come away, o child
to the waters and the wild
The smell of salt and leather on his mother’s skin. The desert sage of his father. The way, to the touch, he always feels like the soil in the sun.
The scholars of his studies. Their lulling voices as they educate him on music, weaponry, history—
Novus.
Vespera.
Solis.
The corner of Terrastella’s citadel his window overlooks; the ivy that might creep upon the wall during the summer (but he does not yet know, not that) hanging dead on the stone.
The Halcyon when they practice upon Praistigia cliffs, diving, sparring, flying. Their hard angles. Their noble lines.
The picture books he reads before bed, full of knights and victors, tyrants and villains, monsters and men.
Aeneas knows, too, the way winter seeps into his bones. The way he closes his eyes at night and sees a thousand, trillion stars and dreams of a white stallion on a black beach.
He does not know Susurro fields. Upon pleading and persuading, his mother agrees to let him leave the citadel to play in the field. He might have asked Hilde to come, but could not find her; and so he leaves at daybreak through the city, running along the cobblestones with a child’s unabashed rush, until he is out of Terrastella’s gates and into the field like a sea.
Aeneas isn’t looking for anything when he finds her.
(But, maybe he will learn one day, that is how all things are found).
“Hey—“ Aeneas calls. He is barely tall enough to see over the golden stalks of grass. Through them, he sees only how golden she is, how long-legged. He feels like he should know her. “What… what are you doing?” Aeneas finishes lamely, bewildered at the brush, at the paints, at the stone.
with a fairy, hand in hand
for the world is more full of weeping
than you can understand
