I am not like any ordinary world
He is minding his own business when she comes, bringing something angelic, altogether holy into his life. Andromeda, Leonidas knows, even by that first glimpse, is so different to a boy like he. They both glow, yes, him with burnished gold and she, with her tail of divine flame. Yet that is where their similarities end. For Leonidas is a wild-wood boy, he lifts his chin from amidst the flowers. Atop his poll his gilded antlers lift the woodland offerings up to the sky. Vines and leaves and flowers and seeds, lie like a wildwood meadow hung between his pointed tines (like fingers and palm uplifted to a god). But Leonidas has no god to make such offerings to. Instead he lives rough and alive, unholy and alone in his feral wood with his kingdom of animals.
The boy watches the girl and he is entranced. She moves, not like any girl he has ever seen, but she dances. Her body liquid light, her eyes not of this world. Oh, none of her is of this world. The sight of her fills his mind with tales his mothers once told him. Stories that have grown rough and forgotten with time. They are smudged and worn in his memory bank, he has thought of them too often and yet not often enough. These stories are loved and held, worried through like years of fingers upon paper. But also, their ink has faded for he has not opened his memories enough.
She disappears into the wood. A glimmer of light and then gone. The woodland feels dark and colder without her light. It takes but a moment to consider, but really, for the boy there is nothing to consider at all. He leaps, elven, from his place. He chases her, caught as if she were a siren. She glows, he is dusted in dirt, dark, but for his gold that gleams in answer, crying out to her vitality with a sun-gold-glow.
They run, her ahead and him, fleeting as a fox through the brush. The fae-boy runs, at times a man and at others still a boy upon the cusp of manhood. But in his eyes is only the awe of a boy, ensnared by a magic he has never seen before. A creature rare within his woodland home.
She stops, suddenly, in a clearing where sunlight gleams down and dapples the earth. She stops before the maw of a cave where lit dustmotes dance in its black maw. He has stopped at the edge of the wood. There is nothing boyish now in the way he gazes at the dark cave and the girl before it. The girl, ivory and crimson, speaks into the cave. A hello that swallowed by darkness and sounds like bells as it sinks beneath the earth.
Slow, calm as any monarch within his glen, the boy steps up beside her, his nape thick with adult muscle, his shoulders growing. He is a boy, so nearly a man. It is easy to forget he is one or the other. But always he is fae, always he is a wild-wood creature, lost beneath stars and deep into the lovely dark of woodlands deep. “Will you go in?” He asks, his voice so deep. It does not break, it emboldens him, “Do you want company?” For he does not think he can leave her holiness, not yet, his unholy body breathes, not yet, not yet.
His voice, however, it breaks at the last word and reminds them both that his is still just a boy, not yet a man.
@Andromeda
