some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
The boy blinks into existence. He arrives to the sound of static, the ripping friction of a world torn open. At the command of the remnant traces of his mother’s magic, the boy presses two worlds against one another.
He did not know it would work when first he pressed the shard of a broken, magical dagger against the edge of one world and pressed, pressed, pressed it through the skin, until it emerged here. She had whispered in his ear, the moonstar girl who arrives beside him, exactly where he should aim. It was a forest, a world so far from their own. He had murmured in response that she should keep that world held tight in the delicate grip of her mind.
Cling to it. He thought, as he pressed that wicked sharp shard in to pierce the world, cling to where you want to go, because I am not sure this will work. But it did and it has. And so here they step, through a ripped-open window, from one world into the next. This is Elliana’s world. It is the one that thrums in her veins and Oh! He does not know whether to look at her or at the world she has wished them to.
His eyes settle upon her. Though he steps down into the woodland floor of this new, strange place, he is watching the girl for whom the realms of death and life thinner than a dragonfly’s wings. This girl who made his mother’s magic answer them. Elliana’s hopes and dreams must be so strong, the song of her blood connected to the earth of this world.
He is grateful they have arrived here, where cathedral trees reach up to new skies and foliage makes a carpet beneath his limbs. Leoniidas’ crown of antlers glimmers darkly gold in this emerald light as the grasses rustle and whisper at the newcomers who came slipping silently from one world into the next with the merest blink of light.
The wildwood boy has still not looked at the sentinel trees that gather around them, but presses his muzzle into the girl’s neck. They are golden earth and blushing moonlight. They are two worlds colliding and his eyes close as he drinks in the smell of her. She is home, home, home. Elliana is all that his magic has stolen from them, the hope her wish brough when it combined with his mother’s time travel to bring them here is like light across water. It is hope.
He swallows and groans like a boy saved, for that is what he is, ‘Gods, you did it.’ His voice is jubilant aching. He does not want to be here, he wants to be home, home, home. But his home is nothing now, maybe, in some ways it is only Elliana, or, maybe, this new wild wood that whispers her curious susurrations.
@[Elliana]