some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
The forest waits with bated breath. All is still as sleep, but there is no slumber to be found in any of the swamps lovely, dark corners. Yet still the boy picks his way quiet as a stag through the ever thick roots and verdant greens.
Even the mists lie still atop the murky waters. He stirs them with the tip of his wing in a way only a daring, wild boy might. The damp air swirls like mild within a cauldron. But Leo leaves them before they grow agitated and wanders on, slowly, quietly. The mists settle, soothed and still once more.
Now and again the boy pauses, turning to look upon the sound an uncareful creature makes. Do they not know, he thinks, that now is the time for silence? All others have retreated and the air has grown warm, warm, warm. It presses in upon his soil-dark skin. It whispers fretting warnings across his body of the darkening clouds up in the sky.
The buttress trees creak and groan, restless with their waiting. Stagnant water bubbles, chattering now and again to their neighbouring pools. Boldly (for a boy who has stepped so quietly that even his breathing has become more of a myth than a truth this day), Leonidas stepps down into a pond. He wades slowly, deeply. He steps high and careful and allows the pool to lap wetly at his knobbly knees. His knees, sometimes, might be the only part of him to remind one that he is a boy with still much growing to do. Nature and her wilderness have taught him harsh lessons that have built premature muscle along his body and over his crest.
Assured of himself, assured of his place within Novus’ wilder reaches, he walks like a god - though he possesses no understanding of kingship, let alone godliness. There is no space in a boy like Leonidas for monarchs or gods.
He turns a bend and his stopping is as silent as his moving. The water ripples only lightly before it too falls silent. Upon the bank, beyond the mists through which he wades, a girl stands, strange as an elf within a court of gnomes. She has within her, all of the loveliness he thinks an elf might possess. She is painted in myriad hues of brown as if the earth has been scooped up and from it her body molded. Gold lies in accents through her body, like sunlight tumbling through the umbra, dappling the ground below.
Leonidas does not hear the swamp now he watches her, but even if he did, there is no sound, as if all Tinea’s eyes are no longer upon the sky but upon the children who meet with twin bodies of brown and gold and brown and gold. Her youth is lovely within her face, her eyes as vital and alive as the blood that thunders through their veins. But it is the way she stands that enraptures him most and the way Tinea does not know how to frame a girl like her.
“You do not belong here,” the boy observes, his voice made of leaves and grasses and other wild, growing things. He belongs too well and she too little. The press of his leonine eyes upon her is soft and curious. “A storm is coming.” It is nearly here Tinea whispers, fretful. “Do you have shelter?” He asks the girl whose eyes seem to watch the world with a wonder and curiosity that turns her eyes as bright as oxygenated blood.
“I can offer you some.” The wild boy says to a girl so strange, so lovely.
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