Crystalline

Trails

He couldn't help but feel nervous as he sat on a chair in a room with a hundred other people, waiting for their plane to be ready to depart.

Every few minutes he'd dart a glance at Lissa: she sat in the chair beside him, her head tilted back, her hair in a long raven braid over her shoulder. There were so many people around. If she changed, there'd be no hiding her, especially since a boy a few rows down was staring openly at her. An inexplicable rage was simmering inside of him, and he didn't quite know what to do with it, so he glared at the boy til he noticed him glaring and looked away, uncomfortable.

Kale? Lissa's words in his head were small and slightly amused.

He turned to her. "Yes?"

Walk with me, she said, standing and taking a step away. She didn't turn to see if he was following. He glanced at his mother and stood when she nodded, lengthening his stride to catch up to Lissa in the throng of people at the airport. All he could think was that this was miles and miles away from how she'd been at the beginning, cowering from him in her cell, needing him to pull her through the door because she didn't seem physically able to take a step out of her prison. Other images flashed through his mind, the helpless followers of his thoughts when he remembered anything to do with her.

Lissa, lying in a bed of glass, her skin reflecting the green of the grass and the sun and sparking light off of the shattered remnants of the bubble they'd put her in. Crouched on the corner of her bed, her back pressed against the wall, eyes wide with fear as her fingers grasped at the thin blankets. Checking that everyone in the car was alright when all he'd asked about was her. Standing in the water, releasing fish into the pond, the bony ridge of her spine showing through the sodden fabric of her shirt. Her slim, shivering body wrapped in the old blanket from the back of his car. The flash of a wet, reflective limb catching his eye. A fish the colour of mercury darting across her collarbones.

He reached out and caught at her arm to slow her down, and her smile as she stopped, looking up at him, banished all of the other images and left him with just one: her looking up at him, hopeful and confused and lovely and very, very breakable but also unbelievably strong.

He remembered, suddenly, a stream of words that trickled from the depths of his mind and into his immediate thoughts, like a string of beads poured from one cup and into another, heedless of any other forces but gravity and momentum. 'Let your heart guide you... but listen closely because it whispers.' He did not remember where he had heard it or read it, but it resonated deeply inside of him. He wondered what the writer had thought when they had written the snatch of a phrase. All it did was make him wonder what words his own heart whispered.

Someone brushed past his shoulder and he realised he hadn't been walking, had just been staring at Lissa. He took her hand and pulled her towards a place he knew she'd like, a place where he also knew there would not be many people. He let go of Lissa's hand with a smile as she drifted into the bookshop with obvious awe, her fingers trailing reverently over the spines of the books she passed. He looked at the empty, dream-filled aisles and was quietly sad about the fact that the written language was slowly becoming a dying one, that soon the feel of old paper crinkling between his fingers and the smell of it, the scent of words on paper, inky black and crisp in the air, would be one that was extinct.

He looked at the books on the shelves and slowly made his way to the poetry before sitting down against the wall, a book in his hands. It felt new, the paper clean and perfect and unwrinkled, marred only by the words on each page. Books had their own beauty, strange as it was. There was something about them that had always appealed to him. He loved the idea of knowledge on pages, of sentences made from words made from 26 letters, scattered in their own lovely mayhem. He loved the idea of a library, wished that he had stayed in one place for long enough to amass his own, swore to himself that he would, one day.