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.
His blood butterflies flutter down to the weeds and flowers that bloom at his feet. Leonidas could have watched the way they grow in ways that plants should not (burdened by blight and the young weeds growing up grey and already old) but he does not watch them. Instead his gaze runs down the long tines of his antlers and into her strange, lovely-wicked face.
The air becomes damp and salt-slick. Mould spores float in the air, dancing like slow, slow pollen. They are enough to tickle his nose and potent enough to spasm his lungs, bringing sickness into the very core of him. The feral boy knows this magic is hers, though there is nothing rotten about her. She is young, her body soft and warm and fresh. Her skin smells only of only strange, metallic magic and flowers growing dry in the sun (and maybe that was the warning he was not heeding). Run, wild-wood boy his forest blood hisses with every wet thump of his heart. Run before you too are wilted and bound up in vines.
As his blood spiders creep to her, the crimson butterflies choose to land amidst the crop she made for them. Their wings open and close a lub-dub so similar to that which he heard from the island when he was so terribly young.
She speaks.
He blinks long and slow. A stag with the pride of a monarch and the innocence of prey. He could bathe in her voice, imbibe her words, open her up to see how she works, how she makes the mould spores dance and plants grow already dead. “Will you tell me what I might find within you?” The colt asks, more stallion than boy as his voice rattles out low, low, low from his throat. Though he asks, a part of him does not wish to know her answer because he is too enchanted by the idea of imagining. A girl once asked him to paint her and he has been so in love with the sway and stroke of a brush since that it is far sweeter to imagine her as something only art and magic could ever think to create.
Slowly he removes his tines from her throat and steps closer, presses his muzzle to the side of her silken neck. He waits, to see how her body hums, vibrates, and then, foolish, daring boy he presses an ear against her skin to see what he hears within her, that echoes louder than the beating of her heart. Does her body murmur with the susurration of magic through leaves? Does her body scratch line wildlife over the flowers and roots of the field? He listens until he is content enough to recall the music of her in his sleep and then he parts from her, stepping through the wall where their art dances. The beetles cling to his skin and the wall begins to close herself up behind him. He pauses for a moment, turns his head to watch her with gold eyes, just a moment, just an eternity, before the wall sews closed and the girl is gone.
@Danaë <3 Fin
