This keening soul;
You and her are one and the same…
Leto nearly misses those whispered words, offered as if they are a secret, a confession. Even her bells and bones sound louder as they chime in the wild tangles of her mane. The sea, iron hard and bleak, hisses as it breaks unfathomably upon the shore. That hiss is something like a laugh. Leto listens, with her delicate head tilted. An ear turns toward the sea, but her eyes cradle the girl before her. The way she watches is dark and avian. Her eyes smolder like warm wood and shine as light gleaming upon the water.
The witch-wood girl does not flinch when the stranger’s gaze moves, and trails slowly across her painted skin. Does she know what stories are painted there? Can she speak the languages of the spells, drawn out in sigils across the skin. Leto stands, black and wicked-wild, and wonders if Torielle could speak her spells, would the magic work just the same? Would a star cast itself from the sky and cascade down to land upon her palm with white-hot fire?
The ocean laps at the fine-boned knees of the ebony creature it birthed only moments before. Its breath is salt that breathes coarsely across the stranger’s face. Can Torielle feel the way it rubs, sharp and hot with friction? Leto no longer feels the way it shapes her as if she is metal beneath the sandpaper. She has already been reformed, she feels the metallic magic tingle across her tongue.
You and her are one and the same… The words come back upon the wind and this time Leto smiles. Oh it is a lovely thing, satin lips concealing sharp teeth. Her blood runs white and hot. It sings like a bell, like a galaxy spinning silver, ricocheting stars.
Her. The sea rises up. It presses itself across her sea-slick skin. It laughs through bubbling foam across her chest and shoulders. I have called you by name. It hisses wet and free in Leto’s ears, You are mine and we are one.
The antlered girl watches Leto as if she were no priestess, but a god made flesh and blood and beauty. Still the Ilati’s smile does not fade from where it curls her lips lovely and curled, full of cursive words not yet spoken and of sigils yet unpainted. “Oh no,” Leto begins, her voice rough as the waves, silken as a kiss, wanting, seducing, drawing the stranger in. I am no god. “We are not the same.” She answers and steps deeper into the beckoning waves. The undulations press against her stomach, her hips, water sluices along the subtle ridge between her ribs. It pours away black and steaming. All of her steams, hot and feral.
Her bones clink and chatter in her hair with skeleton songs that are too old, too strange. “Come.” She breathes to the girl as she steps out deeper into the endless ocean. Her head tips back toward the girl. “I am not her.” Leto says with that same smile that grows ever more beautifully dangerous. The stars begin their trembling and the sea groans a laugh as it reaches for the antlered girl. Fine as a dancer, nimble as a doe. Beneath her wet lashes Leto studies her. “Come,” she breathes, “and you will learn all the ways that I am not her and she is not me.”
Her chin dips low, shadows pooling in the lines and hollows of her fine face. Her white paint gleams like bones, hallowed and wicked. “But you may grow to love her as I do, for the earth and the sky alone are not enough.”
@Torielle
Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:
