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.
It rained, relentlessly.
The boy follows the new streams of floodwater that hurry their way through the woods. They bustle around stones and down over dips and sweeps of the forest floor. The woodland princeling hears the squelch of his feet as they sink into sodden earth. The mud splatters his knees. There is no part of him that is not soiled by mud and rainwater. Across his back are the seeds of trees, loosed by the heavy rain.
Against his muscling and growing neck, Leonidas’ mane lies in tangled ropes, dipped in gold at its ends. The boy is a golden coin dropped into the dirt, his worth forgotten about. But he gleams, roughly, patiently waiting for rediscovery. But until that moment, he meanders through his woodland, until he reaches the mid-wood cottage.
It has not faired the storm well. Where the boy lay beneath the rain and shivered at the cold sting of the wet night, the cottage succumbed to the winds, breaking apart beneath the storm’s relentless ire. A monster lies outside a steamed window (such is the water inside the cottage) and the boy turns his head to gaze at the dinosaur as it lounges.
It seems smaller now, that terrible monster. To a newborn boy its mouth was so very large, its teeth so very sharp. Yet, to look upon it now, it is small (yet no less formidable…). Leonidas steps curious and brave out of the trees. He is no fool, he knows what a monster this creature is, that it was only the cry of its master that meant Leonidas was alive to gaze upon it this day. And gaze upon it he does, with ears pinned and his chin tight into his chest. There is admiration, respect and ire in the boy’s gaze as he beholds the creature that split him from his sister. He has not seen her since, and whether it was the creature that caused their separation or not, Leonidas remembers only how he fell to sleep tangled with Aster’s warm body and awoke, his twin gone and the monster standing over him, hungry and savage.
Leonidas does not know the depth of hate and anger and a need for justice, until he stands and stares upon the slumbering beast this morning. The wild-wood boy’s teeth clack together and he does not flinch when the main beam of the cottage shatters (as if broken by a boy’s vengeance) and the roof tumbles in. Outside, flowers budding for spring bloom and die until the space around the monster is shrivelled and full of death. It is a sign, the wild boy thinks, of the things that are to come.
@Pravda
