I am not like any ordinary world
As surely as the sun rises and falls, children grow older and forget to remember their earliest memories. So it is, therefore, that Leonidas has forgotten his grief and his longing for family. His gilded body is carved from the lonesome dark of solitude. Though his skin is the brown of a woodland filled with the company of a thousand trees, the boy knows nothing of companionship.
The art of becoming an orphaned boy of the wild woods is a lonely one. Yet he grows beautiful with it. As a butterfly within its cocoon, so the boy has grown and evolved. He grows his butterfly wings and with each passing day forgets more and more of what it was to live within a palace. He is no longer the daughter of a once-queen nor the nephew of a once-king. Now, Leonidas is, simply, wild. Nature turns her new prince too strange for the halls of a palace, too uncouth for polite company.
Nature sculpts her boy. She is both mother and teacher. Her child sleeps beneath the boughs of her trees, upon the bed she makes for him - of leaves and flowers and meadow grasses. Vines weave through the tangle of his mane. Sunlight dapples upon his skin. As a cat before a fire the boy lies where her warm light pools. His golden highlights glow in the sunshine. His gilded antlers are otherworldly, refined gold, adorned with all the forest can lay upon his tines - flowers and vines, ivy and pollen.
Discontent with anything perfect, he is weathered by endless days and nights exposed beneath the sky and the turning seasons. Scars are art upon his body - scrapes and scratches and wounds that never healed right. Leonidas is just a boy who has spent too much time alone. He listens to the whispers of the woodland for its voice is now a friend within his ears. Wary and possessive of the deep wood he has come to call home, the boy watches from the emerald shadows those who pass too close to his nest.
~~~
This day he drinks from a water pool he knows well. Its temperature is cool and leaves float lazily across its mirrored surface. The woodland whispers, as it always does. This time it tells him someone approaches. Its voice is leaves crunching, its words the sound of feet parting grasses.
The wild-wood boy watches as a figure steps out between the boughs of trees. Her body is pale, angelic. All of him falls still as his sun-bright eyes traverse every inch of her body. It is better, he knows, to study any wanderer that passes close, so he might know whether to fight, to run, to smile, to snarl.
Slowly, slowly his heart beats within his chest. Droplets of water fall from his wet lips. They touch the lake that shatters into ripples that reach out toward the stranger. A silent welcome, one might think. Leonidas thinks of nothing but how her skin is as pure as the driven snow in the midst of winter. He wonders if she is as cold to touch. Would she also leave at the first touch of sun upon her body?
The forest boy tips his wings down, anything to stop the golden light of them landing upon her form, drawing her eyes to him.
The boy smiles. It is an ageless thing, feral as magic and as rogue as the forest that surrounds him. Time presses itself across his eternal skin. It breathes itself into his ears, into his soul. His mother (before Nature claimed him) was a time traveller and so it is no wonder that he controls it.
At the girl’s feet spring buds lie awaiting the warmer air. Their shells are closed, their warmer winds still days away. Yet Time unfolds at Leonidas’ command. It asks the buds to bloom, now. They do. Days of growth and life slip by in mere moments. Before watching eyes the buds grow and bloom and the woodland laughs as the breeze trembles in the leaves. Newborn flowers tickle at her knees, blue like the sea, blue like the sky that stretches from end to end and always beyond.
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