This keening soul;
The sea warns the beach, but the sand does not listen.
Death came and claimed and yet was overcome, between a girl’s teeth and within another girl’s blood. She rises up out of the sea, more alive than she has ever been. The inky waters churn and sluice from her hips and her hocks. Seaweed, bruised with purple night, hangs from the curve of her spine and her shoulders like a cope from a priest.
Leto is reborn. Old gods are renounced, New ones replace them, upon her silver lips she bears their names. Steam hisses, sea-water scolded away at it dares touch the glow of her veins. She rises out from the ocean in a plume of steam. The sea is a mirror, even as it fractures with waves and froths like glue upon its broken bends. Within the shards of the sea, Leto slinks, celestial and monstrous toward the unprepared sand. Her body is the swallowing black of the universe. Her veins cracks of light breaking in, obliterating darkness in heat and awe and ire.
The stars tremble in their pin-point places, scattered through the sky. They rage like the fire they set ablaze within her star-white veins. The shed-star girl lands upon the beach, like a wave that bends down to prostrate itself upon the sand. She steps out from the wave’s embrace and feels out it returns, pulled back by the moon and its deep night.
Within her hair bones and bells chime like siren songs drifting in upon the seabreeze. It is a lullaby as sharp as the teeth between her silken lips. The earth groans relief at her return. Leto listens to its whispers as she paints her torso in sweeping tribal patterns. Ilati charms, Ilati histories play out across her midnight flesh as she reposes, a mermaid, a cat, a piercing star upon the beach.
Once painted, once adorned in spells and ancient histories she rises from the sand. It is glass beneath her body. Glass where the heat of her starfire veins melted the earth. Leto laughs as a toe taps upon the glass. It strikes a divine note that sets the heavens weeping. The stars peel out of their places, her magic serenading them down, down. A solitary star falls, keen and wicked and bright. It laughs as it descends in ribbons of light and fire and smoke. It strikes upon her cheek and her chin tips up towards the sky, her lips painted in silver, her tongue demanding red.
To be reborn is a blessing. Its cost is that of blood.
~ Anyone Welcome!
Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:
