holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
The boy tips up his chin to peer at the light that splits and falls between the wild wood leaves. It lands upon his skin, bejewelling him in gold, brightening the golden fawn markings upon his back. Above him, far, far above him, the sunlight skips across weathered stone that arches high and graceful across the forest’s ceiling. It is a stone walkway, its steps decrepit and loose that spiral up and up to meet it. The walkway branches a cavern that plunges down, deep beyond the forest floor and down, down into a deep maw and throat that leads into the earth’s core.
He peers into that dark, deep chasm and imagines the monsters that writhe there. He imagines the soldiers that once stood atop the battlements (to which the bridge reaches across the chasm) and pointed their weapons down into the menacing dark. He stands like his uncle might once have and imagines filling that chasm up with water that rises spitting and roaring up to its brim. He imagines being the fabled queen who carries her bow and in his mind he loosens a whole quiver full arrows. They whistle their way down into the deep.
Leonidas rears with the might of a forest king and plunges for the edge. His small, muddied hooves land upon the stone lip of the chasm. Rocks and soil fall loose, tumbling like bells into the dark. He listens until their rattle is swallowed up, he crow calls into the chasm. A victor’s shout that have all the trees turning to behold their forest boy. A thousand boys shout back at him from the deep-dark. And suddenly shadows fly up from the black maw. They spiral up in claw and feathers, bursting out past the boy and into the light.
He shouts, he laughs like reeds and chases the bats that flee the dark. Up and up the spiraling, ruinous stairs Leo climbs. Up and up as nimble as a deer, as fast as a boy who makes his bed in the woodland and knows little else. The stone steps crumble, great gouges forming in the steps as he leaps from one to the next until the bridge opens up before him. At the top, high as a mountain, the colt rears, feet slashing at the air as the bats flee past him and away into the veil of leaves. He shouts after them, a mighty victor and a child’s growl joins him. Leaping, stumbling, scrambling, his cheetah cub has bounded out from the cover of brushes and clambers after her familiar. Her pin-claws grip into the stone as she pulls herself up and runs along to his side to peer over the crumbling bridge and down into the black below.
Leaves rustle, a twig snaps and the boy startles, he turns, his necklace of vines and twigs and golden thread swinging about his throat. He watches the forest floor, suddenly as sharp eyed as the memory of the ancient soldiers stood around him. He waits still and silent until a figure emerges from the brush. She steps into the golden light and is the pale dark of the moon. Secrets lie in the silver shadow whispers of deep dapples across her torso and limbs. A boy blinks slow as he wonders what piece of the moon this girl might be. At once dreams of war are gone as swiftly as the final vestiges of night are swallowed by the day. In every place that he is molten gold, she is silverlight and oh how his eyes darken like night to behold her. Upon her skin he can draw a thousand pictures of the woodland at night, painted by the colours that draw across her skin.
He studies every inch of her, silent, watchful, as she moves further out into the glen. As she steps into the shadow of the bridge, only then does Leonidas rouse from his awe. His ears fall to his skull, his nape lowering in challenge as he leans toward the edge and down to where the little girl stands. “Stop right there!” He shouts and the trees groan around them. He holds her in his gaze, imagining it was not just a look but an arrow pointed straight down towards her. Though he thinks, to truly shoot her might be to pull the moon out of the sky and he likes the moon and her light just how they are: silver and beautiful.
At his side the cheetah cub’s hackles rise as she lets out a low warning that peels from her like a moan. She lies down at his side, her paws curled over the edge as she peers down at the strange girl below. Her lips part, a baby hiss ripping past her small teeth.
@Avesta <3 | "speaks" | notes: Yay! In an actual thread! <3
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
She had started watching him the moment he started to look at the deep and dark tunnel. The forest fronds are heavy and noon-dew wet across her back. Here, deep in the woods and the black, she is little more than a glint of moonlight through the thick, sunlight, dappled foliage. The black scales twining up her legs are almost nothing more than another bit of bark rising up hungry through the soil. Even her eyes, coated in black, are made to blend in with the dark leaves and silver-dusted moon-flowers left behind from a time when her mother walked this path.
And as she watches him chase the screaming bats she imagines herself a predator in the tall-grass, flicking her tail impatiently as she waits for the mice and the moles to settle down to sleep. At her side Foras is watching too, shoulders slung low and close enough for the bones of each to brush each-other beneath his bone-white fur. He does not growl or roar. Avesta, if it weren't for the kiss of winter ever racing between their thoughts, could forget he was anything more than a wind blowing in from the distant mountains.
When the boy rears slashing at the golden air (at her air!) she finally moves from the copse of leafy darkness. Foras follows close behind and the grass tickles his fur when he walks between the rocks sprouting weeds. His paws make no sound. Avesta makes all the sound. Her hooves peel out like cracked glass bells on the stone. Her neck makes a hollow curve as she looks up at him and his young cat. Just as her lips are about to crack a smile and her voice is about to sing a dark hello, he speaks.
Avesta does not care for the words he's saying and the way his cub is growling at her.
She does not care for it all. The sea rises in her-- primordial, vengeful, deep, black.
“I will do no such thing.” Her voice is a dull whip-sharp slash of sea-water on the shore. When she tosses her horn it's in a warning arc (a mockery of the way her mother's dragon swings his head whenever he catches her trying to run off again). At her side Foras growls and his fur makes a great ridge down his spine. The place where his paws meet the stones starts to seem more like a suggestion of something like earth, as if the stone has forgotten how to bear weight. His cheeks turn red and slick like tendon and bone.
Avesta drops her nose to the ground and whispers to the loose stones, wake up, wake up. A stone rises to flutter around and around her horn when she looks up at the boy on the ruins again. When she steps forward it's slow enough that he has all the time in the world to watch the way her shoulder moves, her knee bends, and then the way she steps forward like this entire forest belongs to her.
Then she smiles, it's a curl of bone through her black lips. She closes her eyes until her face is nothing more than black scale an moon-bright skin (until she looks like a beast risen from the deep instead of a girl). And when she opens them it's with a whisper of sound softer than the night wind. strike true.. Foras presses his shoulder to her knee. Together they watch the stone soar through the air at the boy and his cheetah like an arrow loosed from her mother's bow. She hopes it might sting the same.
As it's flying towards him she takes another step closer to the ruins. Deep inside her the sea is still roaring, and howling, and slashing at the shore.
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
He stands upon his archway of rubble and stone like a warrior. His antlers point down toward this girl, gilded like the finest of weapons Midas himself might possess.
From beneath the fall of his forelock he watches the girl where she stands like a shard of moonlight – all sharp, young edges and a wicked horn like a spear. His eyes trail over the scales that mark her a dragon girl. They are black as the night that stretches out above them and reaches from corner to corner of Novus.
Leonidas’ gold is a torch in the night. He is a lamp, a spark to set the world alight. But the girl is dark mystery and his gaze trails along the curve of her eyelid, where scales gather like tears and fall, thinning to a point upon her cheek. Even her tears are made to end the world with their wicked sharp.
Blue runs through her mane as fast flowing as a river running out to sea. He has never seen a girl quite like her. But Leonidas has not seen many girls. And those he has seen are spun in gold and set into ivory and lavender.
The gems along her necklace gleam like beetles and bewitched the boy trails along the intricate lace. The black holds him like a maze and he tumbles down the rabbit hole of their beauty.
I will do no such thing.
Ah, the boy might have continued his studying, his admiring, but her words – however spoken like an angel’s cry - are enough to snap him from his adoration. He stands up taller, no longer a lovesick boy with soft brown eyes warmed by the sight of a pretty girl. Her words, as sharp as a No! cried out in defiance, bring him back to the boy he is. A feral boy who makes his bed in leaves and flowers, who dreams not of girls but woodland gods and gods of Time that can split worlds in two.
It is a good job he is a wild boy then, for the silver girl throws a stone at him and smiles like a leviathan. Beautiful beast. Is what he thinks as he steps to the side and the stone snicks along his shoulder. It is enough to bruise, enough to make him cry out, scandalized. She may be beautiful, but she is not above his revenge and the boy is scooping a fellow stone from bridge. He throws it to her and his magic pushes it fast, faster, faster. It skips through time and space pushed on by his time magic and reaches for her. Before it can even reach her, the boy is halfway down the stairs. Another second and he pauses, savage and bright with his outrage. Leonidas is leonine, a greater cat to the cub who snarls and hisses at his feet. Her silver hackles are raised, her thin, pin-like claws digging into the stone.
“Artemis.” He hisses, naming her a goddess of the hunt. A wicked, beautiful girl made for savage things. Artemis: an untouchable girl. He bears his teeth and blinks his sun-bright eyes. He is the daylight to the night that weaves around her.
“This is my fortress.” He says of his ruins, “And I don’t let just anyone in.” And down his brow tilts until a dozen prongs point to her like accusing fingers, like daggers made to end goddesses. “Especially not pretty girls with a penchant for stone throwing.” And he laughs like a fearless boy as his cheetah cub leaps to the ground and slinks toward the girl and her wolf pup.
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
The black-sea is rising against all her youthful, innocent bones. It's black as ore and as salted as a hundred desert tears. It's an endless storm in the silence between their rocks turned to weapon instead of earth. And it's fluttering inside her over and over again like a wave against the shore. Like it wants her to fly, to soar high above the earth like a god with not religion. She feels like an undiscovered beast, something more than a girl born of royalty and magic.
At her side, Foras, watches the boy and his silence is no storm. He is ice white, bone white, death white and each tip of his hair seems like a suggestion of snow and reality. We could make the stairs clench at his legs like snakes. The wolf says with no more than a touch of his frozen nose against his unicorn's knee. Avesta's only answer is a sickle smile, moon-bright and pale. She does not need to reply, he knows her soul (the dark of it) better than she does. The boys comes tumbling down the stairs they say nothing more about stairs-- even when his rock bruises her skin.
A beast in her snarls and still she does nothing more than smile her scythe smile and wait for him to come tumbling down the stairs like a young wildcat wishing it was a lion.
Avesta has been raised by a dragon. She already knows how to be a lion.
And so when he laughs with his snarling cub she only cocks her head like an eagle looking down at a rippling lake. Her horn is as dark as his antlers are gold and she rejoices that she is not so dipped in brightness. She steps closer, fearless as a dragon, and her horn cants to tap out a single sharp note against an antler. Her bruised hip throbs like a reminder of their weapons.
Foras doesn't snarl back at the wildcat. He only looks on quiet, and curious, and dangerous, like a monster looks at sunlight and wonders at the awful warmth of it. But when Avesta steps closer he follows at her heels like a shadow that hasn't learned yet how to be dark. Soon--
She pauses to look at his wings (like a promise that hasn't yet delivered) and his golden eyes (like trapped young-suns). Artemis, he says. It reminds her of a story her mother told of a hunter running as fleet-footed as a doe after a hound. She thinks she would never want to be destined for the holly and ivy, dirt and root. Yet she doesn't correct him when she steps closer still.
Avesta blinks and she knows that her eyes are nothing more than a smear of darkness on her pale, dappled face when she does. On her brow her horn aches like wanting thing. “And if I took it from you--” She opens her eyes and is so very glad they are of the sea instead of the sun. “would you still think me pretty?”
Her gemstone and lace necklace sighs against her skin when she shakes her heard. Avesta does not think she wants to be pretty. Tame things are pretty and she is so very, very far from tamed.
Inside her chest her heart trembles like a caught hawk.
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
She steps forward and the touch of their horns is an eerie note in this too-still place. All of the island sings with it, he thinks. All of the island stirs and turns its attention upon the two children who stand at the foot of an ancient, decrepit fort. Rot and ruin claims stone and wood. It crawls with roots and vines over every inch of this once whole citadel. Now the flagstone floor is little more than a carpet of leaves. Now the bridge is near collapse and dust billows from its aging spine in an osteoporotic sigh.
But for all its decay, for all its crumbling skeleton, this fort is the grandest place this boy has been. History is sugar upon his tongue, it is mystery in his lungs, breathed in and out like magic. Behind the boy is not a ruin, but a grand fort with ghosts and ghouls, dragons and monsters at its door.
None are so great a foe to him as this girl who steps like moonlight into the bright glow of him. As the moon is bold before the sun. so Avesta is before Leo. His eyes fall to the jut of her hip, where curved flesh is bruised with the strike of his stone. An apology is as urgent upon his tongue as a plea, but he does not speak it. Not when she looks at him with a dragon’s wiles. Not when she steps so close to him that night is no longer a place across the sea, but here, tangible and real. Her darkness, her silver, her stars, press upon his skin. They fill the spaces of him where his sunlight does not reach. In his lungs is a stardust he had not tasted since his mother’s disappearance. Entwined within that is a tendril of smoke that scolds the tender tissue of his chest.
Still his ears ring with the meeting of their horns and he knows that this is what magic sounds like as it both forges and ruins. That sound makes all the island vibrant. It makes all the foliage tremble in their dark, strange shadows. She peers at him, through the mask of midnight black scales - slick as water and silk. Each one gleams like an eye and every one is pointed to him, her true eye watching him with pearlescent clarity.
SHe dares him and the sun laughs at the moon. He is the light to her dark and his lips draw into a tight line, black as the earth beneath a setting sun. His ears fall and the boy’s skull sways, his ivory teeth bare themselves beneath the moon and if her horn is a wanting thing then his antlers lust for the magic and song of violence too.
“Yes,” he says without hesitance or murmur. Yes he would still think her pretty, yes he would loathe her and plot all the ways to take back what is his… Yes, yes, yes, ”for even beautiful things are violent and cruel.” Leonidas says of her and not of her. He looks at her eyes, the fearsome line of her shadow-stained lips where she stands so close he could touch her. He has touched many girls - to take tears from their cheek, to comfort them, to show them he loved them but…
He doesn’t touch Avesta. His lips tingle with their asking, but he presses them more tightly closed. His breath is the only part of him he allows to touch the moonlight of her skin; for afterall, the moon and the sun were never meant to touch.
Slowly Leonidas’ lips lift into a warm smile, maybe it is to Aster a balm enough to ease the barbs of his last statement. “But what makes you believe you can take it from me?” The boy laughs into the surrounding trees, into the no-man’s land between them. With laughter still rivalling the war-cry of their meeting horns, the feral boy nips toward the base of her throat. But never to touch...
“We can share you know.” Leonidas offers with a wicked gleam upon his lips. He begs her to say no, he begs her to say yes. “You can have one side and i shall have the other.” The boy lies with a tongue as smooth as silk.
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
She likes them better like this, with teeth flashing in the dark like panthers in the shadows and the moonlight. This feels like the realist moment in her young life. In Denocte everything is gemstones, stories and sorrow. There is the church-tree and the gardens with jasmine twisting around copper archways like comets. The touches her skin has ever known have all been soft as a wish and tainted with love and affection. But this is cold as ice and something in it sparks ice-fire in her blood. It feels like freedom.
Avesta is almost surprised to discover that she likes the darkness and promise of violence more. Her nerves are sparking wildfires across her skin and her heart is thrilling a war-song under all her sinew. And when his teeth flash white as her mother's arrows in the dark crease of his lips something in her is saying not to show him all the ways in which she wants to be as terrible as a storm. Instead she only watches with that strange look on her face and the darker look gathering shadows in her eyes. Like death on a wave, all curls of white froth and brine worn ropes.
And when he says, yes, it sounds to her like that wave crashing on the shore of a mortal man. It sounds like a riptide heading back out to the deep with the sand and rocks held tight as a heart. “We must be.” Avesta thinks of the girl by the sea with her legs begging for a race, she thinks of her mother stringing up an arrow to burn away the blackness. She thinks of all the things she's know that are beautiful and violent enough to take the world (like fable, like the sea, like her heart). Something in her small chest bellows and makes her skin tremble like a leaf learning how to turn belly up for the rain.
His teeth come calling at her throat and even though she wants to snap back, to let her wolf learn all his secrets, she only stays still as father often is. She remembers asking her mother about the scars ringing her throat, of how they looked like shark teeth marks instead of horse. Avesta knows what to think of boys who reach for the throats of beautiful things and so she only leans back enough that the point of her horn can swing towards his own throat.
Avesta does not think of forgiveness in the ways that her mother once did. She doesn't think of it at all. Nor does she let herself think of how his smile looks warm enough to case away what little chill there is in the air.
“Half of your castle of ruins wouldn't be enough.” The tip of her horn almost waivers in the wind, but when Foras presses his shoulder against her knee it steadies. Below it she smiles and the looks is no less strange than the storm pulling at shadows that's caught in her eyes. “But I never said I had any real interest in your fortress at all.” Avesta quivers when another cool wind comes rushing through the trees.
Only in the taking, her tongue and her storm beg her to say in the silence. And for the first time Avesta does not listen.
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
She is the silver of a blade and yet the softest sweep of moonlight. She is the cold of metal upon chill fingers and the cool damp of dew on frosty morning. Being with this girl is like being stood before a mountain. She is beautiful, untouchable and those who dare to navigate her brave the jaggedness of her wild beauty. She would wound you as she opens the world to you.
Ah! She is so far from the woodlands in which he feels safe and whole. Already Leonidas knows how to survive and fight the wild beasts that prowl through the brush hungry for a feast. Already he can count the ways she is different to every girl he has ever known.
We must be. And Leonidas says nothing in answer but lets his smile fall as she stands, mountain-still, against his teeth as he nips toward her. His lips are grim as her horn lowers to him and his antlers tangle with her horn in a symphony of silver and gold. What world is this that steals parents from children and creates beautiful things to be savage and dangerous because they must be?
But the fae boy does not question her. He does not even wonder about the truth of her words. Leo has felt the cruel bite of this world, he knows how beautiful, defenseless things are quashed and extinguished like a lamp. He has seen bodies floating lifeless from an island that crumbled into nothing.
This beautiful girl is nothing like them, with the tongue of a viper and a horn like a sword, there is nothing defenceless about her. Leonidas faces not a girl but a weapon. He does not even think to be afraid of her. Not when she is more gilded and intricate than the finest swords he saw hung within Terrastella’s palace.
No longer is he surprised when she casts aside his offer though frustration burns within his veins as hot as lava. She turns his blood to acid and at once the boy is not a child made of soil and sunlight. No, he is the sun, bearing his antlers like a diadem of twisted golden thorns. The flowers around them wilt and die as if death touches them, as if Time has grown weary of their slow bloom.
Leonidas tears his gaze from her for it has become painful and irksome to feel how she divides him into two. Ire is hot upon his tongue, it burns like the parts of him that look upon the girl and adore all the ways she is dagged and sharp and wonderful.
He thinks he might love to hate her. (He doesn’t know the meaning of hate).
Avesta smiles, dark like a storm and Leonidas cannot decide whether to press his lips to hers or hiss, angry and feral. Instead his lips pull into their own dark line. He steps forward, daylight pressing into moonlight. Above them even the moon groans as she feels Time pushing her on, on, on at his command.
He sees the way the tip of her horn trembles and steadies as her wolf presses close. “Then leave.” The boy says, his voice low and deeper than it has ever been. He thinks she might have aged him. He thinks he is not the boy he was when he first set eyes on her only moments before. He thinks that she has taught him many things about the cruelty of girls. He fears he might follow her if she does leave, abandon his ruins and all their mysteries in favour of hers.
