This keening soul;
She feels his pain as she speaks for he is close enough to see the hurt spread out like poison from a bee sting.
She listens as his laughter pushes the straining, listening trees back.
She feels a shudder at the sound of his laugh slip like ice through her veins. Oh it cools her. Oh it unsettles her.
Each nerve, lit by wild, wicked fire, grows numb at the touch of ice.
Through her eyes galaxies watch as he grows sharp and stark as winter. Where did that warmth go?
Were her words so cruel?
She expects more from him, but he is turning and leaving. As he always has with her, there for a moment and then gone, fleeting, like a dream. As he once did with Terrastella: leaving, leaving, leaving. His leaving does not surprise her, though she watches as the stars map his departing.
Yet her hurt, like a needle-prick worrying at the layers of her heart, picking at her soul, does surprise her. Did he not care to challenge her? Had he no care for a subject with no faith in him? Were they not worth conversion? She looks to him and sees only a chasm between his court and the Ilati. Her sigil trees are mourning dark, watching the King as he leaves.
Did he care neither for the part of her that trusted too much? An emotion, sharp and desolate swells like a wave within her. It chokes, it chokes and disgust has her turning from him. Before he looks back she is stepping away through the wood, light as a doe. Twigs snap beneath her feet and with each step she severs herself from that aching within her. Vines trail along her sides like the ones she uses to strangle the hope within her. Never quite Ilati, never quite Shed-star, never quite a courtier, never quite a full part of any of them Leto has only ever been alone. So she pulls herself from the boy she trusts too much and too little. She solders the wounded parts of her in star-fire and blood and wanders deeper into the woodland, less a doe than a tiger whose solitude is her own.
The stars are weeping and the trees are shadowed but all she can hear is the breathing of the sea. She tastes salt upon her tongue and feels a kelpie’s gaze upon her skin.
And she is running, away, away, until the sounds of crashing woodland drown out the waves and his parting words, until her veins are the only light that reaches this deepest, darkest part of the swamp, until her starfire glances over increasingly ancient sigils and prehistoric bark… until she realizes there is no peace for her here. Bones jangle like death in her ears until at last she turns, with her heart aching and her soul yearning, toward the sea.
@Asterion
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
