I am not like any ordinary world
The ravine cuts through the landscape like a the remnant of a gouging claw from a great, ancient beast. Whether it was water, or some great monster that carved the path here, the boy does not know. He cares and thinks of little now his eyes are full of a creature he thought dead - a part of himself he thought was lost. But even looking at the creature now it still feels lost to him, the lines of its face so familiar and yet as strange as his sister’s had been to him also. The sight of the cub feeds an anger within him. It could be a unicorn’s fury for all that it prowls within him and lets its anger peel out in sound with the running of a horn along his ribs.
But Leonidas is no unicorn. He is wild and dangerous and curious in such different ways than all the girls he has met before him whose horns point like spears - some straight, some twisted like daggers - into the sky. The boy crouches over the edge of the bank. He peers down like an eagle, a crow, curious and aloof, but curious. His head tilts as the girl appears.
She is a hazy smudge of ivory, a droplet of milk in the shadow of the great, gouged ravine. She wades as if through mud. He looks to see if her slim knees are dark with dirt, enough to hide the splattering of darker skin, stained rich as blood or wine. At her feet flowers bloom, upon the brambles where the cheetah writhes, pitiful and weakening, the petals fall open, soft like death. Leonidas knows it is her magic that grows about his familiar. And when she brings her tail, the blade of it singing as it cuts the air and then whisper-laughing as it cuts brambles like silk. Effortless, dangerous.
The girl makes the scene of biting thorns and twisting vines, tight as a noose, into a thing of ribbons and flowers. Leonidas tips over the edge of the ravine, he skids down its deep wall and lands before her. Closer now he remembers the smell of her, the scent of plants turning toward death. The must of rotting things, the perfume of blooming flowers, caught upon their final turn.
He moves across her, before her and stops the descending path of her scythe with the brace of his gilded antlers. “No.” He murmurs, as he looks up to her eyes so filled with awed desire once as they watched how magic painted itself upon the canvas of their bodies. “Leave it.” The boy says, soft like a lion, gilded and sun drenched as one too.
His cheetah writhes, it cries out as petals press into his wounds, as his blood paints them red, red, red. The sound is claws raking into a wild boy’s soul and he flinches, a part of him dying. Leonidas wonders if he will bind that part of him back together with her flowers that grow like stitches, resisting death, curling like kisses along the dying parts of him.
@Danae
