She does look already painted. Like marble. Yet a wild-wood boy has never seen polished marble like her skin. Instead he thinks of her as the rough-cut stones he finds in the deepest gulleys of the wood. Their faces are like marble two toned with dark or light veins cutting through. If Leonidas were an educated boy he would know the stones tell him of their age, of the landscape. But he does not. Instead he just studies their beauty and then leaves them where he found them - treasure for other eyes to find.


Wandering through the fires this night, before he finds the marble girl stood still as a statue, the boy is thinking of Maeve and Aspara who have made him yearn to step out of his forest home. He shies away from the licking flames that dance and spit and hiss dangerous and unpredictable. Leonidas loathes fire, he has seen it swallow a whole corner of a wood before. He ran from it with the woodland creatures. The feral boy does not know why they keep the fires here, why they dance and run between them as if celebrating their light. Fires are wild and dangerous things.


Yet their light upon the gold of him is spectacular. The boy gleams like a god like a forest ablaze in autumn colours. He moves regal as a stag and dangerous as a cat. He skitters like a doe around the flames and yet turns into a fox as he slinks cunningly through the crowds, barely seen, unnoticed. The smell of smoke and city things cling to his skin and he shudders. The smell of sweet treats and hot drinks fill his nose and he turns to look at the stalls. Their scent is strange, unnatural for a boy used to staining his lips with the fruits of the wild. He has never had cooked food before. 


Turning from the stalls, it is then that he sees the girl, still, statuesque. She is young and small and slim. It is only then he realises how much he has grown. Yet he moves to her, princely, wildly. Her horns, his antlers share the same gold, but that is where they end. Her body is white and black, silver and gold. One wing black, one wing gold. He remembers a twin, a child whose limbs tangled with his in the womb. She was white and gold to his near black and gold. 


The boy comes to the white and gold side of this marble girl. He wants to press his muzzle into her neck and breathe her skin and fall into memories as he whispers sister against her skin. But this girl is not his blood, no matter her gold, no matter her ivory. Instead he slips out of the darkness and looks at her from beneath his thick lashes, heavy with smoke and reminiscence and gazes at her with pain and loss and a want she cannot right. He knows it, but he stands beside her and whispers so very nearly broken - his adolescent voice shattering over the octaves-, “Will you come to the woods with me?” Away from the fire. Away from the noise. For that is where is his peace is, but where loneliness grows as choking as the roots she imagines will rise up and kill her. That loneliness has sent this strangeling boy out into the midst of a strange and loud festival. He hopes to shed his loneliness here and bring a friend back to the woodland with him.


@Diana
“Speaking.”

He does not know how her heart trips and dips as she looks to the woods. How can he when her eyes are set sharp as fangs? Upon his skin they sink deep. He might squirm beneath the hold of her eyes, if he were more rabbit and less fox. The girl has not moved. She is still made of perfect marble - midnight, moonlight, sunlight - every light a boy can think of. But her head turns, slowly, impassively as iron. It is a miracle the child moves at all. 


She is no balm for Leonidas’ loneliness. The cold of her still body, the cold of her eyes, the cold, he thinks, of her blood beneath her skin. He wants to touch her and find out if she is as cold as hard as he believes she might be. 


Then, then she calls him strange. A stranger. The child turns him into a predator and the boy blinks. Is this what his loneliness has got him? It feels more like hope to have a friend with him in the woods. She turns it into something dangerous. But oh, Leonidas does not think he is the dangerous one here. He thinks of the girl spun together from Rift magic who hunted him hungry and savage. It spoke to the wild Time magic within him. Yet this girl, she seems only cruel, the way she watches him with her pale-strange eyes.


“I am not the only strange one here.” The older boy breathes as he does not deny his nature. His eyes trickle over her, he might pity her more if he could hear how her thoughts are filled with assurance that the meadow longs to consume her. Wrap her up in its roots, pull her down into the earth.


The fae-boy draws back, gilded eyes fluttering closed for the merest moment.  When they open, he is no longer a lonely boy yearning for comfort amidst the reaching arms of the lovely dark wood. No, he looks back that regal stag, accustomed to his loneliness, proud of his life, his territory. “And what do mothers know of anything at all?” An orphan boy asks remembering only the blurred and dusty shadow of a figure that was once his mother. He smiles. It is not pretty upon his handsome lips, it is a scar of hurt and anger, “They do not care. They are the ones to leave us.”


@Diana
“Speaking.”

She says his forest wants to hurt her. Her words steal a frown from his brow and places a grin upon his lips. It is a small, amused turn of his lips. Her words come as no surprise to the boy. “Of course it does,” the wild-wood boy says lightly as if it is the most obvious thing this little girl could ever have said to him. “It tries to kill me too,” He says with a shrug, the amusement slipping from his mouth, replaced, instead, by a pragmatic expression. 


“That is what it does.” It is all Leonidas has ever known. It is why he wears the wood amidst the tines of his antlers, why his skin bears the dirt of the floor, why his mane is a tangle of leaves and twigs and roots and flowers. Leonidas was not born of the wild wood, but he was raised by her cruel and yet loving hand. Nature grasped the child of Time and raised him ever more magical, ever more wild. 


Through his fae-eyes he watches her, limns the little girl in gold and feels so much older than his two years. “That doesn’t mean you should avoid it. It is amazing too.” He ends upon a whisper as something dark, something otherworldly creeps upon the boy. It turns him more stag than horse, more man than boy. It is easy in that moment for forget how his voice had risen and fallen sharply with his speaking. Now he seems more man, as if he has never been a boy at all - as if being an orphan had robbed him of any childhood. It did. The boy stands before her, unknown of the depths of his loneliness, not knowing how he missed so many years of play and squabbles with children his own age. Leonidas stands upon the fringes of society and barely knows how to even gaze in upon it, let alone walk within its midst. Already he is a thief, ignorant of money, incapable of counting it, unable to read or write. 


When she asks what he knows about anything, he wonders about all the things he has discovered he does not know. It seems like such a lot. Yet he looks to her and says, proud as a god of the wood, “I know how to outsmart and survive the wood when it wants to kill you.” Beneath the thick bow of his lashes Leonidas stares unblinkingly at the little girl. It may be the only thing a feral boy could know or ever be proud of.


Her feathers rise upon her wings. She reminds him of a newborn panther cub hissing, spitting at a bear. The boy watches her with the slow regard of an adult bear, gold eyes, so dark in the firelight they glow copper. “My mother didn’t want to leave me. She loved me, but it didn’t stop her disappearing against her will. She can love you as much as you love her, but it still doesn’t mean she will be with you forever. It is not only the woods that want to kill and separate, but the whole of Novus and space and time and magic.” And this is the truth the boy knows in his heart. That his mother never wanted to leave him, but it hurt him less to think that she wanted to. It made it easier to hate her absence when he hated her.


@Diana
“Speaking.”

Leonidas sees the way her lips twist and firelight makes the glow of them angrier and darker than she may have intended. His ears are still pressed down into the tangles of his forelock, crumbled like spires in the wake of their disagreement. 


The boy wonders when she speaks how the wood could want you dead if it was not like any of those first things she said. But Leonidas, grown up in the wilds as he has, knows little of the wants and sins of men. He understands more the deliverance of death at the hands of a cougar or lightning bolt than he ever would at the hands of a man. 


He tilts his head and watches her. He thinks how a child can be more wise than he. The fae-boy learns in that moment that this is yet another thing he does not understand. It is, yet another way in which growing up alone in the wilds of the wood had made him naive. It made him feel foolish. He thinks of Aspara, her anger, her rejection. This feels the same, he cannot understand. But he will, he is already more embroiled in the lives of his fellow ‘men’ than he realises. He will encounter their sins, become jaded by them, see all the ways in which they are not simply cougars who kill to survive, or a storm that strikes without subjectivity. 


“I will stop it.” He says though, sure, convinced. “I can kill it before it kills you.” The boy looks down at her and the dark of his gaze, the heaviness in his words makes him grown up beyond the age of 2. In that moment, Leonidas could be an old, wise man. It agonises him to kill his wood. The woodland is all he has known, all he has understood and cared about for so long. Yet now, now he is discovering people beyond his wild-wood walls. Already he longs to spend time with them than alone in the deep of his wood. 


He will kill is wood for those like him. The thought sobers him and he adds, “But only if it really does try to kill you. If it hates you.” 


He holds her eyes as she looks up to him and tells him to fight. But, fight what, exactly? His mother is gone, was not living, raising himself, learning how to live within the wilds a form of fighting? “I have fought my fight and I continue to battle new ones because of my family.” Leonidas says and the turn of his lips is down, the pain in his words only a mere drop compared the ocean of pain that lances into his heart. “Come and find me in the woods, when you are brave enough. I will protect you. This is your fight.”


The boy says and turns from her, heading back into his woods, away from the little girl who brings him only pain and hurt. His strides are stiff, his manner dark and moody as a sea brewing a storm. Yet all the while he wishes she would join him, because an argument, a disagreement is better than no conversation at all.



@Diana - finishing there - I hope that is okay <3
“Speaking.”