[private] the soft and dangerous wild

[Leoniidas]

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

The world turned and the sun pulled herself up, up above the horizon. Brilliant, radiant rays spilled out over mountain and sea and woodland crest. All is bathed in holy light, as if the sun herself bleeds, shimmering ichor that drips light into every shadowed crease of the world. Above, far, far above the dawn chorus of birds the fae-boy drifts. Warm air cradles him, his limbs and wings held upon the draft of air that washed him in dawn light. Leoniidas’ antlers pierce the blushing pink sky, drifting clouds snagging upon tines and left to drift on in tatters. 


The sun coaxes the boys eyes open as she paints gilded light across his closed eyelids. Proud is his chin, tipped up toward the dawn. He is like a newborn god, a boy free of his earthen tethers. Light plays across the gold of him, burning him brighter, brighter. The sunlight whispers in his ear, begs him to be Icarus, to fly closer, full of desire and pride. But Leoniidas knows what it is to be touched by want, by desire and such needs, such wants have sent him fleeing into solitude. So here he difts, suspended, a solitary aquiline boy in a young, awakening sky. 


He waits for the sun to free herself from the edge of the horizon (that trembles in anticipation of their parting). Suddenly his eyes fly open, time whispering across his skin now! it sings liek life, like air.And there! There the sun rises free as the moon slips down at his back, tumbling, tumbling, falling and fading into blue.  


Such heresy he dares as he laughs with the dawn. Tipping his wings he falls with the moon, as any good Prince of Dusk should. Leoniidas, born beneath a twilight goddess’s eye, has never been so loyal to her as he should. His blood is too filled with another god and his mother long left her position as Queen of Dusk. So he dares to bathe himself with the dawn and wear gold, virgin light and not that of glittering stars and celestial things. 


He lands, light and feline, folding his wings to his ribs. He glows in all the places he is gold, charged as he is with the sun’s first light. Heretical boy, heretical son of the gloaming! Through his golden eyes he sees her, a girl as bright as the plasma spots of the sun he just worshipped. He wonders if she sees all the ways in which he is a heretic of another world’s dusk goddess. 


Leoniidas makes no move to her, or from her. He merely holds her there, limning her with the gold of him. Hands of time reach out from him to her, magic urging the flowers at her feet to grow now, not then but, now, now, now. And they do, the grow and bloom and thrive, as if he is their light, their water, their everything. 


She is bathed in flowers as he once was in light.


“Speaking.”

credits


@[Lillia] as requested <3

[Lillia]

.

She finds the dawn as a lover's chest, comfortable against its steady and ever unchanging rhythm; compelled by its warmth, soothed by its beauty. Even the dullest of days and, yes, even the darkest of days, lend themselves to Lillia's restful ear. What otherwise could it hope to do? To the angel, time held no meaning -- except, perhaps, the meaning which she made of it.

Having only descended the astral planes to this body in recent times, Lillia feels unsure of just what meaning to impress upon time, life, and existence. The sensation of connection to the universe yet dwindles inside her but never to nothingness, exactly in such a way that she knows it will remain with her always. A blessing for the most part, she figures; an awful and lowly dread accompanies the vague, dream-like memories of past materializations which did lose contact with that philosophy of mind. Yet when she attempts to recall why retaining the philosophy is in and of itself also a curse, she cannot recall.

Oh well, she figures to herself; for as amused as these musings render her, the presence of another new soul just now calls for her attention.

A loud call, she soon discovers -- made by one in whom she sees all the signs of heresy.

Time quickens and not at her bidding. The hairs at the back of her skull stand on edge at the peculiar sensation, at watching another spin her own craft with such dexterous fingers, such subliminal fingers. In the privacy of her mind she finds the time to close her eyes and relish the feeling, one of strange yet familiar intimacy and of oneness despite separation. With a shuddering inhale, she releases her hold on time, yet immersed in the other's hastened reality.

The flowers bloom at her hooves.

Bathe her, even.

Smiling, Lillia finds the eyes of the heretical prince and holds them for seconds. Minutes. Hours. Yet in the time that passes the flowers do not move, frozen by the invisible force of her mind which she now exerts upon all her surroundings. It feels natural to her, to welcome a slowness many others find unbearable. She does not even pause to consider that it might feel otherwise for the strange familiar across from her.

Then, all at once and in every sense of the phrase, Lillia relinquishes the time she held and stoops -- not far, considering her diminutive stature -- to smell the flowers he laid at her feet.

"Beautiful," she says. In the blink of an eye Lillia closes the distance between them and stands before him, him, the dark tower of gold and otherworldliness, so opposite to her white and pink yet alike in ways she knows she will not have to say. She smiles. "Thank you, sir."

Lillia

@[Leoniidas]