Word Count →408
Though she drew with discipline, she was not deaf to the world around her and the start of someone's unusual singing voice caught her attention as it would have anyone. Talitha paused only a moment, crimson gaze raising to peer into the world around her; finding nothing, as she expected, she simply returned to her graphite sketch of the dead woods. It didn't matter that the sound grew louder, closer, or that she caught a new scent on the air. It didn't matter that she saw movement in her peripheral. Talitha half expected it to be her imagination — in a place that reeked of the dead, even if only metaphorical dead, the mind was susceptible to many a trick.
It was a voice that made her realize the reality of the presence. Complimentary as it was, it only served to surprise her. Her eyes shifted from the filled, worn pages of the symbol-infested diary to the face of the stranger at her side. Golden eyes, golden eyes, golden eyes. Always, her gaze met golden eyes it seemed, even in the unholy place of the forest. Having only truly seen her uncle for brief moments during his life within the borders of Inferni, the falu-masked face didn't register as family — that didn't matter, of course, for he was a coyote and therefore possibly kindred.
Without hesitation, she turned the scribbled-and-sketched page to show the vast expanse of the ashed lands to this strange new companion. "I wasn't writing." The fact that she couldn't write, at least not in the legible sense of the word, impacted the situation — this, along with the simple oddity that a perceived stranger would simply approach her in the middle of nowhere, crafted easily read frustrated intrigue in her mother's red, red gaze. What a flaw in her design, that she would be such an open book, and she chose to hide it in the moment by looking to the man's guitar. Her own, a battered and weather-worn instrument, was missing strings and sat, collecting dust, in her stone-walled den.
"I'm not really a tulip, more like a weed — you play well." She ran through her words without hesitation, the sentence itself fading as quickly as it was spoken. Such negativity wasn't uncommon in the de le Poer woman, though she found lately that positive ideas about herself had risen to the surface. Why they didn't come out of her head was beyond her.
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