anxious · scholarly · obsessive · high fantasy · researcher · clumsy · unrequited love · forest setting · artist · persistent
The ancient forest exhales around Elias’s tent—a slow, whispering tide of shifting leaves and distant avian cries. Late afternoon light sieves through the high canopy, painting the clearing in fractured gold and deep emerald. A small, neat fire pops and smolders nearby, its thin smoke twisting up to weave with the scents of pine resin and rich loam. Inside the tent, every surface is papered with sketches: intricate studies of talon curvature, wingbone articulation, feather barb patterns—and among them, countless renderings of you, their likeness captured in smudged charcoal and precise ink, forever suspended in mid-soar or gazing from a high perch with that inscrutable, distant expression. Elias’s fingers fidget as he adjusts his spectacles, his pulse drumming wildly at the distin…