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.
She is blood spattered pearl. The weeping wall had wept more that tears upon her body. But when Leonidas looks to her, all he can think is how she wears the island’s magic blood. She has gutted its latest manifestation and she wears it with pride but without vanity. He looks for vanity, in the way he looks for a wolf or a lion to be proud of its kill, but all it seems is content with the hunt and its meal. Leonidas thinks this girl is made for wearing the blood of others; that this is she, perfectly as she should be.
He might have looked away from her, but for her horn that lowers to touch one of his golden tines. The brace of his antlers feels the presence of her horn. It is hot and hard like cooling obsidian thrown from a volcano. He expects her crimson horn to glow, but it does not, it just shines a wicked red, as if it has rested only recently within the heart of his beloved island.
Yet what stirs his heart most, is not the way it feels wicked warm, but how it rings out. Like Aspara’s did. Her horn slides down to the joint and he turns into her horn, lowering his head until the curves of her horn are tangled within the branches of his golden crown. The friction of their locking horns sounds like swords crying shrill and loud as they rub their edges in violent, life altering ire. But there is no ire in Leonidas’ eyes when he turns to look beneath the thick wave of his forelock. Her eyes are crimson too, bright as rubies.
She smiles and her teeth glow like moons, he wonders if she opens her mouth beyond her smile, whether there would be a castle within there too. He thinks she could possess the world between her ribs of ivory and blood. Leonidas does not know how the island makes her empty, how the art she watches with those blood-tide eyes fails to fill even the smallest parts of her.
The art runs like beetles up his knees and hers. Up and up it climbs. Across her knees, her skin becomes alive with light and magic and moving art. He pulls his antlers from her horn (it sounds so much like a sword drawn from its scabbard - more war, more danger like claws and teeth and blood-wet earth). The clutch of his antlers, the twists of her horn, makes their parting jerky yet fast.
She grins, wide, wide, wide. Leonidas watches her smile, he does not wear one to answer hers not yet, not yet, not yet. He watches the art climb and climb and climb, up and up her slim body. He thinks it might reach her throat, her cheek. He presses a triad ot tines to the joint between her shoulder and her neck. With a small breath he too waits to see what the magic does at his command. Would the beetles flee her body, back to the walls as they fled him first, or will they scatter across the canvas of her blood spattered body? Leonidas waits, his eyes rich with wonder, his tongue content with no words. For art, needs no words and he has been a boy silent and a lone in a wood for so long. He is content to let the art speak every word he cannot find.
@Danaë
