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 says his forest wants to hurt her. Her words steal a frown from his brow and places a grin upon his lips. It is a small, amused turn of his lips. Her words come as no surprise to the boy. “Of course it does,” the wild-wood boy says lightly as if it is the most obvious thing this little girl could ever have said to him. “It tries to kill me too,” He says with a shrug, the amusement slipping from his mouth, replaced, instead, by a pragmatic expression.
“That is what it does.” It is all Leonidas has ever known. It is why he wears the wood amidst the tines of his antlers, why his skin bears the dirt of the floor, why his mane is a tangle of leaves and twigs and roots and flowers. Leonidas was not born of the wild wood, but he was raised by her cruel and yet loving hand. Nature grasped the child of Time and raised him ever more magical, ever more wild.
Through his fae-eyes he watches her, limns the little girl in gold and feels so much older than his two years. “That doesn’t mean you should avoid it. It is amazing too.” He ends upon a whisper as something dark, something otherworldly creeps upon the boy. It turns him more stag than horse, more man than boy. It is easy in that moment for forget how his voice had risen and fallen sharply with his speaking. Now he seems more man, as if he has never been a boy at all - as if being an orphan had robbed him of any childhood. It did. The boy stands before her, unknown of the depths of his loneliness, not knowing how he missed so many years of play and squabbles with children his own age. Leonidas stands upon the fringes of society and barely knows how to even gaze in upon it, let alone walk within its midst. Already he is a thief, ignorant of money, incapable of counting it, unable to read or write.
When she asks what he knows about anything, he wonders about all the things he has discovered he does not know. It seems like such a lot. Yet he looks to her and says, proud as a god of the wood, “I know how to outsmart and survive the wood when it wants to kill you.” Beneath the thick bow of his lashes Leonidas stares unblinkingly at the little girl. It may be the only thing a feral boy could know or ever be proud of.
Her feathers rise upon her wings. She reminds him of a newborn panther cub hissing, spitting at a bear. The boy watches her with the slow regard of an adult bear, gold eyes, so dark in the firelight they glow copper. “My mother didn’t want to leave me. She loved me, but it didn’t stop her disappearing against her will. She can love you as much as you love her, but it still doesn’t mean she will be with you forever. It is not only the woods that want to kill and separate, but the whole of Novus and space and time and magic.” And this is the truth the boy knows in his heart. That his mother never wanted to leave him, but it hurt him less to think that she wanted to. It made it easier to hate her absence when he hated her.
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