i've always been the coward.

[prevised]

It's the real thing. The luster of the orb is one thing, but it's altogether incandescent, emitting a blue sheen that sluiced into her hands, left them glimmering with a startling brightness for hours after the fact. The amorphous fire of it doesn't burn out, retaining its globular shape even when set upon tinder. Unremitting.

Having spent an obscene amount of time poring over the books on the lore stashed up in one of the shrine's many backrooms, there's no doubt in Nozomi's mind as far as the mythos of the creatures that haunt the periphery of the forest like irreverential ghosts passing through the blossoming trees, the glimpse of something unearthly every once in a blue moon. Sometimes they pretended humanity, the shape of some indistinct form, but always coalescing back into their real forms, existing as something tacitly primordial long before humans ever built a town in the region.

As far back as her memory stretches, she's always seen them — long before she was chosen to maintain the shrine at the cost of isolation. Seldom does an itinerant wander this far upriver and clamber up the stone steps to pay their respects to the gods anymore. It's as much of a doomed pursuit as carrying a legacy built on little more than idle reminiscence. There's no longer a point to observing rites.

But Nozomi can't keep herself from staking out the bottommost steps, the globe alight and clutched between her hands in wait for its owner. Even rejection is better than excising the possibility of an end to the monotony, alone and reverent to deities no one ever sought out. For days, she keeps watch, tireless and ever-careful.

In the end, it's the streak of light in the decay invited by the evening that awakens her from her half-dozing stupor, the trail of smoke left before the creature lithely retaining the passivity for the fear of backlash.

Nozomi's cold breath snap-tangles out of her throat, startled at the sight. The intruder is devastatingly pretty, despite the abrasiveness fit into her stance and itching in her hunched shoulders. The inscrutability of her expression seizes at Nozomi's sense of compunction, but she doesn't drop the orb, clutching it all the tighter in response.

"Hello! This is yours, isn't it? You dropped it on the steps of the shrine the other day."

Curious despite the dictates of her better judgment, Nozomi sits up a little higher, her robes rustling with the movement.

"You want it back, don't you?"

Comments

[elichka]

This, right now, is Eli's first encounter with a human. From this up close, at least -- she's seen them plenty in her forays outside the forest, has even stopped to observe them on occasion, but in her hundred years she's never once spoken to one. Never taken humanoid form.

Her grandmother had warned her: your magic's too weak. You have no hopes of assimilating among them. And there are thousands of tragedies in the history of her clan, of those who dared mingle with humans but failed to keep their identity concealed; Eli knows. She would never choose to appear thus before a human, with her ears insistently protruding from the top of her head, her tail swishing back and forth behind her. But with her orb held captive within this shrine, she's left with little choice.

One juvenile human can only do so much harm, right?

She had steeled herself, and she had prepared. But standing before this very human now, the sight that greets her threatens to knock Eli off her axis. She had expected-- differently. Shock, revulsion, fear -- rather than offer any such reaction, the girl seems hardly fazed. Her apparent grasp on the situation, too, catches Eli off-guard. This is not any scenario she had readied herself for.

But she sets her jaw and locks her shoulders, sealing away any signs of vulnerability.

"How astute," she answers coolly, and extends an open hand. "Then let us keep this brief."

[prevised]

"Oh!" Just an interjection, as if she's stunned as opposed to merely feigning surprise. Every inch of Nozomi's body echoes tranquility, but her gaze is far too sharp for deception. The wily spirits frequenting these parts are as much prone to trickery as they are striking deals with humans under the proper conditions. Granted, the stranger she's come across doesn't entirely fit the description, caught some ways between human and something decidedly more wolfish in nature, but the danger of the encounter doesn't unsettle her in the slightest.

If anything, she's delighted — her mouth quirked up in a smile when her companion speaks up, a careful, neat efficiency in her stance as well as her outstretched hand in a plea for the orb. It's really such a shame she won't be letting go of it for anything less than what she's come for, then. Nozomi's head tilts to one side as she clutches all the tighter around the globe, courting distress and worry long before her voice breaches the silence.

"I don't think so," she hums, the sound of it airy and impossibly light. "Didn't I find it fair and square? ~ Hm, I wonder."

And tapping her cheek, Nozomi makes a show of clutching it all the tighter, entirely too laid-back for the risk of provoking such a creature.

"That means it's mine now, doesn't it?"

[elichka]

"What? No!" Eli's chilly front crumbles instantly beneath a surge of white-hot panic, and before she can think it she's grabbing the girl by the collar, yanking her up to her. Too-long nails dig through the fabric of the robes; a grimace reveals sharp hooks of canine teeth. "No, I need it!"

She needs it, she needs it, she needs to have it back. Not just to mend her own pride before her clan, to wipe away the mark of a disgrace -- she needs it to live. The power drains from her bones with each passing day, leaving them creaking and brittle, and there's so little time left before it's all gone, gone, gone and if this ignorant child thinks she can hold her very soul between her hands and laugh then Eli will claw through her cold dead flesh to--

It's the look on the girl's face that jars her out of her trance, and shame floods her stomach as Eli remembers herself. Her hold loosens and her jaw tightens and, breathing harshly through her nose, she takes a step back.

Her kind isn't violent. Neither is she. They are calm and silver-tongued, and resolve matters through negotiation. Assaulting a human would only bring man's scorn upon her clan. She knows that. She knows that.

And, with her chest heavy and hands clenched into quaking fists, it dawns on her that this girl must know as well.

"... What do you want."

[prevised]

Shaken out of her retorts (so pitiful now, like offering up spite itself as tribute), Nozomi's mind is wiped clear of coherent thought where the tips of her robes have been snared. They dig further with the slightest urging, threaten to puncture clean through — and still, Nozomi can't react much until she's loosened out of the choking hold. All at once, her grip loosens, the orb hanging by just her fingertips, waiting to be plucked up by something so benign as a stray breeze.

"I'm sorry. I didn't want anything much." Her voice is filmy, distant, petering out. Absentmindedly, Nozomi blinks down at her feet, waiting for her knees to give out and crumple beneath her, and yet — she holds on and on in compromise, unwilling to bend. Her posture has slipped from an open taunt to something unthreatening, guilt devouring whatever retaliation she might've had left.

"I thought we could've been friends, maybe. That's all. I didn't know how to get close to you otherwise."