ADAGIO IN HALLOWED HYMNS --

[notch]

--- she thought of herself now a sprite with defined surety. Who else could traipse across the East from dusk until dawn without notice? Who else could slip in and out of the shadows (shifting as they shift, bending with their bends, like smoke, like mist, like nothingness) without a trace? It was a skill unparalleled, sharpened to a fine and jagged point by the hands of time and, she supposed with the true airiness of an afterthought, desperation. She did not belong here, but the East, in its wild, unfurling, entirety (every shadow and smoke plume and veil of mist included) had in fact become something she had never known or thought to know.

Home.

In her seclusion (or self-exile, however one would select to view it) she had grown even more faint. She knew the East, had covered every square inch of ground within its vast borders, and somehow, throughout every excursion, never been acknowledged by the living. With one exception, of course, but that was so many moons ago now, and his face, that dark and towering spire, was committed to memory if only long enough to become a dream. His wild baby blues she found in the raging seas, a great black hole staring at her while she soared across the sky. His breath spilled down her spine in small cold bursts when she ghosted through the rain. He was as real only as she could imagine him, but even that was not enough to make her feel tangible. He shared no connection to her. He had given her a smile, and smiles do not last. Like the wind, he blew away, and took his memory with him.

And so she came to know the East intimately, a damsel lost to the infinity of springs and wild copse, and then a damsel not at all, for she was the East. She knew it just as she knew the path through the marsh. She tread it now, mud and grime up to her ankles, heavily draped in the brilliant red tangles of her hair. The afternoon was a sepia-toned delusion and she was the phantom in red, her windblown tresses like fire at her back; those deep, relentlessly blue eyes eerie in their cast against the ivory of her skin. She hung there, stilled it would seem, as she peered into the wild depths of her humble abode, expressionless, untamed in her feral beauty. Something had caught her eye and she followed it with dangerous precision, and considered momentarily taking flight -- but instead, there she remained, anchored to her swamp by the whites of her teeth.

open thread! character is winona.