The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
—
She can’t keep her eyes open beneath that gentle caress, feather-light and soothing across her shoulders and her neck. Her snowy lashes drift half-closed and she leans her head against her mother’s shoulder, lazy in the thick sunshine of the day, her smile a half-moon curve on her pale lips.
At the explanation she thinks of Leonidas even before Florentine mentions him; there is nothing that fits better, nothing that her soul knows more than the boy her heart first beat beside, their limbs atangle as they slept in the warm dark and waited to be born.
“Then it will never be hard to find,” she decides, but her words are already long and soft with sleep. She giggles at the kisses her mother lays across her face, shaking her head as she would beneath a cloud of butterflies, and butts her forehead gently against the golden mare’s leg.
It is that other word - love - that sounds like a mystery to her. There is a sense of it being the same golden warmth of hot summer sunshine, lulling her to sleep; but there is something else about this idea, a thing that can’t be seen but can still be carried like a garment (or a knife) wherever she goes. How did that work, what kind of magic was it, could love be grown and kept? Did everything feel, did everything love - the trees and the grass that whisper of growing? Or perhaps only moveable things. Could you take someone else’s love, and have more for yourself?
All these thoughts drift through her mind like dust-motes, half-formed, colorless as the scent of summer on the breeze. She voices none of them, only lets them pass, lets them land and sink into the fertile soil of her mind.
“Leo and I will make a home of all of them.” This is less soft and blurry with sleep, and the set of her mouth is all of a child’s seriousness; but when she looks up again at her mother her golden eyes are as innocent as dawn.
@Florentine
At the explanation she thinks of Leonidas even before Florentine mentions him; there is nothing that fits better, nothing that her soul knows more than the boy her heart first beat beside, their limbs atangle as they slept in the warm dark and waited to be born.
“Then it will never be hard to find,” she decides, but her words are already long and soft with sleep. She giggles at the kisses her mother lays across her face, shaking her head as she would beneath a cloud of butterflies, and butts her forehead gently against the golden mare’s leg.
It is that other word - love - that sounds like a mystery to her. There is a sense of it being the same golden warmth of hot summer sunshine, lulling her to sleep; but there is something else about this idea, a thing that can’t be seen but can still be carried like a garment (or a knife) wherever she goes. How did that work, what kind of magic was it, could love be grown and kept? Did everything feel, did everything love - the trees and the grass that whisper of growing? Or perhaps only moveable things. Could you take someone else’s love, and have more for yourself?
All these thoughts drift through her mind like dust-motes, half-formed, colorless as the scent of summer on the breeze. She voices none of them, only lets them pass, lets them land and sink into the fertile soil of her mind.
“Leo and I will make a home of all of them.” This is less soft and blurry with sleep, and the set of her mouth is all of a child’s seriousness; but when she looks up again at her mother her golden eyes are as innocent as dawn.
@
