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.
Am I too early?
That is what his death asks as she steps down into the water with her apocalypse dreams sprouting like weeds between her pale ribs.
Am i too early?
That is how his death counters him as she pads, neat and keen as a lion across the shallow creek. Isolt’s eyes glow with excitement at the seduction of death as all around her the river bed turns over and reaches its end. Expired creatures and shrivelled plants rise to the surface and bend their backs, their ribs, their stems as they float, still and rotten all around her.
Leonidas feels death pressing her kisses to his limbs as corpses rise around him. Isolt turns the stream to death and as the current carries them away, he sees the petals and eyes that watch him with unlinking accusation from their limp bodies.
They tell him it is his time. He should be the one Isolt sends floating down the creek, his body to catch in its slim throat like a dam that floods the plane.
The water runs black and it washes its dank dirt back upon the boy and his so-recently-clean skin. He will wear the smell of her death for days to come - another reminder of her, of their fatefully entwined lives.
Leonidas merely smiles at her, his lioness, come to reap the harvest of the gazelle she has stalked since their first meeting. Little does the forest boy know that his mother’s mother was a gazelle. Neither does he know that she fled a lion-unicorn until they learned to lie together, hunter and hunted. Maybe that is why he turns toward his death now and watches her like the Novus’ sun god might watch the looming of night.
She will extinguish all the gold of him. Leonidas knows it. Already he feels the way she tarnishes him, the way her eyes are a scouring wind, stripping the surface soil of his body away, exposing the rocks and roots of his bones and muscles.
“Is it not?” He whispers as she nears and marvels how her proximity feels like teeth. To be near her is the pain and cold and sweet numbing oblivion of impending death. The boy gets drunk upon the inevitability of this girl. His eyelids hang heavy and intoxicated over his burnished eyes.
“Show me then.”
Already he has begun to look at the death that floats morosely at her feet. Leonidas feels his wings begin to wilt.
@Isolt
