Leto smells of many things this day. She smells of the sweetness of flowers, the bitterness of poison leaves, the metallic tang of paint that draws whimsically, fiercely, and brightly in changeable strokes across her skin. Each line of paint creates a sigil, a story, a potent dream, wish, lament, vow. Magic ancient and old as Verenor’s towering peak, hums through the paint reaching across her ebony flesh.
 
In her mane, tied with long grasses hang herbs and flowering plants. They paint her in ever more colour. They illuminate the shadows that billow across her skin and weave like ghosts between the sigils. From her skin they banish the smell of burning stars, they rid this girl of stardust and the emptiness of space. She is full of Ilati magic, of whispering incantations. Chants beat to the rhythm of her heart, to every step she takes that shakes her bones like a drum. The trees sigh in the winds and oh how bare she thinks them to be, without the carvings of Ilati history upon their trunks.
 
Slowly she moves toward the water’s edge. The dry of her tongue has her lips lowering to where the stream laps upon the shore. There, upon the surface moving, bending is her face reflected back. Oh that reflection’s lips are sharp and then soft, curved like a scythe and then straight like the knife – so does the water toy with her reflection over and over. Laughter fills the air, a babbling brook that says it knows, it knows, it knows what fate awaits her.
 
Starfire warms her veins and her silver eyes blink away dust and the pollen that drifts from the flowers in her hair. A hiss slips past her teeth, her mouth tight, tight. Unsated, unnerved, she draws back from the waters that rise for her, that whisper of a king and a kelpie. At once her heart is racing, at once her blood is hot as molten rock. A star glows bright, bright, it pierces the midday sky and waits for her call. It waits for the moment it may fall in fire and ruin to the earth. Oh how it smolders as it waits, burning ozone, it was made to turn water into nothingness.
 
Yet no longer does she merely thirst, no longer is her tongue simply dry. Oh how her heart clamours! Fate is in her blood and she begs for the cool of water! Leto drinks, her blood suddenly cooled as that high up star keens and blinks its wild white stare. The starfire girl drinks until she could drain the stream, until she could make the waterfall run dry – but she stops. She stops when a stranger comes to the water’s edge and then beyond, stepping, stepping out, out into the water. It babbles about the other girl’s knees, it cradles her in silver and blue. Leto watches and wonders, “Is it deep?”
 
And oh how the water laughs: No, not deep, but deep enough for you.
 
And how Leto shivers then, that star at last unseated.


@Kindred

@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make

The water roars as it tumbles from the stones above. It mists in a cloud that splits in rainbows and light.
 
It is beautiful – this wild idyll of water and light. This is the sound of water at play. This is the sound of water pooling.
 
Yet Leto stands, now ankle deep in the waters that lap – quiet at the edges of that great waterfall. Barely anything stirs, but for the girl who bathes in the heart of the pool. She stepped in dirty yet rises clean. The sun adores her – it bathes her in gilded light and all of the creek-lands giggle like the babbling of a brook.
 
The girl spots her, suddenly. She has not heard her question, it is lost, like driftwood floating downstream. The girl offers for Leto to join her and the water laughs. It gurgles and mocks and rocks itself upon the shore. It reaches, reaches, reaches and she steps out beyond its reach. “No.” The word comes sharp as stone, hard and sudden as if a rock was dropped to break the surface of the water.
 
Though the Ilati girl looks. She sees how the water cradles the other girl. It would not her, not even when the waters rest, still as glass. The sunlight shivers through the trees. It finds her sigils and they glow bright with its touch. She is illuminated in the sun, her sigils dapples of light upon the shadow of her too-black skin. Her skull tilts for the trees do whisper. They warn of drowning and Ilati girls lost to the bottom of the lake until there they rest, eternal. Her bones will become myth, her skin fairytales and her life carved into the Tinea trees like so many before her.
 
“I am Leto.” The star-girl hums as water splashes upon her knee. Oh it beckons, it welcomes. She wears the woodland upon her torso – soil and leaves, feathers and nuts, bones and bells and berries. They all adorn this wild-wood girl, they all whisper of a free-spirit heart. They ache with her for a bone mask to wear, to slip away into anonymity and, ultimately, nothingness.
 
She knows she should say more. Politeness, it itches along her spine. Solitude and wild-wanderings have led this raven girl to be distant with others. She takes a breath and it scrapes along her lungs. They burn with effort and she blinks, slow, slow.
 
“How does it feel?” She asks softly, curiously. The words drift like leaves upon the ground, they snag upon her nervousness. Her dark eyes are wide, wide, never has she felt water, never brave enough to risk her death in the water.  “The water, I mean.”

@Kindred | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make