[private] wanted and wild

[Leoniidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

 

Elliana was gone and oh how her parting ripped this boy in two. A part of him, the piece which had grown to want and need the presence of others around him yearned for them not to part. And yet, the piece of him that has never been tamed, that makes him flinch at the touch of others relaxes his muscles at their distance. It seeks solitude, it years for the wicked, wild wilderness edges that this new world promises him. Ah, it would be so easy, Leoniidas thinks, to fall into the fraying edges of this world, where wildwood boys will slip away into forgotten places. There he will be pulled apart by magicks greater and wilder than his own. 


So he flies, he drifts away from the place where Elliana and he blinked into existence here. He runs across the fly, fleet-footed and free, free, free. But his freedom is a lie. He runs for his guilt is there as chains around his limbs. It weighs down his soul and tears his heart into tatters. Oh to think of it! To think of all the love his magic has erased! His family gone. Apsara who made his heart begin to race, who made him yearn to touch and kiss… she is gone too. They are all gone. 


Except him and Elliana. 


And oh how he touched her to remind himself that she was real and not a dream, a ghost girl here to haunt him as the phantoms once haunted her. Yet she is real and she brought them here.


Down, down, down the boy dips, tumbling out of the sky in gold and brown. He lands amidst the meadow flowers, the wildwood full of the scent of strange, chaotic magic. Ah the feral taste of it upon his tongue is sweet and dangerous. He swallows it down like an elixir and lowers his lips to a flower. The brush of lips across petals is soft and normal. The sea of plants tickle at his knees and abdomen as he folds his wings tight against his muscling sides. 


There is only the sounds of parting grasses, of flowers bending, rustling, bowing. Leoniidas’ tips up his ichor gaze beneath his forelock and settles it upon the newcomer. Do they know how he smells so otherworldly? Do they taste the strange magic of Khiyaal upon his skin as he tastes the strange magic upon theirs? Time trips around them, stumbling over itself as the boy watches, watches, watches and waits.

“Speaking.”

credits


[For a star child <3]

[Roselin]

Roselin knows what it is like to yearn for things gone.

Her mother went missing over a year ago. The Darkness had finally left them but Rose still saw bits and pieces of it in her remaining family. The way her father - Dragon Freyr of the North - kept his portals going (even if he claimed that he didn't know how to close them, Roselin noticed he hadn't tried). Oren - her twin - and his multitude of questions seemed to cease to only one: where was their mother? Her eldest brother had taken the mantle of Guardian but she thought she saw the darkness lingering in his blue eyes, a shade so similar to Lilliana's.

She had finally done it, grown a sunflower for that golden aunt that she had always spoken of. Elena, who lived in a place called Terrastella, amongst a blaze of flowers. Her mother had always looked happiest when she told those stories: days spent dreaming along the banks of Murmuring Rivers, their adventures in a place called Paraiso. Roselin thought that if she could grow those flowers, her mother might smile like that more often.

And after Lilliana had disappeared, those flowers had been the thing that Rose was most certain would bring her home.

But the months continue to pass without a sign. The North grows and thrives. New children (thanks to her brothers Nashua and Yanhua) continue to arrive each spring. Travelers pass through the mystical forest as the reputation seems to grow that it is a place welcome to all. The closed borders become a thing further shrouded in the past and Roselin - born to the generations that came after - can't even recall a time that stranger had been turned away at the Taigan border.

Leilan's daughter decides to venture out of the North, eager to meet one today. To forget her sorrow, at least for a little while.

When she sees him - this boy who is brown and gold (such a familiar shade to Rose) - the young mare has to stifle a giggle. It's a shame, because he looks so content smelling his flower and she would normally hate to disturb such a lovely moment. But there is a shade of white behind him - an Artic Fox that is sitting and watching the winged horse curiously (as if it is a far more curious thing for a horse to have wings than a fox peering at a pegasi). "Excuse me," Roselin finally says, thinking it would be rude to not at least inform him that he was being watched. Companion animals were common to Beqanna.

Perhaps this one was his.

"You have a -" she motions with her dark head towards the little creature that pricks its white ears at both of them and smiles, wondering what to call it.

ROSELIN

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@[Leoniidas] <3

[Leoniidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

 


Though he had vowed to never touch another girl (as Elliana left him and he succumbed to the lonely call of the forest) if he knew how another girl would come with a past that told a tale so similar to his own, he might risk breaking that vow to bury his nose in her neck. His is a past filled with an absent mother and open portals and a twin who seemed not to care about the loss of their parents. Aster was a heather upon a moorland, beautiful, able to withstand the changeable weather, the cold and harsh realities of life. Leoniidas, for all that he is a wild wood boy, feral and so very alive, felt more like a daffodil wilting with the coming spring. 


But the forest boy knows nothing of a past that writes a story of sorrow behind the girl’s lovely, sky-bright eyes. In fact, he does not even know she has come, for he is lost, drowning in the touch of petals across his lips, the scent of flowers blooming sweeter than wine. Only when she speaks does he stir and draw himself from the tangle of wild meadow flowers. Golden eyes tangle with blue; a mirror of the sky above.


The boy’s gaze does not linger on her eyes long. He drinks in the rest of her, skin as mahogany as his, her mane cool with frost where his is hot with gold. Leonidas wonders at the paradox of her body, warm earth skin and chilled with a frost. He has seen dawns like her. 


But she is looking past him, to his back where a smudge of white sits. Startled the boy turns, abashed to have been caught unawares. His nape arches, wary, protective. Ears crumble down to bed within the tangles of his hair. Leoniidas’ eyes grow steady and leonine as they study the fox. She is smiling, the young girl of this world whose eyes, he realises only now as so much like Elliana’s. 


“It is not yours?” Leoniidas murmurs to the girl, surprised when she asks whether it is his. “I have a tiger.” It is a whisper, as small and hush as leaves drifting to the ground in the bronze of autumn. 


Wild flowers reach for the girl, leaves and petals brushing against her legs, tugging at her hair. Slowly the boy lowers his chin as the fox merely watches, “Are you sure it did not come with you?’ And oh how he frowns, wonder creasing his brow as he glances between girl and fox. “I think it is watching you.” Leoniidas whispers small, rough as grasses blowing in spring. “I am Leoniidas.” And it is good, he thinks, to have another to talk to, if just for a moment. 


Already the woods are reaching for him again. Reminding him, warning him of girls and their strange, strange ways.


“Speaking.”

credits


[@Roselin]