This keening soul;
It is dawn when at last she steps out of the treeline and turns her gaze toward the siren song of the sea. The waves beckon her to them. Their breath is loud, the taste of it is salted and fresh. Up the beach the dawn tide crawls reaching for its girl who stands still hidden by the evening shadows. The hour is young, the dawn sky a blushing pink like worried skin. The young sun paints the sea red like blood. Above the horizon it rises, its crown rising as it watches a girl dance upon the beach.
But it is not just the sun who watches the woman dance, lupine and feral. In the dark of her trees Leto watches too. Her silver eyes glow, lit by the moonlight the beach-dancing girl should be howling beneath. But Leto owns the sky, the moon is hers and every star bends at her command. Its celestial fire is the shedstar’s to own and she calls them down, each by name to scold the world.
But this morning she watches as a feral girl dances. There is nothing tribal about how she moves. Leto longs to turn her grace into something sharper than the hooves that dig into the sand like talons. The ebony kelpie needs no sharp claws to end her prey upon the shore. Her dance is earthen magic belonging to wicked wild woods.
The bones chatter in her hair. Their voice is the melody of the wind as it tap, tap, taps her bones together. The canvas of the Ilati’s obsidian skin is painted in Ilati sigils and shed-star seals. They glow in the new-gold light of the dawning day. They whisper ancient magic over the meadow. The air trembles with her presence.
Sleek and slow as a panther Leto steps out from the cover of darkness, out, out into the dawn light. It does not know how to hold her, it does not know how to drench her space-black skin in golden sunlight. As the space between stars, Leto swallows down the sunlight, bleeding out of the air until she is a black hole, drawing all into her a grasp.
Down, down to the beach she slinks, her gaze only for the waves, not the witch who dances at their edge. Oh how the ocean groans for her return, her magic swells and light radiates out from her veins. Her skin glows with the spidery map of her vessels. Leto’s swallowing black splits with light and she gleams wicked and wild and hot like stars.
The startled sea, scolded by her heat, hisses as it laps at her stomach, her hips. Steam rises, salt sticking to her ebony skin. Her pearls begin to melt, her feathers catching light, all the other trinkets woven into her hair succumb to the savage heat of the black priestess. She stands a torch within the sea that begs her to be cool, as it throws itself upon her and steams, steams, steams.
Leto has no eyes for the ocean, not when she fills her gaze up with lilac skin and lupine limbs. The girl still dances her strange dawn dance and the kelpie watches, watches, watches as she burns, burns, burns.
@Euryale
Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:
