some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
She is loud as she steps her way through the woods at the foot of their mountain. (
Their. It has become theirs because she regards it as hers and he regards it at his. And so it must simply be called: theirs. At least until one of them admits defeat or the mountain finally reclaims itself as belonging to none but itself).
The city girl
is loud. And a wildwood boy would have no qualms in telling her so. Yet, he is a young man flawed, for Leonidas misses how she walks, silent as a doe already. He inclines his ear to her like a boy who has nothing else to do but listen to a girl he likes walking through the woods. That is: he listens to her because there is nothing else that would interest him more. The wildwood boy listens to the pretty, city girl with every fibre of his being. And so, to his ears, she is louder than she has ever been.
He hears how the fog grass brushes, nobly, at her knees and the aspen’s shed limbs break rotten and dried beneath her heels. They might have been but whispers on the wind. Yet he hears them loud as thunder in his too-keen ears.
In warning, a shivering cloud of fireflies suddenly tangle about his antlers and face. They remind him of a night in another wood, where ghosts slip through the gossamer veil between the living and the dead. He was irritated by the flies glowing bodies before, and then, and he is irritated too by their fluttering wings now. His head switches this way, that way, and then he leaps through them. They scatter like fairies, fleeing from him through the trees, regrouping in the clearing before Aspara.
She is close. She knows, he knows, the fireflies know. His feral heart stutters and as she leaps into the fireflies he leaps away in response. His toes brush over a knot of gorse and thyme, stirring the air warm and sharp with spice. Still as a stag Leonidas pauses, and twists his head back to listen to where she goes next. He is still, but for his heart that thunders in his breast. It runs faster than it had for a monster and that time with her when his body vanished beneath him, non-existence reaching out to disappear them both more silently than a sleeping sigh.
His magic blooms in his blood, encouraged on by his racing heart. It stirs up like dustmotes beneath a damselfly’s wings and presses a whispering
hush into the brighter parts of him. His brilliant golds turn dark, tarnishing as if Leonidas was merely a statue stood out in the weather-rough wilderness too long. His magic blends him into the dappling dark of the grasshopper greens and oak-deep browns. Leonidas hides from Aspara’s searching eyes yet he cannot bear to leave her wholly. She pushes him on a step for each one she takes. She pulls him back with every step she takes away.
If Aspara would like to ignore herself sometimes, Leonidas might think he would like to ignore her even more so. But maybe they both fail miserably in that, for when her footsteps fall so suddenly still behind him, he stops instantly and turns around. She is there, a smudge of snow in the hazy warm of the woods. Apsara draws Leonidas’ attention like winter commands summer to yield. She turns his gold to burnished copper and on to fading brown like the turning of autumn. He could not ignore her if he tried. (And oh, how he does try).
Woodland magic is a shiver along his spine. His skin twitches with its passing. He wonders what secrets the tree stump gives the half-city girl and blushes as she presses a kiss to the rough, old bark. Betrayed and dismayed, his ears fall to his skull as his heart leaps when she turns towards him. All thoughts of her kisses are gone as he turns again, flighty and fae, to press deeper into the woods.
Still he thinks of their last meeting; it is what stops him from turning back to her, of pressing his muzzle into the warm of her naked neck… Behind him, upon a stone within their path, the wildwood boy leaves his half-city girl a carillon of foxglove bells. The flowers are as beautiful as Aspara and both are equally dangerous to him. He has begun to wonder if such beautiful things are only supposed to be seen but never touched. Not by the likes of him at least.
“Don’t touch it.” He calls out in warning, low and rich as the song of an ancient wych elm (a voice finally broken) as he slinks silently between dappled shadows.
@
Aspara
“Speaking.”
