This keening soul;
The ocean laughs at her. It whispers salt-water froth that curves along its sandy lips and echoes its siren call into her ears.
The ocean crawls its way up along the beach. It ripples like satin cloth, wrong, wrong. It is the black of ink, midnight painted, moonlight highlighted. It ripples and does not chop or hiss. It rolls in enchanting ways and lures Leto’s gaze down, down from the moon.
Oh she watches it, stares upon that wrong, wrong ocean. She gazes as it rolls up the beach toward her and only breathes when it slowly rolls back out. It does not carry her out - not yet, not yet.
How tight does Fate hold her? How does it twine in unremitting chains about her ankles? Its hold is unbreakable.
The stars keen for the girl who looked away from them.
The trees rustle and sigh for the girl who does not look at them.
No, she looks at nothing but the sands beneath her feet as she skirts the inland edges of the beach. Sigils blaze across her ebony skin. They burn golden in the moonlight. They pull upon her skin for the damp of the swamp, for the buttress trees that sit, vines strung between their sentinel trunks.
Leto might have turned then, she might have let those ancient drawings freshly made upon her skin pull her back, back across Novus and deep into the dank dark of Tinea… were it not for the chime of bones. The clack of skulls, drawn out of mud, and beads that clinked like pottery hummed like the wind. Her own bones chime from where they hang, tied tightly into the snarls of her mane. The star girl’s skull tilts, listening, wild, curious.
She looks and looks until, there, a stranger stands with webbed rope strung between her horns and pale bones woven into the tangles of her mane. There is mud in that girl’s veins, it is mud that sings to the starfire in Leto’s own. It is mud that sinks its dirty fingers deep and from amidst the galaxies of her soul draws out her Ilati bond. Slowly, slowly Leto moves, silent like prey, slow like a hunter. She knows how to weave so her metal leaves do not chime, she knows how step so her pearls do not whisper.
Closer, closer this creature of starfire and earth magic moves until she is close, close, until the moonlight shadows bathe them and drown them. All is earth here, her sigils laugh across her skin, they cry out their ancient magic into the space between them. They press and press and press their stories deep, deep into the stranger’s skin. Leto’s eyes are wide, wide and the star dare not speak when the earth has its turn to sing.
“Not many Ilati still remain…” She says like a shedstar, like a girl woven together by stars and animated by earth’s wild spirit. Leto looks, oh she looks over every inch of this girl – for sigils, for scars, for any whisper of ancient magic. “You are Ilati,” She affirms, slowly, slowly as the trees begin to groan. “Yet I have not seen you before.” For how is it that lately she has seen none but two boys with water in their veins and not an ounce of earth in their souls?
@Iscariot | "speaks" | notes: <3
