☀ @kosmogramm { ASKED. CRYING - what makes them cry? do they cry easily?
elise is an ugly crier, so easily triggered ; every emotion feels too big for her body & usually becomes tears before it can tear screams from her throat / the whole village knows her as an easily bothered child ; they call her wounded animal & when bigger, more bitter children try to capture those tears, she offers them with thrown stones & spit curses / but then elise dreams of anabelle's body dragged away by skeletal hands, the dream becoming truth with thunder marking her skin before she has any chance to understand what it means / the village's children no longer bother her after that : she is free to cry, oh so lonely, the newly born boogeyman of her own town / sent away with a well-meaning noble woman, terror dreamt becomes terror lived. anabelle dies by the end of monsters-men that should have been dead, had a rogue sorcerer not decided to experiment / there is no time for tears, then, only fear / grief sits heavy in the throat but it does not come out. some, it seems, are made to carry rather let go.
the next time she truly, really cries is within the cell she is left with at saint agathe's, dimeritium shackles around her wrists and her hair cut so short she wonders if they haven't digged directly into her skull / blood sliding down the nape of her neck, small cuts that hurt more than any punch to the face / she is bare, naked without hair nor magic, left to rot / there is silence, then, no buzzing electricity, no wonderful power, chaos like a flame blown out. as easily as that, girl no longer dangerous monster, no longer lethal legend. just girl, just child, nothing / and so she cries. she cries & screams & throws herself against the walls of her cell / she asks, what for? what for? and the echo of it comes back, as broken as a little child's begging tune, what for? / the hair she never thought to brush, all tangled, full of leaves, harshly attached into a pony tail, that hair she did not know how to care for. that same hair her mother used to lovingly brush for her, saying, it reminds me of my mother, i am glad you have that of her, that you have that of me. that hair, lost. irreverently cut. a heap of blonde locks on the groud.
she loses herself, then. no longer girl & no longer special / a bruised animal that refuses to be peach & rotten / but crying only feels good in the dark, when there is no one but the gods to hear her delirious anger / she stops weeping the second they are back to witness her weakness / soon, she realizes : they will hate her silence much more than they will abhor the noises they pull from her throat / and so this is what she does : elise becomes walls & silence. her very haunted house, the echo of herself hitting the stones & coming back weakened, each time, until there is no more echo, until there are no more tears, until the pain is a memory swallowed by the walls of her own sorrow. / the salt from her tears shall become a forgotten taste.
it takes months for her to cry again. to really, really cry. she has left saint agathe by then / with the elves, life is slow and meaningful, an adventure that demands patience / the child knows perseverance but does not understand moderation / and there, it is hard to be anything but a foreigner / so they leave her be, alone & away. they give her food and give her space, willing to accept her within their forest for the forest itself has claimed the girl, but unwilling to fit her into their life : elise, forever a stranger / the walls stand still, she gives the elves no name to call her and they demand none / they nickname her dynan, little woman (or wretch, when they murmur it) / malborne wants her to perform miracles but all she does is orchestrate destruction : she breaks their tents & destroys their shrubs / no matter how hard she tries, she never quite manages to do what is right / and so life goes on, difficult, shame a weight that keeps her away from the camp fire at night, when someone gets out a lute and starts singing about quieter times, when there were no humans to worry about & no young thunder maidens amongst their cohort. the laughing is so strong, that time they sing about her coming to eryri, that ishtar simply disappears into the woods for days / the tears do not come from the shame / they stay lodged in her ribcage for as long as she walks. and as the stars sing above her head sing, she hears the warning : the scaled monster shall destroy what ought to be home, hurry child, gwneud hast wedd! / royal wyvern, name that she doesn't know yet but utters with eyes full of the thunder that is her own, in front of a camp full of elves, all wondering why the small human child is floating above the ground, demanding their attention, the wind around her like a crown / and when the elves chase away the creature before it can do any damage, when the children are hidden away, when no blood is spilled and no tents crumbled, the blind priestess comes forth. she signs the human child that has no name, fingers following the scars on her cheeks with praise / ishtar, she calls her. ishtar atta isil ; sorceress from the heavens / named, her hair braided by dilshad's agile fingers, crowned with flowers / she cries, that night, in the flickering shades of the campfire, as they sing of the young mage that saved them from a wyvern the size of the oldest tree of eryri / it is joy that captures her throat, joy that erupts in hiccups / yaereene, the blind priestess, gathers her in her arms ; and in the human child's newly braided hair, away from praying ears, she murmurs : ceádmil addef, ishtar bach. (welcome home, little ishtar)
the times that come after follow the same pattern : there is no crying if she is not safe. the walls must stand between her and the world, her tears a weakness she has never felt she could afford. it is only among family (but they are all dead) or friends (and they are all lost) that she thinks herself able to feel pity for herself. for what she has lost and what she has yet to lose. / more often than not, it is in a place with no human land for miles, where only the howling wind and khairos' soft warmth that she screams and cries and wails. it does not happen often, nor does she feel the need to do so as many times as she used to. / but it still happens. / no longer the child whose body couldn't contain her, and yet still endless. so is her grief, but so is her strength.
the sacrifice of tears happens with the wind to wipe them away, miles away from the ground, with khairos' low rumble to reassure her that grief, as everything else, will fade away.
