He is minding his own business when she comes, bringing something angelic, altogether holy into his life. Andromeda, Leonidas knows, even by that first glimpse, is so different to a boy like he. They both glow, yes, him with burnished gold and she, with her tail of divine flame. Yet that is where their similarities end. For Leonidas is a wild-wood boy, he lifts his chin from amidst the flowers. Atop his poll his gilded antlers lift the woodland offerings up to the sky. Vines and leaves and flowers and seeds, lie like a wildwood meadow hung between his pointed tines (like fingers and palm uplifted to a god). But Leonidas has no god to make such offerings to. Instead he lives rough and alive, unholy and alone in his feral wood with his kingdom of animals.


The boy watches the girl and he is entranced. She moves, not like any girl he has ever seen, but she dances. Her body liquid light, her eyes not of this world. Oh, none of her is of this world. The sight of her fills his mind with tales his mothers once told him. Stories that have grown rough and forgotten with time. They are smudged and worn in his memory bank, he has thought of them too often and yet not often enough. These stories are loved and held, worried through like years of fingers upon paper. But also, their ink has faded for he has not opened his memories enough.


She disappears into the wood. A glimmer of light and then gone. The woodland feels dark and colder without her light. It takes but a moment to consider, but really, for the boy there is nothing to consider at all. He leaps, elven, from his place. He chases her, caught as if she were a siren. She glows, he is dusted in dirt, dark, but for his gold that gleams in answer, crying out to her vitality with a sun-gold-glow.


They run, her ahead and him, fleeting as a fox through the brush. The fae-boy runs, at times a man and at others still a boy upon the cusp of manhood. But in his eyes is only the awe of a boy, ensnared by a magic he has never seen before. A creature rare within his woodland home.


She stops, suddenly, in a clearing where sunlight gleams down and dapples the earth. She stops before the maw of a cave where lit dustmotes dance in its black maw. He has stopped at the edge of the wood. There is nothing boyish now in the way he gazes at the dark cave and the girl before it. The girl, ivory and crimson, speaks into the cave. A hello that swallowed by darkness and sounds like bells as it sinks beneath the earth.


Slow, calm as any monarch within his glen, the boy steps up beside her, his nape thick with adult muscle, his shoulders growing. He is a boy, so nearly a man. It is easy to forget he is one or the other. But always he is fae, always he is a wild-wood creature, lost beneath stars and deep into the lovely dark of woodlands deep. “Will you go in?” He asks, his voice so deep. It does not break, it emboldens him, “Do you want company?” For he does not think he can leave her holiness, not yet, his unholy body breathes, not yet, not yet. 


His voice, however, it breaks at the last word and reminds them both that his is still just a boy, not yet a man.

@Andromeda

"Speaking."

Leonidas watches her, like a boy drunk on dreams. The loveliness of her turns all around her dim and soft and unfocussed. She glows. He stares and does not blink. He is as a fly within a web, a month flying toward what it thinks is the moon. She is like that, soft lunar light, ancient, forgotten religion. He gazes at her and the wild-wood boy is drugged upon a thing he has no name for, no words with which to describe it. Will she, like the flame to the moth, scald him if she ever reveals herself as no moon at all but some beautiful destruction, come to ruin the hearts of mortals.


There is a silence to Leonidas and a loudness that is as restless as the song of birds. His silence is the quiet of a midwood, the way he stands, unmoved by even the smallest breeze. The boy is watchful, a sentinel of his feral home that rises green and dark and lovely at his back. The susurrations of the trees still whisper to the boy, begging him to return and not sink beneath the grounds like roots that may never see daylight again. They only hope that he will sink like a seed and rise back up a shoot, a man growing bright and hungry and boldly beautiful.


Adorned with soil and leaves and roots and vines, the gilded boy studies her and tilts his head away, shyly, delightfully proud when she says she will have him for this adventure. The girl does not reach to touch him, as so many have before her and he thinks that he likes it. Except… except that he has also begun to crave it. Born a tactile boy into a tactile family his body years to touch, to be touched. But he has lived most of his life without, touch now is still so new, so surprising. It is rough (like Aspara), gentle, cautious (like his uncle), full of friendship and fun (like Nicnevin) and then full of something altogether different - things that he has no name for (like Maret). Ah, there are so many things Leonidas has yet to have a name for. So many things an orphan boy of the woods has never encountered before. 


He walks past the winter and summer of her skin. The air about her is warm - or maybe it is just his skin, feverish with her closeness, with the imminence of their adventure? The boy has never feared darkness, nor the steps down into the bowels of the earth. He heard once his mother stepped down into the deepest cave and stepped off the edge of it, tumbling into Time, into eternity. Maybe that is why her son watches the girl beside him as if she is a creature woven by the threads of other worlds. Other magics. 


His antlers glow, long after darkness swallows his body. The cave’s maw begins wide and open but at its throat it narrows, narrows until the darkness grows cool, its breath damp and old. He hears her feet whispering behind him and he turns thinking, knowing that she will glow, her skin will be a candle in the darkness that drowns them, luring the youngsters deeper, deeper. The boy walks like the prince she called him, a prince of nothing but the wilderness she also named upon her tongue, between her teeth. He wonders of the word Prince, of how Aspara is a princess. The boy knows nothing of his blood, how royal it once was. How he is the grandson of a Winter Court, a son and nephew to a Dusk Court. He is a prince, a prince of nothing at all. 


He looks to her with gold eyes gleaming and grins like all good wild boys should, “I go where I wish. The night cannot steal me away.” For the night is his own and wild orphan boys have always lived as they pleased beneath the watchful wide eyes of the midnight moon. He says it like a boy proud and it heralds the coming of a man who will know no binds. He laughs low, low like a man, reckless and deep (though his voice only moments before had been that of a boy), “What adventures do you want?” He asks, for all of his life was one. When he whispered into a child’s ear and begged her to join him in the wood, to run away and heal his loneliness, he was unsurprised when she did not - no one ever had, maybe no one ever will. So he looks to this girl of religion and strange, beautiful magic and knows this adventure will ease his loneliness for now.


@Andromeda

"Speaking."