and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
She walks along the flowers as if she is born to do so, wearing a floral crown upon her head and a smile upon her face. At her side, the blooms seem to part and let her through, and she brushes them tenderly with the tips of her wings, purring with contentment as she passes. Above her, the sun shines brightly onto Terrestella’s festival, and she tilts her face toward its warmth to soak in the rays, wanting the days like this to last forever. For Spring was Solstice’s favorite time of year, a time of rebirth and renewed hope as the chill of winter faded to the bustle of new life. And she wanted to take it all in.
Around her, there were children with their baskets, gathering flowers as they went. Some were hasty, in a race to find as many colored blooms as they could and move onto the next activity. Others took their time, carefully selecting the most perfect of colors, with petals that unfurled just-so. She called out to them in a sing-song voice, offering the youngest child a chance to peruse her own basket, picking a couple of flowers before offering a sheepish smile and gallivanting off to join her peers. It was a time of great peace, and though it was the first time Solstice had left the comforts of Delumine, she felt a strange pull of adventure and courage which egged her onward.
“Hello,” She offered to a stranger who approached, much bolder than her usual demeanor. A smile stretches wide across her face as she bows her head, sending ombre curls cascading in front of her golden gaze. “Happy Spring to you!” It was a simple greeting, but a friendly one, as her stomach twists in knots, wondering if her words would be met with equal friendship or welcome. For the mare is as unsure as a child, nervous at how the world would see her. For some, she would be a naïve sort of dreamer, for others a lost and frightened soul. But the beauty of Novus with its wild magics and foreign gods, is that Solstice could be anyone she wanted, left to her own freedom of choice and whimsy.
So today, she plays the bold, waiting with baited breath to meet the other who stood before her, desperately wanting to fit in with the crowd.
― @any
11-07-2020, 03:36 PM
Played by
Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14 Signos: 520
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He is watching the flowers in her hair. The way the petals curl and sway in the breeze. The boy knows how each plant smells, he has seen each growing wild and free in the vastness of the woodland spaces. They are beautiful there, and though a part of him aches with their plucking, Leonidas sees how they look woven together, bright, beautiful, full of vitality.
He moves toward her, his golden, leonine eyes never leaving her poll. He weaves his way along the mown paths that curl through the tulip meadow. It is a meandering one, full of winding curves that lead him away and back again. Leonidas does not dare to stray from the path, and push through the flowers in a direct line. They are too beautiful to be crushed beneath errant feet. So instead he meanders slow as a stream toward the woman.
A smile curls her lips and in her basket flowers lie freshly plucked. His dark eyes lower to her gathered bouquet and then up to her feathers that flutter gently against her slim sides. The feral boy might have appeared more stallion than colt this night. When he speaks, he is lucky if his voice remains deep. It is uncomfortable, he thinks, straddling the line between adulthood and boyhood. Sometimes he is more man than boy. This night it is so. His muscles seem larger, leaner than even the night before. His baby fat lessened, the curve of his jaw, sharper, longer, not even the moon can soften the stallion lines of him.
But oh, the way he looks at her is all colt. Her beauty is a curious thing, it twinges in his breast, it steals the breath from his lungs and fills up with awkwardness, with shy awe. She wishes him a happy spring when she captures him within her gaze. She smiles and the curve of her lips, the delight of her voice steals the breath from a growing boy’s lungs. “And to you,” Oh how sullen he sounds, how strange his voice when it comes out so low and so self-conscious. He blinks his thick lashes that lie across his cheeks as he looks to his feet and thinks how green the grass is and how comforting it is to look there than at this woman and her beauty he has no words for.
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
The boy is beautiful – though she quickly corrects the thought, for men were not beautiful… they were handsome. But oh, how he shines with the vibrance of the sun, all gold and dark in the best ways. There is a certain hesitancy to his approach which she finds endearing, even as her smile grows warmer, grateful that the stranger who approached her was a kindly sort.
Her eyes dance with excitement as they scan the others, still in wonder that she’d managed the courage to leave her home and find her way here. It was a huge step forward for the mare, and though nerves battled with her wish for free will, she was happy to have arrived. There was just too much to see – brightly colored flowers, dancers with brilliantly hued scarves, musicians who played jovial tunes. Not far from her, a Eurasian Curlew sat upon her nest, weaving little bits of flower into the branches to create a festive and colorful appearance… and as Solstice watches the bird, she smiles, nodding from a distance at the mother who rested upon her eggs, before turning back to the colt with an excited whisper.
“Would you believe it if I told you this was the first time I left my home?” Home. It had a nice ring to it, she thought, warmth filling her breast as she thought of all which had come to pass since arriving in Novus. Then, she had been a scared girl, brave in her conviction toward building a better life, but afraid of the consequences. Time had healed some of that, though there were moments that panic still took over her senses. But she was learning to heal, learning to count and to measure her breath until it steadied again.
As she addressed Leonidas, a small black kitten mewed beside her, and Solstice reached to lift it to her back in one smooth motion. The dark kitten kneads Solstice for a moment before nestling into the feathers at her withers, wrapping herself into a tight ball and purring as she watched the stallion with an unusual purple gaze. “This is Luna,” the mare explains, “And I am Solstice.” The name comes easier now, almost naturally – a sense of identity instead of a curse. And she smiles brightly beneath the springtime sun, her heart blossoming with joy as she stands with the boy.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Leonidas knows nothing of the way society expects boys to be handsome and girls to be beautiful. He would not mind if he was deemed beautiful instead of handsome. A tiger was beautiful, made even more so by its savage uncompromising danger. Even as it took a life between it’s unyielding jaws, Leonidas still thought it was beautiful.
The girl watches a bird within a tree as it builds its nest. It pays the horses no heed, too absorbed in its task. All across Novus Leonidas had seen spring birds returning from their migrations and falling into pairs. The warm spring-wood was more alive than it had been through its skeletal winter. Leonidas delighted in the summer rains.
Tipping his head back toward the girl, his long ears twitch. Home. He thinks on the word, his understanding of it had changed. Yet even then he thinks his understanding of home is different to hers. At first, home, for him, had been his wild wood and wherever he chose to lay his head. Then, his uncle had told him that home is wherever his family is. Frowning, the boy asks with a voice deep, befitting his growing body, “You have not left your family before?” All Leonidas has known is leaving his family and the return of his twin who watched him with his eyes and made them feel so unfamiliar.
The girl lifts a cat up to her back and smiles as it kneads along her spine. “Luna,” Leonidas murmurs back and does not understand how the girl and her cat are named after celestial patterns and bodies. The name just sounds pretty upon his tongue.
((~ Good gracious my muse is GONE. Please forgive this terrible, terrible post.))
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
You have not left your family before? His question roars loudly in the girl’s psyche, as if it taunted her with the irony of it. In that moment, Solstice knew she could balk or allow the sadness to swallow her whole, but she doesn’t. Instead, a strange realization washes over her, that in this new world she could take up any identity she wanted. In Novus, she didn’t have to be the sheltered idol on a temple pedestal with worshippers crying at her feet. She didn’t have to be a prisoner chained upon animal skins in a nomad’s tent. She didn’t have to be anything but free, anything but what she wanted. So while she could dwell on the truth that she’d wondered and wished how her life might have been different if she’d known a family’s love, she doesn’t.
“I have no family.” There is no malice in her words, only a slight hint of sadness as she grieves what might have been. “What’s it like? Having someone to come home to?” Her question is innocent enough, even as it speaks volumes of depth. For she had never known love – the love of a mother, a father, a brother, a sister… even the affection or touch of a lover.
There are those who would argue that family are the ones you choose, but Solstice was too new to this place to have begun to form such relationships. In time though, perhaps she would. Perhaps she would find her father figure, her guiding mother, her beloved. Hope blossomed at the thought of it, for Solstice would want nothing more in life than belonging and affection. And as she wonders at the boldness of her question, the girl blushes in embarrassment, hoping that he wouldn’t think her a loon for thinking out loud.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
She is too new and he is too forgotten and wild to build up family here. He shrugs, “i don’t know.” He whispers, busying himself with inspecting a tulip’s opening petals. “I do not have a family either.” Leonidas murmurs and does not know how his answer is an insult. He has a mother, a father, a sister, an uncle, a grandfather, a grandmother… they all exist, they all are somewhere.
But they all left him.
And Leonidas grew up forgetting. Love became a thin layer of dust over the memories of his family. It became a lost thing, like myths.
She has no family, has never known such. The wildling boy has merely forgotten his, become so tangled up in his own sorrow and loneliness he has left no space for remembering and loving.
A blush runs warm as sunlight across her cheek. Her lips paint a small, shy smile upon her lips. He gazes at it and wonders what beauty of the woods compares to this. A waterfall with its diamond waters struck through with sunlight? A bluebell carpet within a springtime thicket? The creeping of dawn light, falling as rays through the pillars of trees?
There is nothing beautiful like company, the boy is quickly learning. Nothing more beautiful than the real smiles of those who laugh and smile, with him and at him and for him. Adulthood has nearly changed the colt from boy to man, nearly, nearly. But there is nothing in the way he gazes at her with wide, warm eyes. He is every part a youth, learning his place in the world.
“I think it would be nice,” Leonidas whispers at last, “to return home to a family.”
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
“I think it would be nice... to return home to a family.” Solstice smiles. “I think so too,” she whispers to the boy, stepping boldly forward to plant a soft kiss upon his cheek. It is not a romantic gesture, merely a warm one, as she smiles bright as the sunlight before stepping back and busying herself with watching the flowers once more. There is an easy stillness as she stands beside Leonidas, flicking an occasional glance toward him, as if wondering what pain and loss he had seen behind the warmth of his golden gaze. She aches to know more of the boy, of his story and his lostness… but she does not ask. Instead, Solstice simply lets the birdsong wash away the sadness, smiling toward the sun as its rays caress her wings.
“I hope I see you again… “ she says to the boy, without a name, without a family. “Perhaps in the gardens of Delumine? They are as beautiful as this – different – more tamed perhaps… but beautiful all the same.” The pride of Delumine, Ipomoea had called them. That, and their cherished library.
She cannot know the politics of this world, that some belong to courts and others roam wild and free. But she knows there is something in Delumine, something she hadn’t experienced before. Belonging. Home. Perhaps even family, if time would lend itself to build such a thing. Maybe the boy could find what he was searching for there too, in the garden, or the quiet woods. If her own story was any indicator, he would certainly be welcome there… for she knew the people of Delumine as a kindly sort, welcoming and generous.
“I should get back… they might wonder where I’ve gone to.” and she gives the boy one last smile before returning to the Dawn Court, more hopeful than before, that he might find his way. She is a bit sad to go, to leave the boy to his thoughts in the flowers, but perhaps that is just what he needs. And Solstice knows she is stronger for braving the world outside her now-familiar court, finding beauty in the wilds of Novus, and curiosity enough to warm her longing soul.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
There is a peace, Leo thinks, to drowning in this woman’s quiet happiness. It submerges him and he goes. He sinks with relieved delight. Being beside her, the glow of her wings, so much like buttermilk, is like forgetting his pain and yet remembering it, feeling it eased with her quiet delight.
Though she wonders of the pain that draws itself in shadows across his cheeks and lips, she does not ask. He would be grateful if he knew. He had fled too many times - he is a boy too wild, too flight to face even his own sorrows that hunt him like predators. They fall from the lips of girls who look at him and find him wanting. Even the girl whose blood is his, whose body mirrors his own, who he lay tangled with in the muted still of their shared womb.
The boy blinks and tips his chin up to the sky to see what Solstice sees. She hopes to leave him and ah, his familiar ache returns like a bruise. Leonidas blinks slowly and sighs softly. But his ears fall to his head, “It should not be tame.” The wildling grouses, imagining a flower forced to grow and conform. He has never conformed, he lives in his wild places and will not be tamed by the wants of the courts and their busy city places.
But then she is gone. Her parting is like the setting sun and his body is colder, darker without her beside him. The boy stays for a time and then turns too, disappearing into the dark solitude of his woods, his home.
