue, as Ankalei had requested, but Laeynna felt that just that small touch of gold was a perfect contrast.
“Okay…” she began as she dropped down to lean in nice and close to the petals and as she knew she had so many other times, she couldn’t resist talking to them. Except they weren’t in a garden and they weren’t growing, which probably meant talking to them was a moot point. It certainly didn’t stop her, however. “So… every time Ankalei moves… I want you to gently light up. My sister is a star. She just simply does not know it.”
That wasn’t how things worked, of course. But she liked believing it anyway.
Once she had finished adding the very same touch of Light across the various hanging pieces of flowers, she rose back up, reaching down to pick up the skirt. Then holding it to her waist, trying to imagine what it was going to look like on her sister, she beamed proudly. Yes. It was perfect. In that perfectly imperfect way that everything in Laeynna’s life was, including herself.
“I did it, I did it~!”
Looking towards the kitchen, she tried not to feed her girlish enthusiasm, though was surely failing to do so. “You can have the table back!” After she cleaned it, of course.
In the days that followed, the very same skirts, all flowers and Light were packaged nice and neat and delivered across the water to a waiting twin of silver hair and blue eyes. Laeynna hoped she’d like it. And that she understood just how much significance there was in its very making.
— @daily-writing-challenge
