[private] I've touched heaven and returned howling

[Leoniidas]

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

 


In another world Leoniidas is the Prince of Dusk, but he looks far from it as he steps out of the trees and into the gloaming. The sky is a bruise of pinks and purples. Stars burst out from wind-tugged clouds (dark as smears). And the moon begins to bleed her silver blood into the river that runs its weaving path along the valley floor. Despite his gilded crown of antlers, and his wings of sunlight down, the orphan boy is nothing more than feral. There is no trace of the foreign royal blood that runs through his body. How can one ever think he was made of royal things when nature has etched herself across his body so thoroughly? His skin is the dark of the sentinel trees, his hair tangled with roots and burrs, leaves and vines. About his antlers are ever more plants that caught there, they hang from his tines as if it was the season of shedding velvet.


Across the growing angles of his dark face, a shadowed frown darkens his eyes to molten gold. It gathers beneath his angled jaw, displeasure gathering at the corners of his lips. But it is more than ire that weighs the fae-boy’s lips into a downward bow. It is grief and sorrow. He lowers his lips to sip of the silvered water. It ripples at his touch. Above him the sky continues her bleed into night. Her bruises grow darker, angrier, the ebbing sunlight pools in the corners of the riverbed. At his back, shadows begin to crawl, dancing with the moonlight as the gloaming grows murky around the wild-wood boy. 


At his feet, spring flowers are blooming and above birds are returning to their nests. He stops a hummingbird midflight and oh how it freezes, with its wings arched in flight and its pointed beak reaching for a closing flower. Leoniidas might have looked at it longer, were it not for a glimmer of white. He tips his chin up, away from the time-stopped bird and up, up towards the girl who glows like mist and starlight. Water drips from his lips and chin and they too stop mid-fall. Even the river begins to slow as his head slowly lifts and Leoniidas regards the girl, less a fae-boy than a stag; a monarch of the woods that frame his back.


“Speaking.”

credits


@[Cressida] <3

[cressida]

Cressida

The forest is quiet at night, which is how she prefers it. She loves the muted sounds of her hours—the way that time seems to soften into a silver river. It’s a kinder passing of time. A gentler way of living. It is the only way that Cressida truly knows. Tonight, she traverses it as a deer. Slender and youthful.

Untouched and unmarred by the things that would have ruined her parents.

She is malleable and pure—her soul a gleaming thing with no fingerprints upon it but her own.

As she walks amongst the forest, she plays with the moonlight that falls gently around her. The light becomes threads that she weaves together, washing over herself and illuminating the path before her with its glow. Her cloven hooves press into the forest floor as she goes, the black of the waning moon beginning to creep up her legs, but just barely. Soon it would overtake her, but for now, she remains silver.

It is only when she begins to feel the affect of his hold on time that she pauses. There is something in the air that feels different. The muted feeling of time warping beneath his pressure, like air being pulled in the wrong direction. Curious more than afraid, she angles her path toward what she deems to be the source of it, breaking through a thicket of trees and standing on the cusp of it, watching with her wide doe eyes.

For a second, and then two, she says nothing. Instead she just regards him, studying the elements around him that remain frozen—stuck in place as though pinned. When her gaze finally returns to him, she offers a shy smile, the smallest tip of her lips. “Is that you doing that?”

@[Leoniidas]