Leto is as black as the space between stars. Her skin gleams with the black of a raven’s wing, the silken light of a midnight sea.To shut her eyes is to fool the Ilati into believing their prophecy is true, for she is as Nahane once was. She is the girl destined to return as their next great Witch Doctor. But to open her eyes, oh, she dashes each of their earnest hopes and wishes. For Leto is not Nahane, her skin is the blackest shadows of eternity - the corners of universes untouched. It is not the black of the earth. And when her eyes open, they too are not pitch but bright with stardust and nebulae. To be held in that gaze is to sink through stars and drown in their light. In every way Leto is a Shed-star daughter.
But Shed-star blood - though it glows white in her veins, is not the only blood she possesses. Leto is a hybrid girl. Ilati magic, Ilati rites are as deep within her core as the nerves that keep her heart beating. Her bones are Ilati, her blood Shed-star and her soul something utterly different yet.
Upon her blackboard skin she wears paint like chalk. Tribal designs, fierce and exotic, map her every inch. Pearls she finds upon the beaches, feathers she plucks from the corpses of sacrifices and leaves saved from the swamp floor, are all entwined in her raven hair.
There is a magic within Leto, an ancient thing forged in the core of fallen stars. It is liquid and hot, divine and righteous. It makes her blood pour bright as white light. When that magic slumbers you might never know the girl is anything other. But oh, when it rouses, it burns hot, hot, hot. It glows brighter than an ember int h dark, brighter than the full moon amidst the clear night sky. It burns bright like a supernova building. Every artery and vein glows with pure starlight - a map upon her ebony skin.
But the magic will drive her into the sea. Its heat was never made for the tinder earth.
If you believe in fate it is written that, one day, a child of the earth and of the sky will be driven into the sea. If it comes to pass, no, when it comes to pass, only the water will be enough to quell that fire in her blood and the nebulae of stars in her eyes. Her body will still possess the fine-boned elegance it once radiated, but where her dances once rattled the earth, so will they now sway with the swell of the tides and the waves that are pulled up, up upon the shores.
Leto will sink to the depths of the sea, where black called to black and cold to eternal cold. Deep down, those star-shine eyes will glow with the bright of drowned supernovas. Their light will gleam upon the sharp of her canine teeth and her skin will pulse with the silver light of her veins – adorning her skin like seaweed might. She will hunger in her kelpie skin and no flesh would be enough to satisfy the fallen kelpie of stars and soil.
Positive: loyal | generous | brave | bold | mysterious | Instinctive | dreamer
Negative: tempestuous | flighty | impulsive | detached
Leto is the in-between girl. She is the one who once sought to fit but never could. So now she roams as free as a bird, as bright as a shooting star. She is a glimmer in the eye of her beholders – there one moment and then gone in the blink of an eye.
Her spirit burns as hot as the star-fire of her gaze. Instinct is hers and it is wild, it is brilliant. Though she flits, free as a bird between lands, Leto yearns to belong. Her time roaming has left her stuck, struck with the desire to grow roots and all at once feeling those roots as though they were shackles about her ankles.
At night she looks up to the stars and daydreams of a different future, of the fickleness of the present. But there will come a time when Leto will change and the sea – that liminal place between the earth and the sky (where all meet upon the horizon) - will come to claim her. Then she will be a kelpie and all will turn dark, all of her will shift and twist and morph. Leto will still be the girl that dreams. But oh she will be more brave and she will be more bold. The Wilderness will call and who will she be but the one who answers?
Impulse will be her greatest downfall and instinct her greatest asset.
She was always different but the Ilati had become accustomed to accepting the unusual.
It began at her birth. All Ilati were born in the hours just before dawn, when all was darkest and the earth most still. It made, you see, for better listening to the whisperings of nature.
But Leto was not birthed then. No, this creature was born just as one day tipped into the next, beneath a blanket of fresh stars. It was by moonlight and starlight that she spilled to the sodden earth. If the Ilati ever dared to look to the sky, they might have seen just how the stars flared that night.
The Witch Doctor came, sacrifices were made and blood was spilled for it was surely a bad omen that a child be born so early in the night… But relief was sweet when they beheld the child. She was as black as pitch without even a blemish upon her body. In every way this newborn was the Ilati’s long lost Nahane: the first Witch Doctor, the child who was destined to be Nahane reincarnate.
The swamp sang with joy, with laughter and joyous cries that rattled the buttress roots and trembled the glistening surfaces of the pools. Until, that was, the child’s eyes opened to reveal their silver glow of bright nebulae, the dust of stars scattered and awakening. Where was Nahane’s black? As joy descended to horror and shock and grief the Witch Doctor snapped the neck of a sacrifice, then spilled its blood upon the ground where the filly lay. A litany spilled from the Witch Doctor’s lips, spells weaving their way through her petitions and chants. This child was something other and the Ilati prayed for her soul.
From that fateful night Leto grew upon the fringes of the Ilati tribe, safe only beneath the protection of her dam, an Ilati priestess. In every way she was shunned for she was so similar to an Ilati, but so very abnormal too… Where her tribe looked to the earth and their goddess for answers, so Leto looked to the sky, the stars, the moon.
As she gathered bones for scrying and killed for sacrificial blood, she did not look to the darkest places of the swamp, the carvings on the trees. No, Leto looked to the sky, whispering to the moon, and oh how her silver eyes flared bright with some alien power.
Leto was an alien in her homeland and though she excelled in the ways of her brethren, though she braded her hair with bones, feathers and leaves, so too did she walk along Terrastella’s beaches and pick silver-pink pearls to weave into her hair.
Only her mother was not disturbed as Leto lay awake at night, whispering to the stars as she lay beneath the blanket of night with no trees for a roof, nor leaves for a bed. Only her mother knew her heritage and to recognize the day when all truth would be revealed. It was the day Leto came into her magic and the night she burned the Old Widow Tree.
All began with prayer, as all Ilati things tend to do. Beneath the weeping vines of the ancient willow tree, safe in its cocoon, the young girl prayed in shadow and silence. She lay bones upon the ground, an offering to the solitary Old Widow Tree who had stood for longer than any Ilati had ever known. From her vines Leto plucked turning leaves of red and brown and wove them into her hair. Summer had parched the land, banished the rains far away, and even the swamps grew dry, its face cracked and wounded. It was little match for the sudden heat that flared, so sudden, so hot, in Leto’s veins.
A magic, newly founded and freshly awaken, emerged with a flare. To this day, its cause is unknown, but the star-girl’s veins burned hotter than fire. Her ebony torso, normally unblemished pitch, was split by her map of slender veins and arteries. They glowed white hot, white with starfire and above, far, far above the canopy of the Old Widow Tree, the stars burned ever brighter in the sky. Their light was matched only by the flare of Leto’s silver eyes – they glowed in the shadows, shedding darkness with their brilliant light. A spark shed from the sky, a shooting star pulled to earth, and as it fell it burned like a comet but, when it landed, small as a flee, bright as a spark, it set light to a solitary leaf of the Old Widow Tree.
How bright that old tree burned that night. How fast Leto fled. How poisonous the accusations were that dogged her fleeing feet. It was that night, as Leto choked on smoke, that her mother told her a tale of the shed-stars. Of a boy she once loved and a child they had, a creature of Ilati and Shed-star blood.
So it was that Leto set out, away from the Ilati and on to Denocte where the stars shone their brightest, where its denizens danced to the light of their night fires. And as she roamed, as she found her place within the shed-stars, so they watched the part-bred child and thought of all the ways she was not Shed-star but Ilati. At night Leto looked up to the stars but heard the hum of the earth at her feet.
This is a girl born of the earth and of the sky yet neither can truly know her, neither can truly claim her.