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
Silence.
In it he hears his breath escape, relieved and loud. The statue no longer screams and its voice no longer tugs at something old and aching within him. Yet the boy is left feeling raw anyway.
Now the scream no longer echoes, it is not just his breath that comes seeping into the silence but the voices of the crowds who gather to cast their opinions upon the statues. They murmurs like the merry hum of bees. They whisper as if their opinions are secrets.
Leonidas does not know what he thinks of the statue, only that its scream reached deep within him, shattering a thin lid of bottled emotions.
A girl’s voice rings out, louder in the wake of the scream. I know you, she says. And I know your voice, the boy thinks before he even turns. Memories tickle in the back of his mind (a mind that has become an overgrown garden, abandoned and wild and beautiful). Through the flowers and weeds and long stemmed grasses that block his memory, he sees a hint of a secluded cave and an underground pool. More clearly yet he sees a little girl with gold feet that tap over stone like an instrument of music he had never heard before. He remembers the way she carried herself, the tip of her small head, the pride in puff of her chest.
Leonidas tips his head away from the statue to look to the girl who stands before him. She is older now. The dark of her skin is now pure midnight, and the white of her like ivory pearls he has found along the sea shore. The two colours still draw themselves across her skin in stark contrast. The gold of the ornaments she wears still captures his magpie gaze. At once she is the slim child he remembers and yet also so much older. Adulthood is already a whisper away and it breathes into the curves of her body.
At the sight of her he forgets the statue, for there is nothing agonised in the way she watches him. Her lips are soft, closed, not pulled open in an eternal scream. She has become wild, Leonidas thinks, for there is a glint in her eye like sunlight over the mischievous sea. Is she still the same child who swam with him by the light of a glowing pool, deep, deep beneath the earth?
Lost boy, she calls him. It is not the first time he has been called lost. His skull tilts with confusion, the vines snagged within the brace of his antlers sway with the movement. He shakes his head, dismissive, as if to rid himself of the discomforting things he does not understand.
“Hello Secret Keeper.” Leonidas murmurs. The memory of Maret is an easier one for a lost boy to bear, easier than those he conceals from himself. They lie behind thicker, ever more virulent weeds. The flowers there grow lovely yet full of thorns. He dares not tread near those memories less he get hurt, again.
He goes to her, proud as a stag, his footsteps ringing upon the path like their laughter when they played like imps in crystalline pools. “I have so many.” The wild wood boy says of his secrets. The lie between the golden down of his wings, in the dark places between his soil dark mane. His eyes are a treasure trove of them.
Oh Maret, he has made so many in the times you have both been apart…
“Which would like first?” Leonidas asks like Rumplestilskin upon the road, a fairytale boy with his fairytale secrets. But then, as an afterthought he adds, “But before I tell you anything, did you keep my last ones?”
@Maret <3
