Hushed Willows I'm arriving, and it feels like I am home.

✹☾❂

Eleuthera, for one, was very astonished when the word Elysium fell from this stranger’s lips. Her heart leaped in immediate recognition: are you like me? seeking a place that no longer exists, and speaking to ghosts? Someone who understood how when she looked at the Willows, it was not the future she saw, as the Faeries did — she saw the past, and the energy of wolves that once roamed this forest, and was constantly reminded of the sadness of such a significant, earth-shattering loss. As much as it pained her, it’s also what kept her locked in place.

Ibis and Mal had both moved on. Who was this creature, who’s sadness sat adjacent to her own?

Eleuthera stared at the young male with a scrutinizing eye before deciding she didn’t know him, despite her initial happiness at finding a fellow Elysian.“I don’t remember you,” she said, more out of embarrassment than anything accusatory. For a moment, Eleuthera was worried that this was one of Mali — Mal’s — long lost siblings and they would be ultimately offended at her forgetting of him. She was beginning to get the sense that her decorum during her first year, as a cherub, then a seraph, had been less than desirable. She didn’t want to feel worse about it.

“Were you a Seraph?" What she really wanted to ask was: do you remember my mama’s?