He crosses the spine bridge, whose ribs rise like fingers for him. His toes tap over spinous processes, the sound so much like a piano’s ivories pressed into tune. He has come far from his wild woods but this is the place of his birth and every season he returns it is so utterly different. Each time he takes a piece of it away with him, sometimes a physical memento, sometimes the island within him, sinking deep, like oxygen passing into his blood and then off into his every cell. 


Leonidas will always return here. He was born into a strange world. He is spun from stranger magic, Time and ancient, feral things. The weeping wall calls him, its tears mixed with the crying of the wall beyond sound like haunting memories of how he and his sister went when their parents disappeared. But Leonidas was the only one who cried for longer. For Aster stopped and never started again. Her lovely face drawn with something dark, some terrible resolve that sunk into her body and soldered her bones. 


In amidst the wandering crowds, this strange fae-boy can pass as nearly a man. Nearly. He is grown tall and muscular, but still youth claims him, turns his eyes wide with wonder and not enough wariness. He has learned of the wilds, of how to live within Nature’s palm, but he has not learned of people yet. Of how they might be the most dangerous things here, more terrible than any monster.


He moves onward, away from the wall that weeps her haunting tears. Away from the wall that screams his terrible ire out like a broken violin. Leonidas, gilded and wild, walks into the glow of the stones, on through the shops and the strange walled gardens, on and on he goes until the castle opens up her maw for him. Her mouth is full of light and creatures. Her teeth are glowing windows. He steps up and in and there, watching art is a girl so much like the one who hunted him in the wood. Leonidas knows a twin. This girl’s body answer’s her sister’s crimson, Isolt has left crimson dots, left like blood splatter across her sister’s ivory skin. Her horn is dipped in blood, her eyes as white and red and bright as a hunter’s moon.


It should stop him, but it does not. He goes to her as his sister came to him. The walls glow off her body and he wonders what death and danger clings to her. What whispers her Rift blood will sing into his. Time meets magic and the boy tips his gilded antlers to touch the art she watches. It scatters from him, like beetles, crawling across the floor, reaching, reaching for their feet, to climb, to claim, to turn them into living art.


@Danaë
“Speaking.”

She is blood spattered pearl. The weeping wall had wept more that tears upon her body. But when Leonidas looks to her, all he can think is how she wears the island’s magic blood. She has gutted its latest manifestation and she wears it with pride but without vanity. He looks for vanity, in the way he looks for a wolf or a lion to be proud of its kill, but all it seems is content with the hunt and its meal. Leonidas thinks this girl is made for wearing the blood of others; that this is she, perfectly as she should be.


He might have looked away from her, but for her horn that lowers to touch one of his golden tines. The brace of his antlers feels the presence of her horn. It is hot and hard like cooling obsidian thrown from a volcano. He expects her crimson horn to glow, but it does not, it just shines a wicked red, as if it has rested only recently within the heart of his beloved island. 


Yet what stirs his heart most, is not the way it feels wicked warm, but how it rings out. Like Aspara’s did. Her horn slides down to the joint and he turns into her horn, lowering his head until the curves of her horn are tangled within the branches of his golden crown. The friction of their locking horns sounds like swords crying shrill and loud as they rub their edges in violent, life altering ire. But there is no ire in Leonidas’ eyes when he turns to look beneath the thick wave of his forelock. Her eyes are crimson too, bright as rubies.


She smiles and her teeth glow like moons, he wonders if she opens her mouth beyond her smile, whether there would be a castle within there too. He thinks she could possess the world between her ribs of ivory and blood. Leonidas does not know how the island makes her empty, how the art she watches with those blood-tide eyes fails to fill even the smallest parts of her. 


The art runs like beetles up his knees and hers. Up and up it climbs. Across her knees, her skin becomes alive with light and magic and moving art.  He pulls his antlers from her horn (it sounds so much like a sword drawn from its scabbard - more war, more danger like claws and teeth and blood-wet earth). The clutch of his antlers, the twists of her horn, makes their parting jerky yet fast.


She grins, wide, wide, wide. Leonidas watches her smile, he does not wear one  to answer hers not yet, not yet, not yet. He watches the art climb and climb and climb, up and up her slim body. He thinks it might reach her throat, her cheek. He presses a triad ot tines to the joint between her shoulder and her neck. With a small breath he too waits to see what the magic does at his command. Would the beetles flee her body, back to the walls as they fled him first, or will they scatter across the canvas of her blood spattered body? Leonidas waits, his eyes rich with wonder, his tongue content with no words. For art, needs no words and he has been a boy silent and a lone in a wood for so long. He is content to let the art speak every word he cannot find.



@Danaë
“Speaking.”

He should have known they were twins. Somewhere a part of him does, somewhere deep within his conscious that whispers of death and being remade. They each threaten him, one with death dripping as drool from her lips, the other as she places the blade of her tail to his shoulder and presses, presses, presses. 


Leonidas feels the way the blade presses in, its edge whispering to his skin to break. It is a compelling, quick question, his body thinks. Its answer needs to be swift too. And, with the fast answer of synapse, his body yields. The blade sinks and his blood rises at its call. 


Art stings. It is agony and delight. But he does not smile, he does not look to himself to see how she seeks to turn him into art and whether he becomes it or not. Already the feral boy’s body is a canvas upon which the wild wood has painted. But this girl seeks to turn him in to new art. Something altogether more magical, more wicked and dangerous. Blood beads out of the miniscule cut and crawls like spiders across her blade. The gleam ruby bright, red as a warning to any who dare to touch. Then, the broken skin begins to move, opening and closing and falling away into wings as butterfly moths red and white as bone emerge from the strange wound. 


Leonidas lowers an antler to her in answer. He presses a tine to her cheek. It is the tip of a gilded blade. The metal of it flashes menacingly in the light. The rest of his tines reach like groping fingers (sharp and lethal) for her throat, her eyes, her jaw. Beetles run where he presses, he follows their path across her skin.


He tilts his head to watch from where he presses against her as beetles paint her, spiders bleed from him and crimson moths fill the air with the metal scent of blood and death.



@Danaë
“Speaking.”

His blood butterflies flutter down to the weeds and flowers that bloom at his feet. Leonidas could have watched the way they grow in ways that plants should not (burdened by blight and the young weeds growing up grey and already old) but he does not watch them. Instead his gaze runs down the long tines of his antlers and into her strange, lovely-wicked face. 


The air becomes damp and salt-slick. Mould spores float in the air, dancing like slow, slow pollen. They are enough to tickle his nose and potent enough to spasm his lungs, bringing sickness into the very core of him. The feral boy knows this magic is hers, though there is nothing rotten about her. She is young, her body soft and warm and fresh. Her skin smells only of only strange, metallic magic and flowers growing dry in the sun (and maybe that was the warning he was not heeding). Run, wild-wood boy his forest blood hisses with every wet thump of his heart. Run before you too are wilted and bound up in vines.


As his blood spiders creep to her, the crimson butterflies choose to land amidst the crop she made for them. Their wings open and close a lub-dub so similar to that which he heard from the island when he was so terribly young. 


She speaks.


He blinks long and slow. A stag with the pride of a monarch and the innocence of prey. He could bathe in her voice, imbibe her words, open her up to see how she works, how she makes the mould spores dance and plants grow already dead. “Will you tell me what I might find within you?” The colt asks, more stallion than boy as his voice rattles out low, low, low from his throat. Though he asks, a part of him does not wish to know her answer because he is too enchanted by the idea of imagining. A girl once asked him to paint her and he has been so in love with the sway and stroke of a brush since that it is far sweeter to imagine her as something only art and magic could ever think to create.


Slowly he removes his tines from her throat and steps closer, presses his muzzle to the side of her silken neck. He waits, to see how her body hums, vibrates, and then, foolish, daring boy he presses an ear against her skin to see what he hears within her, that echoes louder than the beating of her heart. Does her body murmur with the susurration of magic through leaves? Does her body scratch line wildlife over the flowers and roots of the field? He listens until he is content enough to recall the music of her in his sleep and then he parts from her, stepping through the wall where their art dances. The beetles cling to his skin and the wall begins to close herself up behind him. He pauses for a moment, turns his head to watch her with gold eyes, just a moment, just an eternity, before the wall sews closed and the girl is gone.


@Danaë  <3 Fin
“Speaking.”