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.
Nicnevin trembles like a leaf in the wind. She is the gold of autumn, an arresting colour that captures his gaze and holds it. Leonidas knows that the most dangerous thing in the skies now is not the storm, but the girl who glows like a crimson leaf. She would set him ablaze with just a touch across her copper skin. The silk of her hair is still a ghost between his teeth. She had blinked slowly, bemused and yet, as the smile crept its way, bright and glorious, across her lips, delighted.
Her laughter is other-worldly. It is the song of a sword, the cry of a bird. It is bells resounding through the waves of thunder that shake the earth. The air trembles with the storm and it runs like static along her skin. That is the ghost between his teeth: the static of Nicnevin. The girl who sets his nerves ablaze.
There are many things Leonidas knows about the wild, things he has learnt and taught himself. But he does not expect girls, he does not expect proximity. This other-world-girl gives him both. She darts in, swift as a gazelle, playful as a wolf as she snaps her teeth beside his ear. It is not often he is caught off-guard. Leonidas twitches back, his skull twisting away from her, his gilded eyes wide as twin suns. He stares at her and meets her gold with his until they glow like halos, like great suns colliding. The wildling boy has been touched so little. He flinches at her proximity, he startles like a stag at the cocking of a gun. Remember, his young soul whispers to her ancient one, just in case she feels offence, remember when you lay beneath the earth untouched for a hundred years. What was it like when at last you were?
But all seems forgotten in their chase, their sprawling, waltzing dance that reaches all across the storm, drenched sky. They play cat and mouse and then, then she moves. It is more than a leaf, more than flames and suns.
She becomes the air, her laughter the petrichor that fills his nose and wets his tongue.
She becomes the rain that soaks their skin.
She becomes the shocks of lightning that strike deep into his chest and demand he remembers this moment at every second of his eternity.
Leonidas does not watch a girl, but a god dance. Her movement is transcendent and he goes to her, he matches her, he learns what it is to dance, taught by a goddess-girl.
They dance until the skies clear, until she leaves, until his wild-wood beckons him back and home, to his bed of rain soaked leaves.
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