Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
There are memories here among these shards of cratered stars, but they stubborn things.
Here is a slab of crystal-glass that reaches like a stalagmite and looks like a waterfall frozen in time. Around it are smaller bits of fine white gems like froth flung wide, sparkling bright among the snow. Aster stares at it for a moment, her ears twitching like a doe’s; and like a deer she drops her head, snorts, and turns away with a toss of fine branching antlers.
But there is another memory. It might have been a tree, once, an embracing beech with branches like cradling arms; now it is only a broken trunk of ice with twin crystals huddled beneath.
This time there is no birdsong here, no small animals chattering. There is only the sparse clouds making shadows overhead and her own reflection, sometimes reaching long, sometimes shrunken, sometimes wildly distorted. Aster knows better than to trust any of it as she moves through this foreign world.
Yet then, beyond her golden eyes, she spies another watcher. Aster falls still for a moment, hardly breathing, then steps up to the surface of the crystal. There is a boy there, a boy she knows, a boy who looks like her. They have the same gold beneath their wings like a secret, and in the ends of their hair like a god dipped it in a river of molten riches. She touches her nose to the boy’s curving shoulder and it is smooth and cold as a mirror.
When the boy turns away, Aster turns too.
Her breath escapes her in a soft sigh when she sees him. There is a complicated mixture of emotions that tighten her throat, constrict her heart, sting the place behind her eyes; she doesn’t like it. But there is another feeling, too, a weightless, ecstatic kind of joy, a righting of something she had forgotten was wrong. A wholeness.
There is no indecision in her steps when she picks her way to him, ignoring the false-brothers that watch her from her peripheral vision, a thousand boys stretching away to eternity and none that she can touch. She is not so easily fooled, half-fae daughter of a god she is, and in moments she is standing before his true self.
She moves to touch her forehead to his, a gesture as natural as taking a breath. “Leonidas,” she says, softly as a lamb, gently as a shepherd.
@Leonidas | <3
