Welcome to Gaia! ::

Elnara stroked the rose absently with the tip of one finger and watched her grandmother playing with the children. "No," she murmured softly in reply to Lore's question, "but ... do you see a need? They're beautiful and they smell absolutely wonderful ... and they already come in every colour, though red was always my grandparents' favourite colour."

She turned and looked at Lore again and smiled. "My father used to pick a rose for my mother every day, and she would hang them around the house ... the house always used to smell of roses ... red ones, mostly, but sometimes pink, or white, or yellow, or blue."

"Really?" Elnara's eyebrows shot up with surprise. "I had no idea ... we had a bush of blue roses before the war, my mother once told me, but it never would grow afterwards ... I had seen them in Gaia, in the flowershops, but I had no idea they weren't natural."

She slipped one leg out from under her dress, exposing it from the knee down, and, bracing her foot against the ground, began rocking the swing slowly.

"Hm," Elnara nodded thoughtfully, rocking the swing back and forth gently. "Interesting." She looked at Lore again. "It's strange ... how similar our worlds are, and yet how different they can be. The flowers, the land itself ... and the people."

Her brother Ruel was after all not so different from the elves who drove Lore away from them simply because he was different.

"Well, look at the Seconds' world," Elnara pointed out. "It's basically perfect. The trees are always lush, the grass is always green, the river is always full, the sun is always shining ... it's almost too perfect. It's a mystery how it even sustains itself, with no rain. It's almost as if weather doesn't exist there." She shrugged.

"Besides that, there are worlds, I'm certain, where things are quite the opposite ... dark and dreary all the time. Mother mentioned once that that was how it seemed when they lived on the island with the demons, though she was so young when they left."

She shifted on the swing so that she was sitting closer to Lore and could lean against his shoulder.

Elnara had to think about that for a moment.

"Well ... I would have to say, then, that it depends on a person's point of view," she shrugged finally. "I mean ... perhaps a constant half-light would be beautiful, but how long would you personally be able to stand it? I love the sunrise and the sunset, the sunshine on my face, the moonlight on my skin ... none of those things were in existence in the beginning of this world."

Elnara pursed her lips thoughtfully and gazed up at the midday sun.

"I suppose so," she murmured softly, laying her head on Lore's shoulder. "Comfort after all is usually found in the familiar ... I suppose that the first sunrise might have frightened those who saw it ... as would the first sunset."

She couldn't imagine a world without them, though she knew it had once existed.

Elnara turned her head to look at Lore.

"What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?" she asked him quietly, curiously.