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i've always been the coward.
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?"
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?"
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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."
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