in the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
T
he morning after the flood, there is little left in his cottage that is salvageable. His dried herbs and medicines are soaked and in disarray; his diaries so wet the pages rip and tear, and the ink has run to the point they are ineligible.
The gaping hole in the roof will require significant carpentry skills to repair. Pravda does not believe he has any belongings that will not require some sort of replacement or, if nothing else, repair.
Around the cottage, the lowermost branches of trees are strewn with blankets and other bedding materials. Books are laid out, in a relatively orderly fashion, on the driest of the blankets in a pocket of sunshine. It is one of those mornings, after a storm, that seems so pristine there couldn’t have possibly been a storm to shake the rafters, to flood the streets, to set the Viride trembling with the wind. No: the forest is fresh and new with the rain, everything greener, more vivid. The birds sing almost too merrily.
Pravda, meanwhile, feels more disheveled than he can remember having felt, since he was a child. A child in his first life, that is.
His braids are unkempt; his eyes are dark, and tired, from a sleepless night spent at the mercy of the storm. He stands watching the books dry, a bit aimless in his—current circumstances. Pravda has only read of such tragedies, he has never been forced to endure one. His mind is still filled with the cracking of the ceiling and the cold running of the water through the floor of his cottage; he glances up towards the sun dappling through the trees, and then toward the ruined diaries.
Prigovora sprawls out in another patch of sunshine, yawning widely. His teeth catch that same light, and Pravda flinches at the high-pitched screech Prigovora makes with the gesture.
Behind him, the main beam of the cottage cracks and folds in half.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
It rained, relentlessly.
The boy follows the new streams of floodwater that hurry their way through the woods. They bustle around stones and down over dips and sweeps of the forest floor. The woodland princeling hears the squelch of his feet as they sink into sodden earth. The mud splatters his knees. There is no part of him that is not soiled by mud and rainwater. Across his back are the seeds of trees, loosed by the heavy rain.
Against his muscling and growing neck, Leonidas’ mane lies in tangled ropes, dipped in gold at its ends. The boy is a golden coin dropped into the dirt, his worth forgotten about. But he gleams, roughly, patiently waiting for rediscovery. But until that moment, he meanders through his woodland, until he reaches the mid-wood cottage.
It has not faired the storm well. Where the boy lay beneath the rain and shivered at the cold sting of the wet night, the cottage succumbed to the winds, breaking apart beneath the storm’s relentless ire. A monster lies outside a steamed window (such is the water inside the cottage) and the boy turns his head to gaze at the dinosaur as it lounges.
It seems smaller now, that terrible monster. To a newborn boy its mouth was so very large, its teeth so very sharp. Yet, to look upon it now, it is small (yet no less formidable…). Leonidas steps curious and brave out of the trees. He is no fool, he knows what a monster this creature is, that it was only the cry of its master that meant Leonidas was alive to gaze upon it this day. And gaze upon it he does, with ears pinned and his chin tight into his chest. There is admiration, respect and ire in the boy’s gaze as he beholds the creature that split him from his sister. He has not seen her since, and whether it was the creature that caused their separation or not, Leonidas remembers only how he fell to sleep tangled with Aster’s warm body and awoke, his twin gone and the monster standing over him, hungry and savage.
Leonidas does not know the depth of hate and anger and a need for justice, until he stands and stares upon the slumbering beast this morning. The wild-wood boy’s teeth clack together and he does not flinch when the main beam of the cottage shatters (as if broken by a boy’s vengeance) and the roof tumbles in. Outside, flowers budding for spring bloom and die until the space around the monster is shrivelled and full of death. It is a sign, the wild boy thinks, of the things that are to come.
in the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
B
easts do not sleep as men do. No. The creature rests in the sunshine lightly; and when he feels the weight of eyes upon him, his own open with reptilian coldness. The raptor regards his surroundings; until he makes out the silhouette of the wild boy in the wild wood. But the raptor, aside from a coiling and uncoiling of his great tail, does not move.
If Pravda has forgotten, Prigovora never forgets.
He is, perhaps, too busy appraising the damage to his cottage to notice the wild boy’s approach. More likely, it is because Leonidas moves with the silence and sure-footed grace of a feral creature. How often does a wolf ghost through the woods, unseen and unheard? More than any of us might ever know or understand.
Such it is, with Leonidas.
The boy has returned, Prigovora alerts Pravda through their bond. He will never grow accustomed to the beast’s voice; the primordial chill of it, like the first touch of winter, or the eyes of a hawk through the trees. Pravda feels it grating upon his mind; metal against metal.
Nevertheless, Pravda’s response is immediate. He snaps his head to appraise their “guest.” He does not enjoy being caught so unawares, or so disheveled; and as such, it takes him longer to recognize him than he would like. But then Prigovora floods Pravda’s mind with memories of ravenous hunger and a young colt resting in the underbrush, more like a fawn than a horse.
“Ah,” Pravda says, with recognition.
He can still hear the voice that asked, trembling, Why are you bonded with a monster? Are you dangerous too?
Pravda had never answered.
“I’m glad to see you are well.” Pravda’s voice is carefully measured; polite, but cool. He is no fool. There is no telling what sort of man the boy has grown to become; and that unanswered question sits heavily in Pravda's breastbone.
Because, child.
Because, the truths of life are more monstrous, more dangerous, than any beast with fangs.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Oh Leonidas is trembling, within, within. Without he is quiet and formidable as marble. Yet inside he is the chaos of an earthquake. It is what rage and grief do, is it not? Venegance shines upon him, turning his golden antlers into tines of swords made for death and a boy’s vengeance that will take him from child to man. It tail is still, it longs to switch across the grasses, yet he remains still as a stag. It is what the wild wood has taught him, to creep like a wolf, to stand proud like a stag, to intimidate like a tiger.
He blinks his gold, gold eyes. They are almost avian, yet nothing like the primordial stare that levels with them. Prigovora (not that Leonidas knows the monster’s name) watches lazy and yet dangerous in a single stunning moment.
From the crumbling home the monster’s bonded steps. It is a casual exchange, as if children have not been parted at their hands, as if a child’s blood did not come so close to litering the forest floor. That quiet calm enrages the feral youth. He drags a restless toe through the dirt and the woodland garden suddenly grows wild and rough. It turns into jungle of large plants, left to grow, untouched by seasons. Time trips over itself in its hurry to answer the boy’s demand. Everything turns wild and strange and then dares to die.
Leonidas lets the garden wilt. Such is his rage, his ire. Slowly he turns his head to regard the man with all the arrogance of a king ready for war. His kingdom is his dispersed family this day. His subjects are gone, his sister merely a ghost, so infrequently he has seen her since her return. The boy rages for everything that is lost to him, but oh, it feels like a victory to lay it all before this man and his monster and turn them into the focus of his every drop of ire.
“Are you?” The youth says like a man, a god, a king. He smiles a mocking grin. But it is fleeting, for all he knows in this moment is anger, anger, anger and the sweet taste of vengeance that begs him to know it better.
And he will, he will dance with vengeance tonight.
in the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
T
he forest holds its breath.
Perhaps it is the silence after the flood; but Pravda is no fool. He recognizes the wildness in the boy’s demeanor, the threading of scars like constellations across the boy’s body. He has had a hard life. And that hard life is epitomized, now, in his hard and wild stare. The garden around him wilts; and Pravda recognizes the magic but does not comment on it.
His quiet observance is nearly an insult, to one who rages so evidently; to one who holds himself as a young prince. Pravda does not empathize with this type of anger. He has never felt it, passionate and righteous. His feelings are never warm. They are always cold or, if not cold, then—
(Then he tries not to feel them at all).
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Pravda asks, but there is nothing caustic in his tone. It is genuine. “Would you—well. I would offer you something to drink, but unfortunately all my stores are damaged from the storm.”
Prigovora has yet to move. He blinks the sunlight lazily from his eyes and stretches out lethargically. Then, he yawns. And when he yawns his mouth gapes; every sharp, bright tooth catches the sunlight he basks in and when he snaps his jaws closed it is to glance at Leonidas with grinning eyes.
Meanwhile, Pravda’s memory of the boy is colored by shame; it is a shame to see him grown, and scarred; it is a shame that, when they had met, he had not had control over his bonded.
A shame, a shame, a shame.
But when you have lived thousands of years, a shame is of little significance.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Maybe when Leonidas has existed for thousands of years too, he will also think of shame and anger as fleeting things. But not now. Now he is a young boy, brimful with hormones that tip him towards adulthood. He stands upon the precipice tipping between adolescence and manhood. But this place is more than just a tipping point. It is a storm, swirling about him. Its waves are high and cruel, its clouds thick and moody. The boy feels himself snap between emotions with all the speed and ferocity of lightning finding the earth. It is what brings him to stand, tall and proud and stretched with vengeance.
Such vengeance might warp him, if it did not suit the wildling boy so well. It darkens the gold of his leonine gaze until it burns like lava. It arches his muscled neck until he is more god than boy. It turns his antlers from beautiful crown into gilded weapon.
His lips curl into a snarl and as he steps forward, it is with the prowl of a lion, the slink of a cheetah. The monster yawns and Leonidas’ gaze skip, skip, skips from one long, sharp tooth onto the next. Each tooth gleams like a bone sword in the lazy post-storm light.
A drink is a mundane offering from a man who screamed at his bonded and pulled it back mere moments before it ripped a fae-boy open. Leonidas stands and wonders what art the scars would have made upon his skin - if he had ever survived it at all.
But it is not himself that Leonidas is here to avenge. Neither is it a drink of water for his parched throat. “I do not want any of your charity,” the wildling snarls. He needs nothing from this man except an opportunity for vengeance. Bold as a king before a mere pest, Leonidas stalks toward the beast and lowers his head until his tines point as wicked claws and daggers at the raptor. “I want only a fair fight.” Just the opportunity to pour every ounce of his magic into the beast and watch it age and crumble before its time. A just cause, the wild-wood boy thinks, for the sister he lost that night.
