So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace:
A dream once lost among sorrows and songs
A dream once lost among sorrows and songs
In the garden the air is full of the sounds of tools carving at stone and wood and bone. Amidst the echoes and so close to the start of the path, a forest boy sits and carves whitewood. The material is soft, it feels as warm to his as skin. There is a careful art in the way he carves. Though his skill is lacking, his talent is clear. He looks to his work and stops himself from looking back to the start (just a few metres away) where a horse rears, its mouth agape in a scream - a scream Leo hears in his fitful dreams. It looks, to Leonidas, not like a stallion at all, but a woman, distressed, frantic. She has lost something, or someone. Her scream is an echo all through the garden. He carves his own echo, for he thinks it might help stop her crying.
The antlers he makes, are how he thinks his own look. But his mirrors have only ever been living water and his unskilled talents with the tools are not enough to stop the statue’s antlers looking like living water too. Each tine ripples with the invisible wind, or maybe they tremble at the mare’s scream?
His statue’s wood is pale in his grasp. It is almost ivory - almost bone. There is a quietness to his statue, though the boy’s energy brings it to vivid life as he carves wide eyes and a long mane into his echo’s pale, wooden skin. The grains of the wood run, as if like veins, filled with golden blood. It seems fitting, gold upon white. The boy picks up paint brushes from the nearest basket of tools. He turns his statue’s antlers into rippling sunlight.
Wanderers pass him, studying the statues, gazing at the talented work and those less talented and yet carved with love in every chip and cut. The flowers sway and his cheetah sighs beside him. It seems to fall as still as the wood within Leonidas’ grasp. Sometimes he thinks his familiar is but merely wood too. The cheetah is like a shadow, it follows him, yet never speaks. Leonidas, king of the wood and master of his shadowing cheetah, does not think he has ever heard the animal speak. Yet boy and animal sleep as if they are just halves of a larger piece of art, broken away, lost.
But that is the thing, he does not know what he has lost. He thinks he might know what the screaming mare has though. He finishes the carving. It is of a small filly whose antlers mirror his own, whos pose feels familiar - so familiar that he carves until it is perfect. Then, on a whim, he looks to his still cheetah shadow and carves a cheetah as young a his, its body still round with baby fat.
Then he stands and ambles warily back to where the mare rears and screams. Gingerly he places the statues upon her base, he flinches when her screaming stops. He breathes a sigh and dares to look up. She is still and her screams no longer echo in his ears.
@Maret <3 So glad to write these two together again.
