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.
Leonidas is not surprised by her hunger. The stories of their mothers’ home are woven into their beings. The older boy remembers tales of huntresses and hunters, of a unicorn who hunted like a lion and screamed her vengeance at the sky.
“You do not control the fates.” The wild-wood boy says, his golden eyes dark as he surveys the child that hunts him, drooling like a beast. She whispers, her voice light with youth. It is barely there in the wind, his ears have to twist to catch them, but catch them they do. “My death is not at your hands,” Leonidas does not know when death will catch up with him and gather him into his arms. But he knows it is not now and it may not be for an eternity. Yet he does not entirely trust death not to be hidden, like a blocked road concealed by a bend - sudden, surprising, unavoidable.
Her eyes are claws. He wonders how something so soft, so warm in colour can gouge at his jaw with a mere look. She is the hunter here. Small and slim and wickedly dangerous. The boy grins at her. It is a reckless gesture, yet he has survived dinosaurs and collapsing islands and the standing still of time and natural disasters - so many things he has endured alone and learnt how to live. He looks to the little girl, small and slim and dangerous, yes, but he has faced worse. Leonidas knows how to live with adversity roaring like a lion at his flanks. His body bears the scars of its teeth, deep and long and everywhere upon his torso.
“No one can ever escape death,” Even his mother whose lives are multiple, even she let death catch her eventually. “Though the cheetah is an instrument death. It is death. Just like me.” The boy says as the earth about her springs its Spring flowers. The plants and grasses and flowers grow and wilt and die. At the command of his magic the earth about her feet is wilted and riddled with death like winter.
The boy gasps, suddenly weary from his magic. His eyelids are heavy, that gaze of his soft and warm. “Why do you wish me dead, little death?”
@Isolt <3
