There was no need for the lights to lead her to their destined place, but it had since become routine, almost expected of them, to keep her on the path and not wander off into the forest. She knew this area by heart, as familiar to her as she was comfortable with her own body and the changes the blight had brought upon her. She let them be and continued on her way. That would be something he could add to his tower of notebooks he had in his bedroom, a little factoid she discovered all on her own, and without any of that scientific malarkey that took ages just to prove something in a minute.
She would have to tell Laphi this, when she got back. Who would help guide her way through the woods if they did? Only good people with good souls could embody these creatures.
Tonight, they were both fireflies and butterflies, in the shape of their raiment at their core rather than the real thing, soft and ephemeral, and not a hint of darkness within them. Some nights, they looked like butterflies. She content herself with staring at it and moving her head with it as it went to pass her out of sight. One of the wisps drifted by her face, and Velvet almost gave into the temptation to reach out and touch it. That was the part where he would shrug and gesture to the book he would be holding with his open hands. Pieces of their souls and what they embodied in life, he would go on to say, but there were similar such phrases he would read aloud to her in whatever textbook was lying around (and what few he could get his hands on, whether it came from Arthur or from Velvet herself, what little money she could scrape together that did not go toward medicine and visits from the doctors).Īnd would they still be the same if they’re still alive? she would ask. Laphi told her about these once, how in some books they were claimed to be echoes the spirits of the dead left behind when they departed the mortal realm. Still, she looked upon them, and soon the word came to her: will-o’-the-wisps. This was as close as she had ever gotten to them without pain, without the sensation of emptiness filling into the hollows scoured into her by blight and would ever be close to for as long as she remained. Velvet eased back a step, giving them their space. The lights did another lap around, coming toward the front. It reminded her of the hearth back home, of the kettle drum out in the garden by the tool shed, when she was able to get the sparks going on the logs on cool nights such as these. Or, at least, it did hurt so much that it was no longer an incentive to do so. Such meager silver light, enough to illuminate her face and the cone of their small bodies, would be enough to bring her to her knees and fall apart, coil by coil, until it seemed as though nothing would remain unless she moved away, back into the shadows where she belonged. They were easier on the eyes now earlier on, she could not so much as look at them dead on without feeling their fire sear into her mind and set her flesh near to cracking and peeling.
Velvet snorted laughter, let her hand fall back to her side, and allowed the moment to stretch on a little longer.
#TALES OF BERSERIA ELEANOR PRAETOR COSTUME FULL#
Turned with it as it made a circuit and looped back round her, and when she completed the full circle she came face to face with two more lights sticking together and buoying toward her. Velvet stopped herself just as she was about to touch it and drew back-slowly, as not to startle it, and took a moment to watch it go past her, lazy and bumbling and carefree. She saw the floating lights first before the light out in the darkness, calling to her like a lighthouse beacon signing for the wayward ship to come home, and raised a hand when one of them came close to her.
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