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.
He leads the little wolf girl to the middle of the swamp. He stops and turns to watch her. Though he stands taller than her, grown with time, muscled with burgeoning puberty, she does not falter. The girl begins to prowl like a hungry thing woven together by monstrous magic.
In his mind are tales his mother whispered of her birthplace where ancient magic twisted itself into ungodly monsters and Time spun itself trapping webs and ripped holes between worlds. It was a place of dragons and giant graveyards where bones reached up from the bed of an ancient long-lost sea. It is like the wolf-girl is from such a world.
He does not know that in their blood is riftland magic. That his parents and the wolf-girls mother are from the same strange world as the stories his head is full of when he looks at her. But maybe it is their shared blood that has him standing calm and bright and knowing though he understands nothing at all. Instinct alone breathes magic into his bones. The wolf girl is the chaotic magic of the Riftlands, he is the Time.
The wild-wood boy watches when she licks her teeth, hungry and keen and asks him what he is. Leonidas, glows bright, radiant next to her drab skin. What is he? A self-appointed keeper of the Novus wildlands? A stag, a boy-king whose kingdom is nothing and yet everything (to him)? A child without a father or a mother yet with an ancestry that reaches beyond worlds and time and space. He looks to the girl and finds something familiar in her hungry, savage being.
“What do you think I am?” The boy asks in turn, his voice breaking, shattering over the words. He does not flinch at its breaking. Now is not a time to be embarrassed by the passing from childhood to adulthood.
The more pertinent question for this wolf-girl is, however, “What do you want me to be?” Between your teeth, over your tongue, bled out like ripe fruit? Time never succumbs to magic so easily. And so, like any good wild-wood boy, born of and master of Time, he breathes lightly, “I am the cheetah.”
@Isolt <3
