I’ve been turning this idea around in my head for a little while, and I finally was able to actually write it! It’s pretty short, but I like it nonetheless.
Featuring @justanartsysideblog ‘s Melarue, because all my best ideas seem to include their characters?? #notcomplaining.
Tagging @feynites because... Melarue.
Solemnity has known Cunning for a long time.
They are one of the first few spirits they meet, after being ushered into creation by a very lonely man, Necessity giving Solemnity it’s nature and name.
The encounter is brief; What would a spirit like Cunning want with a passive creature like Solemnity? But it parts with advice, advice that Solemnity remembers for a very long time.
“Stay in the dreaming,” They had warned, a quality to their town that the young spirit had been unable to process, at first.
“Stay in the dreaming, where you may yet survive.”
And they do. Solemnity spends a long time in the timeless dreaming. Learning, exploring, and existing. Where they meet spirits of both similar natures, and those who are almost unbelievably different.
And it reflects. Reflects on what is has learned, who it has met, where it has been.
That is after all, it’s nature.
And then Cunning takes a body, and Solemnity ponders.
Thinks of the advice they had given, so long ago. Contemplates why, if they had been so against Solemnity leaving the dreaming, all that time ago.
Solemnity wonders, and wanders.
The anomaly becomes the centre of their introspections, until spirits of Inquiry and Curiosity begin to curl around them, and Solemnity fears they are losing their nature.
They draw away from such thoughts, but they do not forget.
They do not forget, when death sweeps across the dreaming and Knowledge whispers, “The Nameless,” Its form quiet and almost remorseful, “Enemies of Arlathan.”
They do not forget, when they see Arlathan for the first time, and can only remember the impressions of the blood-soaked fields outside of the sparkling city.
They do not forget, when one of the elvhen leaders looks for spirits to fill bodies, and Solemnity takes the place of the young Nobility, who has only just been born and is still so very fragile.
She remembers, when she is no longer Solemnity. When she is Elaera, instead.
She remembers, when she is naught but sixty years into this new body, and being ushered into the pleasure district to meet who will soon be her manager.
And Elaera recognises them the moment she sees them, because they are Cunning, but.. not. The same way she is Solemnity, but not truly- not anymore.
Then they are alone, and for all her time spent wondering, and contemplating, and thinking, Elaera does not know what to say. Has never been good at voicing the circling thoughts always spiralling in her mind.
Cannot fathom how she will ever succeed in a profession that requires such verbal skill.
Melarue gives her a look then, a look that she will not really comprehend until later in the night, before gesturing beyond themselves.
“Come,” They say, and the moment is passed between them, so quick Elaera is not sure if she has not simply imagined it all, “Let’s see you settled in, yes?”
It is not until later, when she is lying in her little room on her little bed, with sleep mocking in its ability to avoid her, that she thinks she understands.
