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.
She steps forward and the touch of their horns is an eerie note in this too-still place. All of the island sings with it, he thinks. All of the island stirs and turns its attention upon the two children who stand at the foot of an ancient, decrepit fort. Rot and ruin claims stone and wood. It crawls with roots and vines over every inch of this once whole citadel. Now the flagstone floor is little more than a carpet of leaves. Now the bridge is near collapse and dust billows from its aging spine in an osteoporotic sigh.
But for all its decay, for all its crumbling skeleton, this fort is the grandest place this boy has been. History is sugar upon his tongue, it is mystery in his lungs, breathed in and out like magic. Behind the boy is not a ruin, but a grand fort with ghosts and ghouls, dragons and monsters at its door.
None are so great a foe to him as this girl who steps like moonlight into the bright glow of him. As the moon is bold before the sun. so Avesta is before Leo. His eyes fall to the jut of her hip, where curved flesh is bruised with the strike of his stone. An apology is as urgent upon his tongue as a plea, but he does not speak it. Not when she looks at him with a dragon’s wiles. Not when she steps so close to him that night is no longer a place across the sea, but here, tangible and real. Her darkness, her silver, her stars, press upon his skin. They fill the spaces of him where his sunlight does not reach. In his lungs is a stardust he had not tasted since his mother’s disappearance. Entwined within that is a tendril of smoke that scolds the tender tissue of his chest.
Still his ears ring with the meeting of their horns and he knows that this is what magic sounds like as it both forges and ruins. That sound makes all the island vibrant. It makes all the foliage tremble in their dark, strange shadows. She peers at him, through the mask of midnight black scales - slick as water and silk. Each one gleams like an eye and every one is pointed to him, her true eye watching him with pearlescent clarity.
SHe dares him and the sun laughs at the moon. He is the light to her dark and his lips draw into a tight line, black as the earth beneath a setting sun. His ears fall and the boy’s skull sways, his ivory teeth bare themselves beneath the moon and if her horn is a wanting thing then his antlers lust for the magic and song of violence too.
“Yes,” he says without hesitance or murmur. Yes he would still think her pretty, yes he would loathe her and plot all the ways to take back what is his… Yes, yes, yes, ”for even beautiful things are violent and cruel.” Leonidas says of her and not of her. He looks at her eyes, the fearsome line of her shadow-stained lips where she stands so close he could touch her. He has touched many girls - to take tears from their cheek, to comfort them, to show them he loved them but…
He doesn’t touch Avesta. His lips tingle with their asking, but he presses them more tightly closed. His breath is the only part of him he allows to touch the moonlight of her skin; for afterall, the moon and the sun were never meant to touch.
Slowly Leonidas’ lips lift into a warm smile, maybe it is to Aster a balm enough to ease the barbs of his last statement. “But what makes you believe you can take it from me?” The boy laughs into the surrounding trees, into the no-man’s land between them. With laughter still rivalling the war-cry of their meeting horns, the feral boy nips toward the base of her throat. But never to touch...
“We can share you know.” Leonidas offers with a wicked gleam upon his lips. He begs her to say no, he begs her to say yes. “You can have one side and i shall have the other.” The boy lies with a tongue as smooth as silk.
@Avesta <3 | "speaks" | notes: eee
