I am not like any ordinary world
Her ribbon feathers flutter in the contented sigh of the Autumn breeze. He watches as they sway, brushing against the porcelain lines of her body. He can see her in the woods, creeping stealthily beneath the deep dark of the umbrella overhead. “You are like a tiger.” He says lightly, watching her as she watches him. His eyes draw along her pallid lines. She is tribal, he thinks. Her body is painted by her genes as the Ilati are by their paints. But her colours come in the bright ribbons, so startling against the soft sand of her body. She is like a desert too - how many things does she make him think of? - her skin the colour of dunes beneath teh morning sun. Looking at her makes him thirsty, looking at her makes him feel warm as if the sun were upon his cheeks.
The wild-wood boy looks away, before she can remind him of anything more. A sparrow, a lion, a desert… “Your name is not big enough for you.” The boy says lightly, though his brow furrows with confusion. He cannot put to words what he wants to tell her. The thoughts of all the things she could be crowd into his mind. Leonidas is holding her in gold again, when did he look back at her? He is quite unable to look away. “What are you?” He whispers with wonder as he looks at the fire of her ribbons, the soft sand of her skin, the white snow of her tiger lines. He does not mean what she is dressed as. A woodland orphan knows nothing of dressing up, of pretending to be something he is not. No, there is something deeper in this girl and he stares at it as if she is a new star within his sky.
The way she says his name has him tipping his eyes up from the place he thinks her soul might rest. Up he looks into her eyes and at her lips, as if he might still see his name there, marking him, claiming him. It sounds different upon her lips than it did upon Aspara’s. He smiles for she makes it sound like a game, like a toy, something light and playful. His grin is wildling dark in the shadows of the alley, but the gold of him casts honey light across him. He grows more otherworldly, more feral.
She asks where he is from and the softness of her, the playful way his name played between teeth and tongue eases him. “The woods.” He answers and his head turns, to look back to the woodland that waits for its boy-king to return. Never once does he think she might mean, his origins or a place he spends each night. Every night is different, there is no place that he stays for long. All of Novus is his. He is from everywhere and nowhere at all.
A band suddenly starts as it passes the alley and the boy startles. He looks with wide-sun eyes to where the festival beats like an entity, a monster he has no name for. “It is so loud here.” He says, bemused, disgruntled. “Do you enjoy it?”
@Maeve
