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 crosses the spine bridge, whose ribs rise like fingers for him. His toes tap over spinous processes, the sound so much like a piano’s ivories pressed into tune. He has come far from his wild woods but this is the place of his birth and every season he returns it is so utterly different. Each time he takes a piece of it away with him, sometimes a physical memento, sometimes the island within him, sinking deep, like oxygen passing into his blood and then off into his every cell.
Leonidas will always return here. He was born into a strange world. He is spun from stranger magic, Time and ancient, feral things. The weeping wall calls him, its tears mixed with the crying of the wall beyond sound like haunting memories of how he and his sister went when their parents disappeared. But Leonidas was the only one who cried for longer. For Aster stopped and never started again. Her lovely face drawn with something dark, some terrible resolve that sunk into her body and soldered her bones.
In amidst the wandering crowds, this strange fae-boy can pass as nearly a man. Nearly. He is grown tall and muscular, but still youth claims him, turns his eyes wide with wonder and not enough wariness. He has learned of the wilds, of how to live within Nature’s palm, but he has not learned of people yet. Of how they might be the most dangerous things here, more terrible than any monster.
He moves onward, away from the wall that weeps her haunting tears. Away from the wall that screams his terrible ire out like a broken violin. Leonidas, gilded and wild, walks into the glow of the stones, on through the shops and the strange walled gardens, on and on he goes until the castle opens up her maw for him. Her mouth is full of light and creatures. Her teeth are glowing windows. He steps up and in and there, watching art is a girl so much like the one who hunted him in the wood. Leonidas knows a twin. This girl’s body answer’s her sister’s crimson, Isolt has left crimson dots, left like blood splatter across her sister’s ivory skin. Her horn is dipped in blood, her eyes as white and red and bright as a hunter’s moon.
It should stop him, but it does not. He goes to her as his sister came to him. The walls glow off her body and he wonders what death and danger clings to her. What whispers her Rift blood will sing into his. Time meets magic and the boy tips his gilded antlers to touch the art she watches. It scatters from him, like beetles, crawling across the floor, reaching, reaching for their feet, to climb, to claim, to turn them into living art.
@Danaë
