[AW] the changeling [fire]

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

In my dreams, my mother is braiding my hair and singing me a story about a girl who is cursed.

Mirrors are too scared to show her reflection. They always crack when she passes, a spiderweb of impact-wound arching away from the imprint of her face. When she drinks from a well, it goes dry in a week, and, when she plucks dates and sweet pears, the crops all fall fallow and worm-ridden in her wake. She travels from town to town with her family, trailed by swarms of locusts and sudden flash floods, and it’s a wonder that all of them survive her. It’s a wonder, probably, that anyone does.

Her father, who always loved her the least of any of his daughters because she was so troublesome, engages her to a desert rattlesnake, in spite of her protests, and it tries to devour her on their wedding night; but the girl peels off skin after skin after skin, scale after scale after scale, and, when she has pulled off every single one of the snake’s false skins, she reveals that the creature in snakeskin is no snake at all. He thrashes in her grasp, wild-eyed and miserable, desert wind in a cage, god of many faces – she holds him still as a hawk, and a gust of wind, and a thousand-eyed dragon, and a half-formed teryr, and a cactus mid-flower, and one of the waterfalls that feed into the Oasis. He bites her and bleeds her and nearly sneaks out of her grasp time and time again, but she holds him fast, and, for the briefest moment, when the two of them are almost the same – or as close as they can be to it -, she leans forward and kisses him. (Mother doesn’t say it, but, in my mind, she bites his lips when she does; what kind of cursed girl could do otherwise?) After that, he settles, tamed as much as any shape-shifting serpent can be, and she settles a bit, too, because a cursed creature like that would never much hate her for being cursed, too.

They’re still out there, somewhere. Mother says that he made her like him, when she died, and now they skip across the dunes as gusts of wind at night, that you can see them in every little thing lost to the sands; that every time a peach goes rotten before it’s due or you find the shards of a mirror half-buried in the dunes and the rains come a few weeks earlier than expected, it’s because they’re passing through.

(If it’s true, I might know it, but I’m not telling.)

I know my mother too well to think that she believes in things like a true love’s kiss or happy endings, or – if she does, she only believes in them for Ambrose and I, and, even then, only halfway, half-hearted. What I think that she is trying to impress is technically persistence.

(What I think that she is trying to impress is that even strange girls, half-cursed or god-touched, can find their way in the world, their own little enclave where they will no longer be strange or cursed at all.)

--

This place wants to hurt me.

If I stray too close to the fire, I know that it will bite my heels like a hungry jackal. If I stray too close to the trees, I know that their roots will find every way that they can to trip me, short of reaching up out of the ground to wrap my ankles and pull me down themselves. The air smells sweet, and I don’t know what to do with the crowds. All I know is that the pulse of the landscape, the multi-colored smoke, even the soft blades of grass pressed gentle and green to my heels – all of them want to make a skeleton of me.

I’ve strayed too far from home again. Mother won’t be happy, when she catches me.

There are more people here than I have ever seen before in my life. Veritable swarms of them, swaying in the field like a vast carpet of multicolored waves. I linger near their edges, cagey, my heart throbbing against the edges of my ribcage. I do not know what it means to feel like you are being stalked by anything; most desert-born girls know the familiar prickle on the back of their neck that tells them they have crept too close to a sandwyrm, or that a teryr is watching them from above, or they know that, when they hear the mourn-whisper sound of jackals in the distance at night, they are in an intimate danger. I’ve never felt anything quite like that. Still. If I had to compare it to anything, the feeling that creeps my spine as I skirt the edges of the crowd is something like that.

I don’t know what to make of anything here. Fire-races and newborn seeds, shed-stars with broken eggshells, paints and jewels of colors that are nearly impossible in a desert, ones I only learned by watching passing merchants from a distance, crouched like a ghost in the shade of rocky outcroppings. I want to look at everything, and I want to run from it. The sweet-smoke air – colder than I am accustomed to by measures - is catching in my lungs whenever I breathe it in.

I settle by the paints, finally, half-entranced by their bright coloration and all the people painting designs on each other – friends and lovers, perhaps even strangers. But I am not like them. I look painted already, or carved, a thing made of stone-

And if I were to settle my eyes closed, if I were to hold my breath and stay silent in the growing shadows of the treeline, if I were to be perfectly silent, I am sure that I could make myself an unfitting part of the landscape, rather than anything like a girl at all.

(But a statue wouldn’t keep looking hesitantly towards those forbidden jars of paint; a statue wouldn’t tilt her lips just so, and a statue’s eyes wouldn’t gleam with something that is half-longing and half-fear and very nearly envy.)

---

for anyone || <3 || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

@

[Leonidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

She does look already painted. Like marble. Yet a wild-wood boy has never seen polished marble like her skin. Instead he thinks of her as the rough-cut stones he finds in the deepest gulleys of the wood. Their faces are like marble two toned with dark or light veins cutting through. If Leonidas were an educated boy he would know the stones tell him of their age, of the landscape. But he does not. Instead he just studies their beauty and then leaves them where he found them - treasure for other eyes to find.


Wandering through the fires this night, before he finds the marble girl stood still as a statue, the boy is thinking of Maeve and Aspara who have made him yearn to step out of his forest home. He shies away from the licking flames that dance and spit and hiss dangerous and unpredictable. Leonidas loathes fire, he has seen it swallow a whole corner of a wood before. He ran from it with the woodland creatures. The feral boy does not know why they keep the fires here, why they dance and run between them as if celebrating their light. Fires are wild and dangerous things.


Yet their light upon the gold of him is spectacular. The boy gleams like a god like a forest ablaze in autumn colours. He moves regal as a stag and dangerous as a cat. He skitters like a doe around the flames and yet turns into a fox as he slinks cunningly through the crowds, barely seen, unnoticed. The smell of smoke and city things cling to his skin and he shudders. The smell of sweet treats and hot drinks fill his nose and he turns to look at the stalls. Their scent is strange, unnatural for a boy used to staining his lips with the fruits of the wild. He has never had cooked food before. 


Turning from the stalls, it is then that he sees the girl, still, statuesque. She is young and small and slim. It is only then he realises how much he has grown. Yet he moves to her, princely, wildly. Her horns, his antlers share the same gold, but that is where they end. Her body is white and black, silver and gold. One wing black, one wing gold. He remembers a twin, a child whose limbs tangled with his in the womb. She was white and gold to his near black and gold. 


The boy comes to the white and gold side of this marble girl. He wants to press his muzzle into her neck and breathe her skin and fall into memories as he whispers sister against her skin. But this girl is not his blood, no matter her gold, no matter her ivory. Instead he slips out of the darkness and looks at her from beneath his thick lashes, heavy with smoke and reminiscence and gazes at her with pain and loss and a want she cannot right. He knows it, but he stands beside her and whispers so very nearly broken - his adolescent voice shattering over the octaves-, “Will you come to the woods with me?” Away from the fire. Away from the noise. For that is where is his peace is, but where loneliness grows as choking as the roots she imagines will rise up and kill her. That loneliness has sent this strangeling boy out into the midst of a strange and loud festival. He hopes to shed his loneliness here and bring a friend back to the woodland with him.


@Diana
“Speaking.”

credits

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

I am always lonely, and I am never lonely at all.

I have always thought that you could split me into parts, and I have never thought that you could do it evenly. When I am home, I am lonely, but I am never alone; I am alone in the way that shattered glass is alone, or in the way that one-half of a broken bowl is alone. (That is to say: I am alone because I am in pieces, because I am a collection of ill-fitted segments.) I am empty in the way that a glass is either not-full or overflowing, but never right at the rim.

When the boy approaches me, his long, dark lashes fawn-like over the bright gold of his eyes, I stand my ground. He is larger than I am, and older, and, unlike me, there is something about him that seems to belong in this place – it is in the deerlike curve of his antlers, and the gold trailing from his wings, and the way that he is dark as umber and ebony, like the trunk of a great and old tree. He comes closer to me, and closer, and then closer still, and, though my blue eyes slit, I do not say a single word, even at the sound of his mournful whisper, even when he beseeches me to go with him into the woods like some passing spirit.

I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him in the same way that I don’t trust the brambles, or the trees, or the stars in the night sky. I don’t trust him because I know that this place wants to swallow me whole, and I know that my knowing is not simple imagining. I look towards the forest that he hopes to draw me into, and, though I do not shudder, my heart skips-beat twice. When I look back at him, I don’t see anything less gaping. I see the woods that I do not want to enter, and I see bright, metal-gold eyes that want something from me, and I know that I don’t want to give him a thing-

(I do not think that I will want to give anyone a single thing in my entire life. See, Solis sparked me from nothing, and I’ve always been in pieces; and if there is anything that I have learned of what people think when they look at god-granted things, it is that they always stare at them with expectation. See, Solis sparked me from nothing, and he’s never told me why, or what he wants from me – but no matter what, I won’t give it. I am my own, not anyone else’s bright thing. No one’s. That is what the desert has given me; or maybe that is what I have given myself.)

When I look at him, I am not quite glaring, but there is no welcome in my reptile-eyed stare. I look into those too-bright eyes a bit coldly, raising my chin to look up at him as best I can. “Mother says,” I say, my eyes narrowing, “that I shouldn’t go anywhere with strangers, and you are certainly… strange.”

I am a strange thing, too. I am not quite fool enough to be unaware of that – but I do not say it with an empathetic familiarity. I say it in the way that I might say it to a hunting tiger, or to any other thing that might wish to lure me into a trap. What girl would be fool enough to follow a wolf into the depths of a wood that wishes to eat her alive?

I am not a girl. (I am not a wolf, either, but, if I tried, I think that I could be a viper.)

---

@Leonidas || <3 || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

@

[Leonidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

He does not know how her heart trips and dips as she looks to the woods. How can he when her eyes are set sharp as fangs? Upon his skin they sink deep. He might squirm beneath the hold of her eyes, if he were more rabbit and less fox. The girl has not moved. She is still made of perfect marble - midnight, moonlight, sunlight - every light a boy can think of. But her head turns, slowly, impassively as iron. It is a miracle the child moves at all. 


She is no balm for Leonidas’ loneliness. The cold of her still body, the cold of her eyes, the cold, he thinks, of her blood beneath her skin. He wants to touch her and find out if she is as cold as hard as he believes she might be. 


Then, then she calls him strange. A stranger. The child turns him into a predator and the boy blinks. Is this what his loneliness has got him? It feels more like hope to have a friend with him in the woods. She turns it into something dangerous. But oh, Leonidas does not think he is the dangerous one here. He thinks of the girl spun together from Rift magic who hunted him hungry and savage. It spoke to the wild Time magic within him. Yet this girl, she seems only cruel, the way she watches him with her pale-strange eyes.


“I am not the only strange one here.” The older boy breathes as he does not deny his nature. His eyes trickle over her, he might pity her more if he could hear how her thoughts are filled with assurance that the meadow longs to consume her. Wrap her up in its roots, pull her down into the earth.


The fae-boy draws back, gilded eyes fluttering closed for the merest moment.  When they open, he is no longer a lonely boy yearning for comfort amidst the reaching arms of the lovely dark wood. No, he looks back that regal stag, accustomed to his loneliness, proud of his life, his territory. “And what do mothers know of anything at all?” An orphan boy asks remembering only the blurred and dusty shadow of a figure that was once his mother. He smiles. It is not pretty upon his handsome lips, it is a scar of hurt and anger, “They do not care. They are the ones to leave us.”


@Diana
“Speaking.”

credits

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

My mother tells me, sometimes, with a certain and particular caution and tenderness, that I can be very cruel. I know that. I know that I am not tender like Ambrose, and I have never learned to be tender in all the ways that she has slowly bruised – but I am cruel chiefly in the way that the desert is cruel. (That is, impassively. Carelessly. Impersonally.) My mother tells me, with a soft strain of worry in her voice, that I can be very cruel; and I don’t ever know how to tell her that I don’t mean to, or that, to me, it never seems very cruel.

(Worst of all are the moments where I look at my mother, and I see all of the reasons why it is better to be seen as cruel than foolish, but I will not speak of those.)

I am not the only strange one here, he says, and I watch him impassively. I’m perfectly aware of all the ways that I am strange, all the ways that I am other, all the ways that I will never quite belong – so his turn of phrase rolls off my back easily, without much of a reaction at all.

“No, you aren’t,” I say, with a slight roll of my frigid blue eyes, “but your forest wants to hurt me.” The words flit off my tongue with the absolute certainty of a fact. I know that it would kill me, if it could. Oriens’ lands will never love a sun-kissed child like me; the gods barely even love their own.

His expression turns – solitary, somehow, though not in the way that sandwyrms tend to hunt alone, or in the way that my mother often looks, when I catch a glimpse of her and she doesn’t see me. (Brow-creased, tired, dark circles swelling beneath her mismatched eyes; hair half-fallen, shoulders bent. Tired. I pretend not to notice, most of the time.) He asks me why we should trust the words of mothers at all, tells me that they only leave us, that they do not care for us at all; and I wonder if he thinks that I should imagine that he came to me with care, when we know nothing of each other at all. (Any care he has, I think, must be the result of that gaping-hole want in the twin suns of his eyes, and that isn’t care at all. It is the longing for a hole to be filled.)

Oh, I can’t imagine that he isn’t speaking from personal experience, from some pitiable past that I know nothing of (and, were I older or better-built for sympathy, I might have sympathized with him in all of the ways that are appropriate) – but the notion that Mother would ever leave me is unbearable, if not unforgivable. (She is strange and sometimes-cold and strict, but I do not like the idea of anyone else insulting her.) I look at the smile on his lips, which is not a smile but more of a gnawing, angry sickle, and my eyes narrow into matching slits, a look of something like offense settling across my mismatched features.

“And what do you know of anything?” I arch my brows at him, my tone the very implication of you may be older than me, but you are still a child. He doesn’t know Mother, and, though he would beseech something of me, have me follow at his side thoughtlessly, like some foolish accompaniment, he doesn’t know me. Whatever tragedy he might have experienced, it isn’t mind to hold – we only met moments ago. My tail swipes back and forth behind me, like a feather-tailed cat, and the soft down on my wings seem to rise by fractions at my side. “Mother won’t leave me, and she does care. You don’t know either of us at all.” I raise my chin, staring up at him, my eyes still narrowed rather ferociously. “Why should I trust the words of a stranger over her?”

If there is one thing that I know already and innately – it is all the ways that the world has teeth.

---

@Leonidas || being mean to leo does hurt me, ngl || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

@

[Leonidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

She says his forest wants to hurt her. Her words steal a frown from his brow and places a grin upon his lips. It is a small, amused turn of his lips. Her words come as no surprise to the boy. “Of course it does,” the wild-wood boy says lightly as if it is the most obvious thing this little girl could ever have said to him. “It tries to kill me too,” He says with a shrug, the amusement slipping from his mouth, replaced, instead, by a pragmatic expression. 


“That is what it does.” It is all Leonidas has ever known. It is why he wears the wood amidst the tines of his antlers, why his skin bears the dirt of the floor, why his mane is a tangle of leaves and twigs and roots and flowers. Leonidas was not born of the wild wood, but he was raised by her cruel and yet loving hand. Nature grasped the child of Time and raised him ever more magical, ever more wild. 


Through his fae-eyes he watches her, limns the little girl in gold and feels so much older than his two years. “That doesn’t mean you should avoid it. It is amazing too.” He ends upon a whisper as something dark, something otherworldly creeps upon the boy. It turns him more stag than horse, more man than boy. It is easy in that moment for forget how his voice had risen and fallen sharply with his speaking. Now he seems more man, as if he has never been a boy at all - as if being an orphan had robbed him of any childhood. It did. The boy stands before her, unknown of the depths of his loneliness, not knowing how he missed so many years of play and squabbles with children his own age. Leonidas stands upon the fringes of society and barely knows how to even gaze in upon it, let alone walk within its midst. Already he is a thief, ignorant of money, incapable of counting it, unable to read or write. 


When she asks what he knows about anything, he wonders about all the things he has discovered he does not know. It seems like such a lot. Yet he looks to her and says, proud as a god of the wood, “I know how to outsmart and survive the wood when it wants to kill you.” Beneath the thick bow of his lashes Leonidas stares unblinkingly at the little girl. It may be the only thing a feral boy could know or ever be proud of.


Her feathers rise upon her wings. She reminds him of a newborn panther cub hissing, spitting at a bear. The boy watches her with the slow regard of an adult bear, gold eyes, so dark in the firelight they glow copper. “My mother didn’t want to leave me. She loved me, but it didn’t stop her disappearing against her will. She can love you as much as you love her, but it still doesn’t mean she will be with you forever. It is not only the woods that want to kill and separate, but the whole of Novus and space and time and magic.” And this is the truth the boy knows in his heart. That his mother never wanted to leave him, but it hurt him less to think that she wanted to. It made it easier to hate her absence when he hated her.


@Diana
“Speaking.”

credits

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

When he speaks, I watch his face. I watch the smile on his lips as he tells me, easily, that the forest tried to kill him too; and, when his voice dips deep and dark and ill-fitting for his form and he tells me that I shouldn’t avoid the woods, that it can be amazing, too, I find myself upset mostly because I know that he is right.

I want to go beyond that threshold. I want to go into the woods – I want to know what the world is like outside of my desert.

My expression twists, lips going rigid with annoyance. “It’s not the same,” I say, with more than a hint of frustration coloring my voice. “It doesn’t want to kill me like – like a sandwyrm. Or like a bear. Or like a sandstorm, or like a strike of lightning. It wants to kill me like a man. It wants to kill me because it hates me, and it wants to hurt me. Do you understand?” It doesn’t want to kill me because it is hungry. It wants to kill me because it is malevolent, because I am five-hundred years of grudge after wretched grudge made manifest. It wants to hurt me because it would like to hurt my father, but nothing can hurt the sun but itself, the inevitable falling-in of its own mass.

I am – his extension. Always, always, whether I would like to be or not. No one ever asked. Him least of all.

I don’t want to be him, and perhaps that is why I pause, then. “If I…follow you into the woods…do you promise me that you could keep it at bay?” I cast a look past him, into the darkness of the trees, and I feel a chill run up my spine. Mother says that it is foolish to run into the face of danger that you know you can avoid. Still – all the world that I cannot see pulls at me like a magnet. I have always been drawn to things that I know I am not supposed to have, blessings that are not my own.

I do not like the way that he straightens, then, in much the same way that I do not like the mature gleam in his eye. I do not like the confident way that he tells me that he knows how to outsmart the woods, and I do not like the certainty with which he declares to me that nothing stays and everything leaves, eventually – that the entire world and everything in it is always trying to tear you apart from the people that you love the most. I know. I know that. I know that because I’ve seen dead bodies in the Mors, and I know that they had families; I’ve seen dead sandwyrms, and I’ve thought just the same. And – and I am a girl made by a god, and they always prescribe destinies to girls like me.

I have had a sense of inevitability thrust upon my shoulders for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps that is why I look up at him slowly, and, when I meet his eyes, I have regained my composure. “That doesn’t mean that you should be resigned to it,” I say, then. “It only means that you should fight.” Against cruel fates, or against cruel magic, or against cruel men. Against time or space or any other seemingly-impossible force.

My mother spent her entire life giving up what she wanted – what she loved. My brother thinks that what matters is what you are given.

I know that the only thing that matters is the striving.

---

@Leonidas || being mean to leo does hurt me, ngl || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

@

[Leonidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

Leonidas sees the way her lips twist and firelight makes the glow of them angrier and darker than she may have intended. His ears are still pressed down into the tangles of his forelock, crumbled like spires in the wake of their disagreement. 


The boy wonders when she speaks how the wood could want you dead if it was not like any of those first things she said. But Leonidas, grown up in the wilds as he has, knows little of the wants and sins of men. He understands more the deliverance of death at the hands of a cougar or lightning bolt than he ever would at the hands of a man. 


He tilts his head and watches her. He thinks how a child can be more wise than he. The fae-boy learns in that moment that this is yet another thing he does not understand. It is, yet another way in which growing up alone in the wilds of the wood had made him naive. It made him feel foolish. He thinks of Aspara, her anger, her rejection. This feels the same, he cannot understand. But he will, he is already more embroiled in the lives of his fellow ‘men’ than he realises. He will encounter their sins, become jaded by them, see all the ways in which they are not simply cougars who kill to survive, or a storm that strikes without subjectivity. 


“I will stop it.” He says though, sure, convinced. “I can kill it before it kills you.” The boy looks down at her and the dark of his gaze, the heaviness in his words makes him grown up beyond the age of 2. In that moment, Leonidas could be an old, wise man. It agonises him to kill his wood. The woodland is all he has known, all he has understood and cared about for so long. Yet now, now he is discovering people beyond his wild-wood walls. Already he longs to spend time with them than alone in the deep of his wood. 


He will kill is wood for those like him. The thought sobers him and he adds, “But only if it really does try to kill you. If it hates you.” 


He holds her eyes as she looks up to him and tells him to fight. But, fight what, exactly? His mother is gone, was not living, raising himself, learning how to live within the wilds a form of fighting? “I have fought my fight and I continue to battle new ones because of my family.” Leonidas says and the turn of his lips is down, the pain in his words only a mere drop compared the ocean of pain that lances into his heart. “Come and find me in the woods, when you are brave enough. I will protect you. This is your fight.”


The boy says and turns from her, heading back into his woods, away from the little girl who brings him only pain and hurt. His strides are stiff, his manner dark and moody as a sea brewing a storm. Yet all the while he wishes she would join him, because an argument, a disagreement is better than no conversation at all.



@Diana - finishing there - I hope that is okay <3
“Speaking.”

credits