05-31-2021, 10:50 AM
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.
Elliana looks to him and her eyes are ice. They set jackfrost seeping across his body. It begins at his antlers where he gaze rests (not upon his face which, he thinks, is both blessing and curse). From his golden tines the frost of her seeps down to the crown of his head and across his cheeks. The chill of her races down his spine, chasing a shiver that rocks the bones of him.
Leoniidas trembles and vows to himself, to whatever gods haunt this new world, that he is off girls. That downward bow of his lips, rife with grief and sorrow grows deeper. Oh, if his emotions were a sea he would be drowning, sinking like a stone. Can she see how he drowns, as he turns his phoenix-bright gaze to hers and dares to freeze at the touch of her eyes upon his. Her coldness reaches in through his eyes, down, down, down into his soul. Leoniidas would be a statue before her, a boy frozen forever at the whim of a girl.
And that is the mistake he makes. Leoniidas is still a boy discovering girls. He has witnessed their complexity, their strangeness, their utter unfamiliarity. They could be aliens to him for how confusing and complex he finds them.
Yet he yearns. Oh gods how he yearns. The fae-boy thinks of Aspara, how her beauty stole the breath from his lungs. The want to touch her slayed him. He thinks of the pain of not touching her and now, how she is lost anyway. The soft warmth of her skin is a ghost now. Aspara is resigned to exist only in his garden of lost memories, pressed with his family into a bed of flowers he will forget to weed. The memory of them will be choked from him. Leoniidas fears it and longs for it.
Elliana talks to him of family and so much he can understand. He thinks of the uncle he snarled at, never recognising him, he thinks of the father and mother he has not seen since his birth. He thinks of his sister, as fleeting in his life as an eclipse in the sky. No, Leoniidas did not know his family either, but to have been drawn out of his solitude, into the arms of friends and family, only to lose them again…
“It is easier not have family at all,” The wildwood boy murmurs, agreeing, if just for a moment.
But then she speaks of magic, of the chaotic time control that flows potent and lethal through his veins. “I would bleed myself dry if it meant being rid of it,” low, low like a lupine snarl the lie rips forth, as if snagging upon too-sharp teeth. Leoniidas knows it is not that easy. He knows that time magic is not merely in his blood. It binds the pieces of him together - soul and skin and heart and mind. Time is all he is, a gift passed down from his mother. There is no dissection that will see him separated from it.
She departs him and he watches her go. Feels the silence of the woodland reach in to cocoon him. He surrenders to it, to the lovely darkness of the deep woods.
We will meet again Elliana said. The words form a litany across his skin. They seep into his blood and beat in time with his heart. He will not separate himself from the truth of her parting words. Yet he wonders, when they do, if he will be anything like the boy he is now. Or if his sea of grief will be swallowed down by the wilds of this new world and he will be irrevocably changed. No longer a boy trying to understand others, but something wilder, more feral, more alone. He yearns for the latter, he feels the need for it deep, deep within his soul.
The trees whisper at his back and Leoniidas turns to them, leaping into their shadows, no longer a winged boy of time, but a stag that knows only the song of the woods, the vitality of solitude.
@[Elliana] fin <3