Bonesplinter Ravine who thought she was a nightingale

✹☾❂

 

Again, Eleuthera could not help but notice that there was something about his voice that stood out in her attention — at this point, she had heard him speak enough and pondered it enough to have a clue what was going on. He spoke in a way that was heavy, dripping with meaning — yet unused, creaking back to life before her eyes. For this to even be noticeable to her, she thought, he must have a wicked cold or he must have not used his voice in a long, long time.  Gosh, how long has he been living here? she wondered, her heart and eyes softening like butter.

He explains that he likes the company of death, and Eleuthera wished she didn’t understand — but she did. He had opened her eyes to the possibility that there was more to the afterlife, as well as the other lifes, after. It was eerily similar to ideas she had heard her mother preaching so many years ago, and to hear it now, Olive somehow felt close. She had always had her head up in the clouds with the gods, and Scarab has his in the earth with the dead. In the end, it was all the same. “I understand," she spoke, holding his gaze quite stoically and seriously, 

“completely." 

Eleuthera looked around the ravine they were in, mucky with death and sticking of rot and flies. The only disgust she felt was towards the possibility of contracting any disease, and nothing more. Her proclivity, insensitivity, to death was something she had known since she was a child, after he brother bled out right in front her as an infant. It had fucked her up a little bit; not that she was ever going to tell anyone that. “If you know where your mothers are," she advised carefully. “You should go to them," If both life and death were wonderful, and he and his mothers were currently alive, should they not be enjoying the simple closeness of their kin? Eleuthera would give her own life to embrace Olive or Seabreeze, or Ariel and Séamus, Lily and Oaxaca, even only once more. “…before they are stolen from you too." and, without much else to say, the two bid adieu and Eleuthera found a nearby stream and took a long, long shower.