Goldrush for Gwynlain?? ๐ โจ
my mind turns your life into folklore
Sometimes, in the hollow silence of the library, Gwyn could still hear Catrin's voice.
As children, they'd never known anything but the walls of Sangravah, the high ivy covered gates that closed the temple off from the rest of Prythian.
There had never been the opportunity to travel, to see much of anything beyond the wooded grounds, and so she and her sister had delighted in stories.
Night after night, they stole away to the temple library, whispering as they poured over tomes of folklore and fable, making up sorties of their own about the supplicants to make offerings to the Mother, about the lands they'd traveled from, what prayers they sought answers to.
But Catrin was gone now, Sangravah nothing more than a shadow of what it was.
And Gwyn? Gwyn had cloistered herself behind a different set of walls, seeking solace, in the unfamiliar places that didn't carry echoes of all she'd lost.
But something had changed when Nesta had come to the library. Gwyn had found sisters of a different sort, and even if there were days when memory felt heavy, at least now she could bear to step outside, to venture beyond the safety of high walls.
The first time she saw Nesta's sister, it felt like that moment when she'd first stepped out of the library, when she'd felt the warmth of the sun on her skin.
She didn't know her at all, past the things Nesta mentioned in passing. She was called Elain, her name like a song, one she ached to sing, to hear echoing high through the temple walls.
She was a baker and a gardener and though she moved more freely through Velaris than Gwyn had yet allowed herself, there was something in the female's expression that led her to wonder whether she, too, understood what it meant to be sheltered, to cocoon herself behind high walls, to keep her dreams secret things lest the world find a way to shatter them too.
