Hushed Willows driftwood: a fairytale

February Theme: Love
@Delight, but no rush! just wanted to get this posted

It had not been so long since Seabreeze has roused from her unconsciousness. It had not been so long since that day that Lily told her of the sea woman’s accident, hurried and out of breath. It had not been so long since her heart raced and mind went sour, looking upon the women who had her entire soul lie crumpled in a heap at the foot of the cliffs — if only Olive had been there, if only she could have warned her wife of the danger allure of the cliffs, perhaps Seabreeze could have been spared such pain. If only…

Alas, the Shakti woman had not been present for that moment, and she was mature enough now to understand that was just the way of things. Olive could no more change destiny than she could the stars in the sky, or the winds that blew; she was subject to the will of the gods as was everything that had ever lived or breathed. Seabreeze had been meant to suffer because from suffering came growth and abundance — Olive had been meant to suffer too, for the very same reasons. These weren’t always happy lessons, and often times felt as though her very essence and being were being torn into two, but Olive thanked the celestial gods for their blessings all the same. It was not their fault that she was merely mortal, and that sometimes even she could not scry their divine words from the pain which they wrought. Sometimes, it didn’t seem fair, but Olive knew that was the small way of looking at things. 

Olive was not a totally skilled nurse. Once, in a past life, she had cut her teeth using Dakarai as her patient — but it was a mode of necessity, a part of her life that she did not wish to revisit. The blood and the emotional anguish that came with nursing was not appealing to the shrouded empath, and when she was around those experiencing physical pain Olive found that she felt it, too. Perhaps such intuitive powers might have been a useful skills for a clinician, but Olive had no desire for it... all the same, she worked to heal Seabreeze with whatever knowledge remained inside her. In the end, perhaps it was not Olive’s nursing skills that had seen Seabreeze through the worst of it. It had been more of an energy thing. 

With Seabreeze having returned to her mostly normal self, Olive felt a little more secure. She returned to her duties of interacting with the pack and mothering Eleuthera, Séamus, Okeanos and the newly-returned Ibis. Delight’s children might always be lost to her, but to Olive, it was not for lack of trying. This, like many other things that threatened to throw Olive off-kilter, she chose not to let bother her.

At the moment, Olive was neither with her convalescent wife nor with her litter of grown children. She was out, looking at a small clearing — a great location for the garden she had never started. Then, she had climbed to the summit of the great rocks [artfully avoiding the place she knew Seabreeze to have fallen from] and gazed upon the sky — full of invisible stars which she had neglected to speak to. Life had just moved so fast since the ordeal of leaving Sunspire and then moving the Sanctuary; had she truly let these parts of her, which were so essential to her very being, fall to the wayside? Either way, the ground now was frozen solid, and they sky full of heavy gray clouds, so these things must wait until spring. For now, Olive was fine to weave through the draping branches of the willows, a white snowfall all its own, and be thankful that all these different lessons happened in a place so beautiful; a place more holy than she could ever hope to be.