I am not like any ordinary world
Nova presses her front paws upon the lip of the bench as she reaches up and forward to sniff the bent knee of the horse that sleeps there. Yet the cub is wary where her familiar is not. Her whiskers and her lips do not touch where Leonidas’ do. Over her brow across the sweep of her lashes. He studies the girl like he does a flower he has never seen before.
But when she wakens both he and Nova retreat. Leonidas just a step, but Nova two and three and four - enough to carry her behind him. From about his hocks she peeks, where she bears a mane of golden horse hair cascading from Leonidas’ tail.
The girl rises from the bench like a phoenix from the ashes. She is gold and glowing crimson, embers upon a fire and, had he not already felt the cool of her skin, he might think the smallest touch would be enough to burn. She wakens with dreams still clinging to the vestiges of her sleep. They fog her cinder eyes and limn them in starlight.
The fae boy does not falter when her eyes find his. He does not think how strange he is with mud upon his feet and foliage tangled within his hair. Leonidas is the dawn creeping through the slumbering wood. He is bright and wild and his smile is tumbling, dappling light spilling upon the forest floor.
She speaks of death and how it catches her. It means little to a boy of the wood except that the word creates a twinge within his tummy. If death can catch her… can he catch it? Can he catch it and demand it return his parents - if they are even dead at all. Aster believed they would return and so they waited and waited until the island began to crumble and be reclaimed by the rising sea.
Now he did not believe they would ever return - and neither did Aster. He saw the way her eyes changed. The twins needed not to ask each other, it went unspoken, their mutual understanding: Their parents were never coming back. They would spend this life together and yet, alone.
Where is home, little wolf? The boy turns in the lamplight, his skin gleaming where raindrops sit upon his thick, winter-ready coat. He smiles lupine and feral. He likes such a name, how it makes him more than fae. It makes him bold and savage and enough to ward off girls who try to steal his forts and beasts that prowl in the night nursing a hunger for foals.
“With Aster,” Leonidas answers as he begins to lead her across the cobbled street, passed houses and shops and gates and beyond walls until habitation falls away and all that beckons them is the sea to the left and the wild woods before them. He does not stop to think how the phoenix beside him might think to imagine a place of walls and blankets, windows and doors. He walks beneath the boughs and pauses to check she follows. He breathes in the dew drenched wood and hear the mud and leaves that squelch beneath his small feet. Here he feels wild, here he feels at rest.
He leads Moira to a small thicket, where the rain does not reach the small flattened patch where two twin foals slept with their two twin cubs. He does not think how blankets are not leaves and moonlight and how boughs are not rooves. “We slept here last night, it should be safe again.” The boy murmurs confident and keen. “My sister should be here soon and we can sleep then. My name is Leonidas and this is, Nova, my cub.” The cheetah regards the Night woman with wary eyes and steps forward under the shelter of the thicket. She shakes, her coat puffing out thick and warm.
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