I am not like any ordinary world
The boy is roaming as wild children do. He is a moon without a sun to call home, yet he turns and revolved and orbits his sister like she is his planet. Aster is the glue that holds the pieces of him together and yet, neither of them know it. Not when they are still wet with youth. They are fresh grasses learning of new seasons, watching how this world turns strange and beautiful and mysterious.
Their eyes are full of time and endless space - as is their family way. Each member of their family was born in stars, bathed in time and magic and gilded by galaxies and moons and suns. Eternity is nothing to them, yet to this immortal boy still learning his body, still learning of this world, eternity feels incomprehensible.
He does not worry about stars or Time, except to wonder of the ghosts he has heard rumour of in Denocte. If he was to go there, would he see his parents or his uncle or any other kin he has? He wonders as he roams, as he skips from stone to stone and does not think of how his heart feels better now - for this is a boy living in his moment, this is a boy who thinks of only now and waits for time to slip just a little, little faster.
The cobbles he runs fleet-footed across are slick with rain. But Leonidas is the sun, he is the burnished fox sly upon his feet, quick and sure as he dances his way through his birthplace. Aster is behind him, so far behind that occasionally his cub pauses in its run at his heels. It stops and lifts its head, regarding the path they had come along with a wary and alert eye. Leonidas brushes his lips across the cub’s crown and murmurs, ‘Come, they are following.” Never does he think to question himself, never does he think for a moment his sister would not be there, for they are one, she and him. They are home.
His skin is slick with glittering raindrops thick as dew. He glitters like the sun that paints herself across the sea. The feathers and twigs and wild wood things in his hair dance in the wind as the boy suddenly stops. He beholds a girl upon a bench. She sleeps beneath the silent rain. It dampens the black of her mane that lies in a font of curls across the crimson of her skin. The boy wonders, if he should touch her, if it might be like touching the sun. Would he burn?
Slowly he edges to her and hears the rasp of her breath, thick with cold, deep with sleep. He looks over her, as if she were a statue - a divinely carved icon to be worshipped and adored. Her eyes stir beneath her eyelids and the boy wonders what dreams lie there, beyond his knowing. What worlds exist for her in sleep, what joy - for he traces a smile upon her lips.
He reaches out to touch her brow. It is cool and wet with night. She smells of strange and wonderful things he has no name for but he knows he might like to go there. His lips sweep her fringe from her eyes and her lashes that catch rain like tears. She glows like his mother did - what he can remember of her - for each day he forgets her just a little bit more.
“Do you want to come home?” The boy murmurs to the woman asleep for his sister will be along soon and together they will find shelter from the midnight rain. Already his skin grows cool and already he yearns for a roof of twisted branches and covering leaves. There is no home for these siblings, except what their blood bond provides. They lie tangled in sleep as they had within their mother’s womb, they tangle their hearts and souls and roam Novus as she once traversed worlds.
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