05-28-2021, 12:21 PM
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.
You cower, Elliana observes and his chin dips into his breast.
“I do not like being touched.” Leoniidas murmurs, his ears tumbling like fallen spires to his skull. They drown in the thick tangles of his windswept, magic-tugged mane. It has always been that he shies from the touch of others. He has always been too untamed, an untried colt for whom touch can seem dangerous, controlling.
..And yet lovely too. He knows it can be such terrible intoxication, it can leave him yearning to touch and be touched. But there was only ever one and oh how his love was unrequited. He ached for her even as she drove him to distraction. A shiver slips through his body, rocking through the curve of his spine. A chasm of guilt and loss breaks open within him and steals the breath from his lungs. Maybe he would have dared touch her, kiss her, if he knew what his magic was destined to do.
The boy does not fear magic nor monsters. Not when his blood is filled the ichor of a god and the mortal blood of a girl so in control of time she had become immortal with her eternal lives existing in unison. This place… could it be any wilder, any more dangerous than Novus or Khiyaal? Novus where cities choked him and Khiyaal where magic was ancient and wicked, they are each dangerous with monsters clawing at his mahogany skin.
She steps away from him, the warm satin of her cheek replaced by the cool of the wind. His lungs tremble and exhale, relieved (and lost). He limns Elliana in gold as he turns his head away from the lovely dark of the siren wood to hold her in his sunbright eyes. Light catches across her hips, the slim curve of her spine, the delicate arch of her neck - he has noticed, of course he has, that she is no longer the child who gazed up at him from amidst the tulips. Though their colours no longer reflect upon the pale canvas of her skin, she still summons light to lie in myriad hues across her body. He watches them now as she moves, They paint dapples across her; Elliana looks at home here.
It is easy to shy from her beauty when grief is a lance within his soul. It is easy to forget the way she felt against him when his heart still stutters over itself for a girl he wishes he had had the courage to kiss before his magic stole her away. Ah, he closes his eyes and looks away, the shadows of his frown turn his golden eyes into molten metal, heated with broiling emotions. Leoniidas tries to be as he always has, aloof, detached, destined to be alone. If he has lost his whole family, Maeve and Aspara, what will stop him losing another? It is safer, he thinks, to shackle his heart up, guard it with thorns that will prick him or any who dare touch it.
Elliana talks of her family here, “Find them.” He says, his voice as dark and tumultuous as a salt-slick wave. That wave is grief, drowning him, he does not wish for it to drown her too. Find them he implores her. “And do not let them go.” Oh the fae boy’s eyes are dark, his lips a wounded, black gash across his face. Sorrow softens the line of them like worried flesh. In this moment he is more than a boy traversing the trials of manhood, now he is a boy forced to become a man, forced to carry the world upon his shoulders. Leoniidas has become as cursed as Atlas.
She returns to him, of course she does. The air grows hotter, his skin prickling with her proximity. Into his hair Elli twines a purple bruised flower. Purple like Twilight. Purple like the flowers that adorned his mother’s hair. Now he flinches as if branded. Now he skitters from her with eyes wide, wide, wide. Here is a boy who challenged a dinosaur, who slept amidst the howls of wolves and the shadows of dragons. Yet he flinches at the touch of a girl.
“Stop.” He tells her firmly, his voice the crack of felled trees. His heart splinters. He might have said more. The words are there, a bitter dismissal upon his tongue. Go. Leoniidas wants to tell her. Why do you stay with me?
But she steals the moment with a memory of their first meeting, of his keen desire then: to find some strange magic. “Don’t you think we have had enough of strange magic?” He asks, suddenly a boy again.
@[Elliana] <3