I am not like any ordinary world
Leonidas feels uncomfortable in the way the other boy watches him sometimes. It is as if he knows something that Leonidas does not. As if the forest boy’s appearance is strange. He tries to ignore it, fill himself up with what the island whispers to him.
The ivory boy asks him how he knows what the island tells him. Leonidas’ brow furrows. Are there truly any ways to describe instinct? He cannot explain the way the island whispers to him, just as he cannot explain how the woodland whispers to him too. He pauses upon the edge of the door that opens into the galaxy of dying stars that flings itself out into endlessness. Leonidas turns his gaze to the pale boy with his smile that is a thing born of fairytales. He frowns as he thinks of words (of which there are none) and finally he presses a tine to the other boy’s breast.
“Here,” The elven youth murmurs. There, where he feels his heart beat. Listen, he should say to Pan (and yet does not), listen to the trembling cadence of your heart. Leonidas does not stop to think that it might only be the fact that he was born here, amidst the wild roots and vines of the island, when Time stopped moving, that means he hears how the island whispers in his blood.
Together the boys fall through the doorway and cascade down, down, down. The paler boy floats, as if this is not his first time tumbling between worlds. Leonidas watches him, intrigued, enchanted.
Then Pan is swimming away, toward a beam of light like a moth into a flame. The wild wood boy follows him, drifting past stars and planets until his feet touch upon a glittering room. This is the first place he is quiet, in awe. He presses his lips together and feels how his ears fall firmly to his skull. They are beautiful, yes, but the remind him of shame. He thinks of Aspara, of the necklace he chose for her. It has diamonds in too. She hated it. She got angry at him. Leonidas never wants to see a diamond again, no matter the awe that slips like a shiver down his muscling spine.
Without a thought Leonidas storms across the room, diamonds singing shrilly as his feet tap upon them. The room fills with the sound of angelic ringing. Without a pause the youth shoves through the next door and falls out into a land of lava as crimson and bright as his shame, his sadness, his anger. He looks back to his companion from his place within the new dystopian room and wonders if he will still follow.
@Pan
