This keening soul;
The world is wicked and wild and it laughs as she runs. The moon creeps out from behind the volcano’s smoke, and she is a wide-eyed doe before the glare of the encroaching sun.
Far, far below Leto is streaked in ash and shadow. Darkness and light are paint upon her flesh. They strip her and mark her as she flies beneath unending boughs of ancient trees. As if she were the sinner and they the jeering crowd, they whip her as she runs between them. They spill red upon her skin and shout faster! with their whip-crack voices.
Water sprays up the wild girl’s limbs, fine as sand. Then trickles down her legs as if she is cut more and her blood is mud-blood; Leto, the water declares, is not a creature of stars but earth and stone. The dank waters are raven black against the ebony of her skin. They glow blue but she is darker still. She is the black of nightmares where no light dares to go… Leto is blacker than black but her magic awakens and it is light that can. Oh, it is glowing bright, bright as illuminates the swamp, lighting up shadows drifting beneath the waters – catching eyes between cathedral trees.
The stars above are open mouths. They are endless teeth parted in a fearful, silent scream that rips urgently through dust and airless black. Eternity swallows their cry and in the earth-girl’s blood, that is where their ire surges. In her blood is where the bones of destiny clink and rattle. The sea is still laughing in her lungs. It froths across her tongue and yet she swallows it down, down. Upon her tongue is earth and ash. Across her skin is chalk and paint and wild light.
Silence is gone from the swamp she crashes through. Mud paints her, it throws itself up upon her skin as if it fears to remain upon the changing earth. Dark things are surging out at sea, crimson things that illuminate the sky it turned to smoky midnight. The earth is bleeding and the world is silent and fearful.
She reaches a place, a throbbing place – Tinea’s heart so filled with magic blood and straining trees. There the earth-girl dresses in bones feeling their dread cold. The body of a bird lies split and limp beside her. Some of its bones and most of its blood lie in a crimson pool at the base of a bowl.
How long has she looked at those bones and blood? Long enough for him to appear from the dark. Long enough for her sides to stop heaving, for the grove to stop rattling with her laboring breaths. She stands in blood and starlight, her skin lit from within, her sigils blazing as if they carve her with moonlight. They snarl at him, at her, at the volcano that dares to rage.
If she is ink and black, the king is too. Only the glitter of his mahogany gaze, only the slight shine of his white-star-skin reveals who he is. But she has been waiting for him since she felt his watching. He was there with her every stride, unwavering. He followed her, his lips as grim, his eyes as firm. She looks to see if the trees whipped him too. She looks to see if volcano’s glow in the corners of his wild-wood eyes.
He brings the sea he parted. She tastes the salt of it upon her tongue, as if his skin was between her lips. As if the water in her mouth was not saliva at all but an ocean.
Leto says nothing as her king steps forward. Silently she watches him, a tribal priestess ready for the start of her sacred ritual. This girl is blood and bones. She is starlight and starfire and all of the swamp waits for her verdict, even him. Her eyes silver and dread-full, lower to the divining bowl. “Has Novus not suffered enough?” She says, plaintive as a lambs bleat, defiant as a lion’s snarl. She is still looking at the bones and blood, but all around her are Terrastella’s scars. She knows he sees them too. Signs of flood and plague, fire and catastrophe are carved across their home and every other land.
She would turn herself into a goddess just to pull the Novus gods from their thrones and condemn their idleness and their games. The line of her lips is a savage black slash, her silver eyes a reckoning blade. “Have you renounced the gods yet, Asterion?” Leto asks him, each word a guillotine falling, weighted with her own renunciation.
But he asked her a question.
Her eyes look over the lying of the bones, the pooling, shadowing of the blood. She hears what they have to say and, “No help is coming. We face this alone, again.” She spits their answer like poison from her lips.
@Leto | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
