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.
She may not braid her hair as her Ma does, but it is because she doesn’t that Leonidas finds her.
There is a feather upon the ground. It is cobalt blue above and cream below. It gleams like water and yet its underside is pale carmel. The wild wood boy has come across many feathers loosed from a bird, yet none are like this. He thinks on his mother, who used to shed petals as if she were a wilting flower. It might be the only the thing he remembers of her, except for the day she left. Her screams still waken him at night, when all the wood is hushed and silent. Her echo cries through the cathedral trees and he shivers in his bed of leaves.
He picks up the small and delicate feather and carries it with him. Its barbs are soft as satin. Why he carries it he does not know, but pauses when a stag lifts its head from behind a berry bush. It’s lips are red, its brow painted with an intricate pattern that Leonidas has no name for. Its antlers are pale as bone and maybe they are. The boy is used to seeing stags within the woods, but none were quite like this. For a while the regard each other in silence, a boy with his crown of gilded antlers and the deer, blacker than black and whiter than white.
Leonidas does not know that the stag has a name, Rook. Nor does he know that he holds a feather the stag recognises, that the feather will draw him to a girl hidden by bone and beautiful butterfly wings. Eventually it is Leonidas who moves on, graceful and nimble through the wood.
There is no rush this night and he wanders and roams and does not cease until there is a scent, faint and sweet, in the air. He thinks of the feather he carries, their scents are the same. The boy’s head tilts, curious and feral. With leonine eyes he looks ahead through brush and clearing to where a pale girl wanders like a phantom, silver and blue. She is the dust of galaxies he thinks, and in her hair he sees blues and gems of myriad hues.
The feather tips in the wind, as if to drift back to the one who lost it, the girl who wanders like a nymph through the woodland. Elven the boy hurries after her. He does not listen to the way the leaves press against his mahogany skin and the way the boughs whisper to him slow Leonidas.
In his hair are leaves and twigs and petals of foliage that caught within his snarls. But as he draws close to the nymph he sees the art of her hair. Braids are plaited carefully beautifully, they weave and look about her slender throat. He has seen nothing like it, the wild wood boy it too rough for such delicate art. It gives him pause and the feather in his grasp flutters tremulously.
Nimbly, quiet as a fawn, he draws close to her and lets his eyes trail over the skull that covers her face. His gaze lingers along the delicate line of her jaw, so fragile compared to the skull above it. Pausing, his lashes press atop his cheek in a blink before he steps in beside her, elegant as a stag within his realm. “You dropped a feather.” He whispers, for already his attention is drawn back to her hair, its beauty, its art. The wild wood boy reaches to touch a loop of hair where fragile wings are woven in like shavings of gems so rare and exquisite. Is he the rough stone and she the gentleness of water that grazes itself upon him? He breathes gently, warm across her braid, her neck. The wings flutter delicate in the wind and he loses confidence, too rough, he thinks, too rough. He holds out the small kingfisher feather, it matches the ones in her hair. He does not think of the number of feathers nor the number of butterfly wings. He does not think of souls, but if he did, he would ask this nymph how many pieces his sister’s soul has.
@Maybird
