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 sees the way her lips twist and firelight makes the glow of them angrier and darker than she may have intended. His ears are still pressed down into the tangles of his forelock, crumbled like spires in the wake of their disagreement.
The boy wonders when she speaks how the wood could want you dead if it was not like any of those first things she said. But Leonidas, grown up in the wilds as he has, knows little of the wants and sins of men. He understands more the deliverance of death at the hands of a cougar or lightning bolt than he ever would at the hands of a man.
He tilts his head and watches her. He thinks how a child can be more wise than he. The fae-boy learns in that moment that this is yet another thing he does not understand. It is, yet another way in which growing up alone in the wilds of the wood had made him naive. It made him feel foolish. He thinks of Aspara, her anger, her rejection. This feels the same, he cannot understand. But he will, he is already more embroiled in the lives of his fellow ‘men’ than he realises. He will encounter their sins, become jaded by them, see all the ways in which they are not simply cougars who kill to survive, or a storm that strikes without subjectivity.
“I will stop it.” He says though, sure, convinced. “I can kill it before it kills you.” The boy looks down at her and the dark of his gaze, the heaviness in his words makes him grown up beyond the age of 2. In that moment, Leonidas could be an old, wise man. It agonises him to kill his wood. The woodland is all he has known, all he has understood and cared about for so long. Yet now, now he is discovering people beyond his wild-wood walls. Already he longs to spend time with them than alone in the deep of his wood.
He will kill is wood for those like him. The thought sobers him and he adds, “But only if it really does try to kill you. If it hates you.”
He holds her eyes as she looks up to him and tells him to fight. But, fight what, exactly? His mother is gone, was not living, raising himself, learning how to live within the wilds a form of fighting? “I have fought my fight and I continue to battle new ones because of my family.” Leonidas says and the turn of his lips is down, the pain in his words only a mere drop compared the ocean of pain that lances into his heart. “Come and find me in the woods, when you are brave enough. I will protect you. This is your fight.”
The boy says and turns from her, heading back into his woods, away from the little girl who brings him only pain and hurt. His strides are stiff, his manner dark and moody as a sea brewing a storm. Yet all the while he wishes she would join him, because an argument, a disagreement is better than no conversation at all.
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