Northstar Vale i miss you in the dawn & most of all, your fingerprints, everywhere (mtr.)

@Mahler!

She is without thought: mind split by spires, inviting myriad of color come to ease into the belly of the sky.

Hide of shadowed snow cloaked in thin sheets of summertide mists, the altarless dryad returns to her willow-weeping haunt; it is not long, not at all, before their verdant tips caress her cheek, throat; linger at the dimpling seated between narrow hips. It is not long, not at all, before she cleaves her way through the pondwaters with a heady hum, from ankle to shoulder; breast to chin; mind as adrift and as fathomless as the waters which take her insipidly in arms and shepherd her beneath.

Like a babe in a womb the silver again lingers for as long as she dares; claws anchoring deep into mire; pressing against the navel tethers of pads and their bursting, wilting lilies; caging breath within lungs that soon  (too soon!)  quiver for the airs above. Here, in the dim and shifting lull, she is breathless, heartless, sightless.

Here, the shadow of gothorauk remains unheard.

Still—returning above she has a qualm with that seems more irritance than anything; and when she does, it seems she is more provoked to snip at the cascading rush of pond down crown and shoulder, made like oil by the indecisive and balming day. And because of this, upon one of the many shelves of rock does the naiad drape herself; forever gaunt, the heft that an uncharted ancestry had condemned her to be without. ... But Aurëwen prays it is not too arrogant to believe her figure is lissome, at least; or too concieted to be timidly spirited that at least one eye still gleams.

So, she lies, draped and dozing, flushed beneath the summer's warmth; not, for once, wilting.