The red sand stretched, reaching like a red blood river from edge to edge of this obscured cove. It was as if the island hid it from sight, as if this place where the terminus see pressed in had opened the island up, right down to its beating heart.

Red, red, red. 

That was all that filled the forest-boy’s gilded eyes as he drank in the arching beach. It throbbed and it rippled, blood pouring out along the river beach, out into the reaching tide of the azure sea.

Terminus was the deepest blue, nearly black where the land fell away below, deep, deep into the core of Novus. Yet as the swell pushed up along the beach, the water turned an eerie green as it ran over the crimson beach, then it shattered, white as bone - white like a curved rib - as the waves crashed upon the crimson beach.

Leonidas steps down, down upon the crimson sand that is, in fact, not sand at all. A shore of crimson flowers and weeds are what lies where golden sand should be.Yet the boy wades out, following the only channels of white surf that runs in rivulets through the red. Bones and blood Leonidas might have thought - if he were a boy older, if his eyes had seen blood and gore and tragedy.

Yet he knows nothing of the chaos of this world. He knows nothing of magic that writhes wicked and dangerous beneath the crimson. His golden antlers, sharp and fine and bright like torchlight, gleam as he lowers a tine to the crimson beach. The flowers yield to its midas touch, they part as if he is a god, they yield to reveal surf - white as bone. Then the surf is gone and the flowers swell like a wave has rolled in below them. They ripple, pushing up the beach toward the rocks. There is no white surf that Leonidas sees now. There is nothing but black scales, slick with saltwater and raw with golden sand. The black surges like a serpent slithering its way deeper. Below the crimson beach.

Suddenly more ripples appear, behind him, beside him, before him. The small boy shies back, his skin the colour of hearth grows dark as a spring shower. Sweat slicks along his coat and oh, even to a newborn boy this tastes of death. As if in answer a tentacle looms up in a hook. Its shadow casts the wild boy in dark and at once the fairy boy (with mud upon his body and vines and leaves within his hair) knows that this is the time to run.

The tentacle reaches for him as another rises from the crimson beach. Up and up it comes, a monster from the deep. He leaps, with spindly limbs and a heart surging wicked and wild at his breast. Leonidas, Midas’ woodland boy, clears the tentacles and feels their brush as his fetlocks as if they breathed upon him. He is running and leaping with his golden eyes blown wide, wide. He runs brighter than the sun and darker than the unsettling deep of a fairy wood. He laughs like a reckless thing. It is the sound of the wind in the boughs, the breeze through woodwind instruments. He spies a girl, who dares to step upon the crimson beach that dares to hunt him so. Oh, he hears the rustling flowers, the hiss of golden sands shifting as a leviathan surges after him. “Run!” The boy shouts, he laughs, he bares his teeth as feral boy’s do. He looks for stones and rocks and plucks them as he runs. He looses them behind him and they strike into the water, bullet’s loosed from a gunslinger’s weapon. Still the boy is laughing as he reaches the girl - a girl, a girl, always a girl! He thinks nothing of the boys he might play with, not when girls are all and enough and always so pretty.

Leo shouts, fearless as a lion, startled as a fearful boy. Yet he laughs as red petals splash and cling to his mahogany skin like needle-pricks of blood. “Run.” The boy urges the girl, “It is dinner time and we are both too sweet to eat.” His smile is playful and wicked as he swerves a rising black tentacle. It rears into the sky and were he older, were his wings not still unfledged, he might have risen to meet it. Yet he is just a boy and so he ducks and swerves and laughs, and laughs and laughs.

@Apolonia | "speaks" | notes: thank you for threading with him! Please bear with me whilst i work out how to write him and who he is!