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 turns dark with the storm. The rain turns her bright copper skin from glowing metal to damp soil. Her laughter accompanies her as she rises. This strange girl, who has been so many things, smells of petrichor and the wild flowers of the wood they just fled out from.
The sky beckons the young ones up into its eternal, endless embrace. They are young, the storm is young but there is nothing new or green about this great sky. The groan of the storm is as an ols soul within a new body. The song of the storm is as ancient as water carving stone, weaving its way through the earth. Such simple, natural truths cut their way deep within Leonidas. Where some read from books, he reads of the sky, the leaves, the earthen floor beneath his feet.
So it is no wonder he waits for her with a smile upon his mahogany lips. It is no wonder that he flies within the sky as if he belongs here amidst all the things that drift free and limitless. Together they circle one another, tangling together like butterflies caught within the wind.
The electric light frames her as lightning branches, pointing down toward the earth. He watches how the world illuminates below him, lit by this chaotic sky and the storm’s whim. The lightning snags within her eyes. She calls him strangeling but it is nothing to the wicked-sharp smile upon her lips and the shock of lightning in her eye. Even her laughter is the song of a blade, it drowns out the crack and groan of the thunder. The soundwaves of thunder reverberate in his bones. They rattle him, but they do not move him in the ways her laughter does.
As she rises to him, so he spirals up and up, beckoning her closer to him and higher into the storm. The clouds kiss their poll, the children wear them like crowns. The lightning branches from them as twists of divine metal. Leonidas snags his gilded antlers upon the darkest cloud, it bleeds rain that pours as a river down the canyons and grooves of his Davidic face. The wild boy grins when she meets his eye and at last he lets her reach for him.
Strangeling, this other-world girl had called him and all he can think is how she is the strangeling. She is the creature woven from the fabric of things he cannot name nor even comprehend. It is her body that whispers old fables into his ears. It is she who makes the woodland come alive around her, whispering ancient things across his mind, painting them into his gaze. She turns things lovely and strange.
His wings beat and rain showers from his gilded feathers like ichor. (It turns grey as the clouds as it falls further and further from his glow). Dance. That is what she asks him and the boy looks to the sky and the way she moves with the wind, the way he does too. They circle as partners and he swoops in close as lightning lances through the air where he had just been. He laughs reckless with the near miss. The laughter presses itself into her ears, “Are we not already dancing?” Leonidas’ words chase his laughter. The boy stalks through the sky, a stag ascended or a lion prowling its heavenly savanna. Yet behind his smile is something that gathers, darkening the corners of his lips. It is doubt, for he knows nothing of dance in the way others do. The orphan boy knows only what he has seen when spying upon festivals. There bodies move close, grounded, there is something intimate in it, something free and yet restrained. He wonders what her dancing is, this girl made from other worlds and strange magic. “This is the only dance I know.” He says and the lightning beckons to her. But it is not enough, he circles her reaching in like a cat to tug with his teeth at the windswept curl of her hair. “Show me.”
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