"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Time aches where he stands. And Leoniidas aches with it. Oh his magic and his grief grapple, there, in his soul. Outside of his body the air trembles with magic. But this fae-boy was born when time stood still. At his beginning the boy knew nothing but silence and stillness. Time had run dry like a river. It ceased to exist as all fell as still as a painting. Now he is the one as still as stone, whilst the world around him plays out its fate.
Upon the edge of the rocky outcrop he stands, cradled deep, deep in the dark of the woodland. The shadows of reaching trees mute the brilliant gold of him. He turns dark, dark, dark. His skin akin to the bark upon the trees, his gilded feathers and brace of antlers little more than the mellow glow of a wilting tulip. But he does not care how the darkness steals his brilliance. Neither does the boy care how the darkness turns him from a stag of the wood to an eagle perched upon a cliff’s edge, waiting, watching.
Leoniidas listens. He hears the whispering of the wood and his angled head tilts. Golden eyes flit to a space between the trees where another horse roams, out of sight yet heard as loudly as a tolling bell. The forest lets no one creep unheard, not when she lays her traps of dry twigs and crisp leaves. Time slips against his skin, begging, begging, but it cannot decide for what - to stop or to run and run and run. The air turns sweet with the tang of blooming magic. Flowers bloom open all across the forest floor below his perch, all the woodland groans with life as it blooms and grows about the feral boy.
As the stranger steps out into the clearing (where the grasses now reach long and tall and flowers gaze with open faces up to the forest sky) Leoniidas rises from his grouch. As he goes he seems to shed the vestiges of childhood, the sharper, stronger lines of adulthood accenting along the line of his jaw and flare of his shoulders. The fae-boy says nothing, but stands and drinks in every line and curve and inch of the stranger below, limning them in the gold of his bright eyes.
05-31-2021, 11:02 AM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2021, 11:18 AM by Shipka.)
Shipka doesn't often come to the Forest, she's a creature made for open skies full of stars, full of black velvet dreams, and her lack of finesse as she picks her way through the sun-dusted trail makes no secret of that inexperience. Her hooves find every stick and stone lying across her path, the traitorous things, and she think that she would never have survived the long night, robbed of everything and too stupid to pick the quiet roads, too foolish to keep herself safe. There is a place on her shoulder where the skin ripples under glossy fur, puckered like a burn that melted flesh but left the hair undamaged, and it twitches with the knowledge that she would never have survived because she had already nearly died.
Three times. Three times Ten had saved her that day, and for it, she lost a year - was it longer? There's nobody to ask, there's no way to tell them that the terror from which they carved their meager survival day after dark day was barely more than a blink for her, that her death had been rapture until Ten tore her away from it, and that even the terrible wanting that ripped her soul apart had been washed away like a nightmare cleansed by the sun. No, nobody came from the eclipse wishing to hear Shipka's tale, and nothing but time can heal the white-rimmed trauma she sees in the tight lines of their faces, the hint of rib against their skin, the dull, scarred coats, so she loses herself in the places many still avoid. The shadowed, close places, with only her dreams for companionship.
Recently, her dreams have been full of that half-remembered wanting, full of strange and indistinct desires that make her blood run like fire and she wakes sweating, heart racing and wild. Ten had sucked the poison from her body's wounds, but souls are such tricky things.
Her thoughts run halfway between the nearly-forgotten dream of the laughing beast absorbing her into itself, filling her belly with longing (the sweat is still drying on her skin,) and irritation with her inability to find an easier path when the tight deer trail opens suddenly into a golden and plainly occupied clearing. Grey eyes lift, startled, from the ground to the stern face studying her own. He says nothing and she aches to bleed into that silence, to fill it with a thousand words, but Time has changed her like it's changed everyone. All she can do is wonder what he has suffered while she was falling in love and it dries up the well of her eagerness.
"Oh," she says, choking back questions with gritted teeth, and then, by way of apology, "I've disturbed you."
