Hushed Willows the morning will come soon.

Finally, Ibis had relented and invited her to take a glimpse of the treasure. Eleuthera was delighted; this was a tactic that had worked for her often before, the idea of being annoyingly persistent until you got what you want, and here it worked yet again! If Eleuthera hadn’t known better, she might have smiled at what she didn’t realize was quite a childish manner of manipulation… but to her, right now, it was simply the matter of getting whatever it was that she desired at the moment and nothing more — and hey, look, it worked.

Eleuthera sidled on closer to her sister, eager to see what secrets she held in the crux of her arms. She had always been a curious soul, which was clear in the way she craned her neck to scry a better peek — but at Ibis unfurled her protective barrier and offered up the object for inspection, the lilac girl pulled her head back and wrinkled her nose in repugnance.

She rolled her tongue against the roof of her mouth, almost as if she could taste the rot in the air, although it had clearly been a long time since the creature died and all the flesh had since been stripped away. “Oh, ew, Ibis. Throw it away,” the girl moaned her commanded. She knew exactly what this small thing was — for a girl so young, Eleuthera has had several encounters with death of the bloodiest kind, and as a way to heal her nursemaid mothers educated her about the inner-workings of living creatures. Bodies were just bodies after all, and souls were eternal, right? 

— bit this thing, it was clearly a skull, and much too familiar for comfort. The way the empty sockets glared unblinkingly up at the sky — the crack of the skull and the flaking of the bone — the small, lipless grin — it looked like a thing from her nightmares, and it instinctively turned her stomach and make her hackles stand on end. Eleuthera turned up her nose at Ibis and this disdainful thing. Just wait till their mommas heard… 

“You got so dirty just for that thing?” Eleuthera suggested dismissively. “C’mon, let’s go take a bath.” Assuming that Ibis would simply follow, the lilac sprite rose and walked a few paces away. Her sister was certainly weird, and the least Eleuthera could for her was clean her fur and  primp her and make her look pretty again. It was a kindness, really.