There are many ways in which Leonidas and his sister are identical and there are many ways in which they are so very different. Smiles are one such thing. They are, upon leonidas’ lips, as frequent as the flowers of a meadow - and just as bright. Yet upon Aster’s lips they are a rare phenomena, enough that when one comes, even Leonidas’ lips drop to study this new curve of her lips. But the boy may not yet have recognised how his sister does not smile for many (or maybe any) but him. Yet the way his eyes linger upon her upturned mouth is enough to show he has become subconsciously aware. 


Yet when his sister stops, becoming as still as the sun at their birth, Leonidas also ceases from his game. His eyes draw across the familair lines of his sister’s face (each one he can draw within his mind, each inch of her he knows as well as himself). Then he follows the line of her sight to where a mare steps out from the small house they had been playing in front of. 


If Leonidas was not a boy, with boyish things upon his mind, he might have noticed how beautiful the mare’s little house was. Its wild vines crawl across its facade, and gypsy patterns are intricately carved into the wood. From an open window a sheer curtain drifts lazily in the breeze. The bough of a tree casts an emerald shade over the roof and it is as if the swamp is but a background made for the little house to sit within.


But Leo notices none of these things, but the woman who stands like the moon beyond her front door. The sunboy smiles but his smile fades when she asks what they had been up to. Discreetly he opens his mouth discarding the flower he had between his teeth. “Nuthin’” He murmurs guiltily as his sister asks if she was a witch. Aster’s question was better - if a little predictable. His ivory sister relished the strangeness of witches and slowly Leonidas steps closer to his sister, until their shoulder’s touch and they stand as one.


“Can you do magic?” the boy asks warily, for the last time he met a girl as silver as she within a wood, she tried to take his fort and threw stones at him. Were all beautiful girls so rude?

@Aster @Corrdelia
"Speaking."

The leaves and twigs and wild herbs hanging in his hair mark the boy as less a Prince of Terrastella than one of the woodland fae. In his eyes gleams a wildness that has begun to grow and flourish as a flower of the field. All of Leonidas is blooming, the feathers upon his wings growing finer and longer, the way he no longer looks afraid but more at ease. Already independence and dark lonesome nights with just his sister has taught him the things he should truly fear.


And so, when Aster looks back to him and asks with her gaze, is it safe? The boy says nothing at all, but his gilded gaze - so much a mirror of hers - blazes just a little brighter. Aster steps within the house, the wild ivy reaching for the antlers that have begun to grow like a crown from her poll. Upon each of their heads their antlers are growing, little more than golden tangled roots arising like the tines of crowns.


They are royal fae children with no kingdom limited to stars and dusk but extended out to all of Novus. He would sleep in the mountainous halls of the gods and call it his own. He would sleep upon the island in the midst of Vitreus Lake and things its his own too. He would pluck bread from a stall within Solterra’s square and believe that he is entitled. Terrastella is no more home to him than the rest of Novus. Anywhere Aster is he names home.


So Leonidas is quick upon the steps his sister disappeared up. He is quick behind her through the door only slowing when his side is pressed to hers, when the feathers of their wings are tangled together. 


A witch. A witch. He sees the glow of such a word shining up from Aster’s soul. He feels it in her heart as if it were her own. Slowly he turns his wildwood gaze upon the woman and his skull tilts to regard her. Were witches not supposed to look like crones? Corrdelia is not dark nor twisted nor bent, but tall and regal and pale as a dove.


The walls of the house set in close, close, close. It is dark and full of strange smells and the world reaches in through only a window. Leonidas looks to it and already his body yearns to run, to push his wings wide and cast out the walls that confine them. “Do you sleep in here?” Curious wonder slips like silver through his question. It shadows the crinkling of his nose. “How does the moonlight and the wind get in? Do you sleep alone?”


Slowly he peels himself from Aster and steps curiously forward. The fae boy passes a bed… bed... he has a name for it he can recognise the wooden frame and plush pillows and blankets upon it, but never has he thought to sleep upon one. He thinks beds within the woodland are better, with no walls and a roof of endless leaves and a sky struck moonlight-silver. 


The boy moves beyond a bed to where fruits and teas and fruited teas all lie out fragrant and sweet. So many berries he already knows. So many that have coloured his lips black and red and blue as he steals them from the bushes he and Aster pass in their meanderings. He sees one he does not recognise and looks back to the pale witch, “Can I try this one? Then will you show us some magic?” And his eyes flit to Aster’s for he knows how much she will delight in such events.

@Aster @Corrdelia
"Speaking."