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 is the silver of a blade and yet the softest sweep of moonlight. She is the cold of metal upon chill fingers and the cool damp of dew on frosty morning. Being with this girl is like being stood before a mountain. She is beautiful, untouchable and those who dare to navigate her brave the jaggedness of her wild beauty. She would wound you as she opens the world to you.
Ah! She is so far from the woodlands in which he feels safe and whole. Already Leonidas knows how to survive and fight the wild beasts that prowl through the brush hungry for a feast. Already he can count the ways she is different to every girl he has ever known.
We must be. And Leonidas says nothing in answer but lets his smile fall as she stands, mountain-still, against his teeth as he nips toward her. His lips are grim as her horn lowers to him and his antlers tangle with her horn in a symphony of silver and gold. What world is this that steals parents from children and creates beautiful things to be savage and dangerous because they must be?
But the fae boy does not question her. He does not even wonder about the truth of her words. Leo has felt the cruel bite of this world, he knows how beautiful, defenseless things are quashed and extinguished like a lamp. He has seen bodies floating lifeless from an island that crumbled into nothing.
This beautiful girl is nothing like them, with the tongue of a viper and a horn like a sword, there is nothing defenceless about her. Leonidas faces not a girl but a weapon. He does not even think to be afraid of her. Not when she is more gilded and intricate than the finest swords he saw hung within Terrastella’s palace.
No longer is he surprised when she casts aside his offer though frustration burns within his veins as hot as lava. She turns his blood to acid and at once the boy is not a child made of soil and sunlight. No, he is the sun, bearing his antlers like a diadem of twisted golden thorns. The flowers around them wilt and die as if death touches them, as if Time has grown weary of their slow bloom.
Leonidas tears his gaze from her for it has become painful and irksome to feel how she divides him into two. Ire is hot upon his tongue, it burns like the parts of him that look upon the girl and adore all the ways she is dagged and sharp and wonderful.
He thinks he might love to hate her. (He doesn’t know the meaning of hate).
Avesta smiles, dark like a storm and Leonidas cannot decide whether to press his lips to hers or hiss, angry and feral. Instead his lips pull into their own dark line. He steps forward, daylight pressing into moonlight. Above them even the moon groans as she feels Time pushing her on, on, on at his command.
He sees the way the tip of her horn trembles and steadies as her wolf presses close. “Then leave.” The boy says, his voice low and deeper than it has ever been. He thinks she might have aged him. He thinks he is not the boy he was when he first set eyes on her only moments before. He thinks that she has taught him many things about the cruelty of girls. He fears he might follow her if she does leave, abandon his ruins and all their mysteries in favour of hers.
@Avesta <3 | "speaks" | notes: eee
