I am not like any ordinary world
The boy’s eyes are burnished gold. They gleamed as they watched the girl step out from within the cathedral of sable trees. She walked, enchanted, her body suspended in wonder. The woodland has made her a shrine. Across every inch of her is its signature. Leaves and blossoms are snagged within her salt-silver hair that curls, he notes, sea-foam waves.
There is a ringing in his ears, a laughter of the water pool that bubbles at his feet. Its song is liquid and free. It sings of nymphs rising from the sea with the ocean’s blues in their deep, deep eyes. It sings its song deep into a time-boy’s crimson blood, it serenades the pieces of him where the earth has lain her roots.
This girl, stood across the copse from him, with her hair wild as ocean waves, her wide, wide eyes bright and her skin the colour of frost does not belong here. But Leonidas does not fit any more than Aehra. The boy is a piece of the sun, the dust of his autumnal antlers shedding as solar rain. He stands, as resplendent as the sky. The sun lauds him as loudly as the sea sings from the girl’s body.
She thinks him a hart and he is as he stands proud and wild within the centre of his kingdom. Autumn has already come to the ivy that strings itself between the tines of his antlers. They glow in burnt oranges and coppers, browns and sunset golds. Leonidas claims for himself a kingdom of sky and thriving earth.
He smiles like an imp when she speaks. His nape arches as his young ears, twist toward her, tulip fine, to catch the strange words tumbling from her tongue. His skull tilts and the dark of his throat is exposed. It is no colour her sea would know. The brown is the darkness of the earth, soil that is deep and rich and fertile. Already next year’s spring is settling itself into his immortal flesh. The boy stands, a herald; the son of an earth god. The son of Time.
Then she speaks a word he knows. Her voice is breathless, lost to a heart that flutters with its pitter-patter run. Leonidas blinks slowly and it is something like an eclipse, a darkness into which his woodland falls, until he opens his eyes again and turns them upon her. His gaze gilds her it wanders over her every inch and joins the surf of her mane.
His flowers still remember the way she watched them with wonder. They tap upon her knees before they lean towards the boy, as if he were a sun, as if his magic is the only thing that keeps them alive when all around them is falling into autumn.
She is bold in the way the sea will never let itself be stopped, she wanders as waters loosed and his forest welcomes her.
He is bold in the way the sun will never cease to rise, in the way it is unrelenting light.
Can you make anything grow? Still her small voice is breathless, wonder weaves through it as light dances across the sea.
How long has he been lost within his wild-wood, growing more feral, growing more intertwined with the forest and her lovely roots? It is long enough that words are almost lost to his tongue.
The arm of a tree grows at Leonidas’ command. It reaches down and reaches out with new-born fingers. Each fine branch is laden with flourishing flowers that brush across her salt-hawn cheek like a finger. The boy then shrugs and looks away as if this influence of time, the gentleness of such a gesture is of little consequence. And maybe this is so, for it is his magic that has her blooming when she should be dying and dying when she should be thriving. The woodland beckons to her feral boy but he does not heed the way her leaves sigh for him.
He steps toward her along the water banks. The mirrored water watches him, paints him clear and regal, sun struck and haloed. He walks like a like an elvin prince across his kingdom and stops just before the strange-sea girl. The air is full of the scent of the sea, Leonidas knows without touching her that her silver-blue skin would be salty and sweet.
“What are you?” The boy murmurs, the ivory of Aehra’s skin so much like his sister’s. But she is bruised blue where his sister had been gilded gold. “The water wants you,” Slowly he tips his sunglow gaze down to where the water laps and tugs at her ankles, beckoning her out, deeper, deeper. “Don’t go,” he whispers against the babbling of the lake.
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