leonidas
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
“Uncle Ashmarian!” The boy yells as he skips from rock to rock. Nimbly he leaps a crouching cat as if it were a rock (for what does a boy born in a time stuck still know of the living?) The world around him might watch his progress, bright as a phoenix, fast as a cheetah, if it could move. The boughs of willows hang unmoving. The grasses do not sway. The wind does not groan. The sounds of a boy running echo and echo. They sound like a god’s feet, fast and loud and clattering in a world made only to listen and now never do.
The boy pauses, crouched upon a rock. His head is slung low, a mane, raucous and wild tangles its way down his slender young neck. Its ends set the forest aglow with a dawn light that has not risen here for… days? Weeks? Months? The mid-day sun hangs, ever bright, ever still and darkness never comes. Leonidas is a boy who knows nothing of shadows and darkness. He knows sleep with the heat of daylight upon his back, he knows the burn of sun upon his sundrenched eyelids. He has the golden eyes of a hunter’s sun and he turns that gaze upon his sister, holding her, one moment, two, in the gold of their world.
Then he looks back to a king that stands before a waterfall’s silent roar. Water tumbles and tumbles and never falls an inch. Mist arches high and the boy lets his gilded gaze roam over the silver of it and wonders how it would feel upon his skin.
Suddenly he is leaping like a deer from his rock. Suddenly he is running swift as a rabbit that leaps from log to log and over brush and root and between great tall trees. He runs like a creature born into the woodland, like a boy too in tune with the strangeness of Time. He laughs and does not wonder how it echoes and echoes and echoes. He closes in upon his uncle and crashes into the still-pool mirror of water and through its great waterfall arm that ascends and ascends reaches and reaches. The waters groan and shift and fight. they move unnaturally, wrongly and fall still in his wake. But what is abnormal when you are born into it?
Leonidas is an arrow, aimed for his blood, for a man as dark as him, with stars upon his skin and eyes that whisper of water living and water flowing. “Ashmn-“ He stumbles, over tongue and tooth and tries again, “Ashmurian!” Out of breath and out of words the boy stops before his uncle and looks up with a grin of gums and too-few teeth.
Feminine laughter bubbles bright like flowers and melodic as peeling bells from behind Leonidas. It is bigger than the newborn boy of thin shoulders and wide, wide eyes. “Careful, brother, or he will show you-“ And it is too late, for already Leonidas is ripping a small wooden toy from the tangle of his mane and holding it proudly up to the still sunlight. “Papa got me this today. Ashmer has one too!” The boy declares, ignoring his dam's warning.
Already the carved cheetah is stalking her way up the Dusk King’s shoulder and across his side. The small boy growls like a tiger and knows nothing of the true sounds that cheetahs make. He does not lift his gaze to wonder what the wheeling birds, frozen in flight, might sound like.
The boy pauses, crouched upon a rock. His head is slung low, a mane, raucous and wild tangles its way down his slender young neck. Its ends set the forest aglow with a dawn light that has not risen here for… days? Weeks? Months? The mid-day sun hangs, ever bright, ever still and darkness never comes. Leonidas is a boy who knows nothing of shadows and darkness. He knows sleep with the heat of daylight upon his back, he knows the burn of sun upon his sundrenched eyelids. He has the golden eyes of a hunter’s sun and he turns that gaze upon his sister, holding her, one moment, two, in the gold of their world.
Then he looks back to a king that stands before a waterfall’s silent roar. Water tumbles and tumbles and never falls an inch. Mist arches high and the boy lets his gilded gaze roam over the silver of it and wonders how it would feel upon his skin.
Suddenly he is leaping like a deer from his rock. Suddenly he is running swift as a rabbit that leaps from log to log and over brush and root and between great tall trees. He runs like a creature born into the woodland, like a boy too in tune with the strangeness of Time. He laughs and does not wonder how it echoes and echoes and echoes. He closes in upon his uncle and crashes into the still-pool mirror of water and through its great waterfall arm that ascends and ascends reaches and reaches. The waters groan and shift and fight. they move unnaturally, wrongly and fall still in his wake. But what is abnormal when you are born into it?
Leonidas is an arrow, aimed for his blood, for a man as dark as him, with stars upon his skin and eyes that whisper of water living and water flowing. “Ashmn-“ He stumbles, over tongue and tooth and tries again, “Ashmurian!” Out of breath and out of words the boy stops before his uncle and looks up with a grin of gums and too-few teeth.
Feminine laughter bubbles bright like flowers and melodic as peeling bells from behind Leonidas. It is bigger than the newborn boy of thin shoulders and wide, wide eyes. “Careful, brother, or he will show you-“ And it is too late, for already Leonidas is ripping a small wooden toy from the tangle of his mane and holding it proudly up to the still sunlight. “Papa got me this today. Ashmer has one too!” The boy declares, ignoring his dam's warning.
Already the carved cheetah is stalking her way up the Dusk King’s shoulder and across his side. The small boy growls like a tiger and knows nothing of the true sounds that cheetahs make. He does not lift his gaze to wonder what the wheeling birds, frozen in flight, might sound like.
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: thank you for threading with him! Please bear with me whilst i work out how to write him and who he is!
