❛in which they grow to love and learn❜
Briar Desilva hated. She hated the Cursebreaker and the High Lord of Spring. She hated her mind and she hated her body. She hated the memories that danced beyond her reach and the past that was and always has b...
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"my own death does not frighten me. but yours? oh, that is my greatest, deepest fear."
❀❀❀
AT THIS SPECIFIC MOMENT in her life, Briar had never experienced anything more exciting than a raindrop race.
Though she shouldn't, and had before been warned against it, she was perched on the top of their only sofa, bare legs folded underneath her and entangled in a mess of blankets, one pink and threadbare and probably from her days as a baby, the other freshly crocheted from blue cotton. Briar only sat atop the sofa because it had the very best view of the living room window; it made her the perfect height to rest her chin on the wooden sill and gave her a vantage point of the whole valley surrounding them. It was also comfy, warm, and had already formed a Briar-shaped indent on the top of its cushions.
Anywhere else in the house would simply not work. It was either not very sit-able or too breezy, or else the view of the window was obstructed by a bookcase or the raindrops were simply too far away to trace with her eyes.
So atop the sofa she sat, chin resting on the dampened sill, legs starting to cramp beneath her, hair spilling down her back in a mess that was surely not even knotted yet from the day's lack of activities. The glass fogged as she exhaled and cleared as she inhaled, and though this had annoyed her before, today it served as a mysterious fog on her racetrack, one that left her whining as her competing raindrops disappeared into the cloudy wisps and then left her grinning or frowning when she came to find which drop had won the Great Race.
Her chosen raindrop was a big fat one, one that she had been watching for sometime now and had just decided was going to be a real big winner. It was surely going to surpass all the little ones and bulldoze the ones that did not move out of its disastrous, winning path.
And then - a finger came over her head and poked the glass, sending little vibrations all the way to the windowsill and that tickled her chin. She could hear the grin in her father's voice. "This one's surely a winner."
When Briar looked up to examine his choice, she was thoroughly disappointed. "That one's tiny, Dad."
"And? So are you," he said, and his finger came down to tickle her neck.
She bat him away and faced him with a ferocious snarl, glaring up at him, at the mischievous grin that peeked its way through his silver-speckled beard. "Tiny! How dare you!"
"Tiny!" He exclaimed back, "All the best ones are tiny!"
That was the stupidest thing she had ever heard. "I've never heard that before. Nobody wants tiny things! That's like picking a tiny little apple to eat instead of a big fat one. That's silly." And so wrapped up in her argument, so wrapped up in convincing him that tiny is never good, that big is, and that that logic was why she was such an excellent raindrop racer and why she had won dozens of matches against him, she did not catch the twitch of his fingers that always meant he was about to pull his stupid tickling trick.
