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.
Yes. She is right. He does feel lonely. Leonidas is a cherished garden abandoned to grow forgotten and wild. Where plants and flowers of memories were placed and lovingly sculpted, now they are choked by the weeds of forgetting. Leonidas has turned from a son into an orphan and he is so utterly lonely.
Aspara has taught him touch and friendship and he yearns for it like the choked flowers of his forgotten garden. Isolt moves close and the fae-boy is so starved of touch, of proximity that he lets his death press in upon him. Better, he begins to think, to let death touch him, for it might be the only thing that cares enough to search him out.
Her lips touch his tines and though he craves touch, though he needs it, he is glad she has not touched him anywhere else. Still he is a flighty boy, in need of love and desperately fearful of it too.
As his eyes roll closed with her death-touch he looks like a man remembering he is still a boy. He feels so far from adulthood, from the effects of age which silently work upon him, sculpting him from a sapling boy into a rough oak, tall and rooted and strong.
But even trees fall sick and her touch is a sickness that feasts upon his sorrow. She whispers her words and they fill his ears like incantations. He succumbs to the magic of her tempting death. He yields to her, tilting his head, his tines to her lips. Though the path of them leaves tarnished gold in its wake. Their gold is turning to brown and crumbling away like dust. The girl erases him with her touch and all the while the awoken fish swims in circles.
Leonidas can feel her at his ribs. He feels her in his blood turning it black and thick like tar. His heart turns sluggish and his skin turns dark with his magic and hers. Leonidas; the sun boy, the autumn child of gold and bronze and brown, wilts, for she comes at him like winter and demands he die in her arms.
The fish swims, skeletal, starved of life as he is starved of love and bloated on loss. Already he feels like a corpse, blooming with rot and stained with algae. He can feel his teeth turning and knows if her twin was here his teeth would be blooming with fat flowers weaving his death-teeth together. With clarity, Leonidas knows then that upon his death he will be found like a dead-forest walking; with twigs for ribs, vines for hair, dank streams for black blood and rotting flowers weaving all the parts of him together.
“Yes.” He says; a dying man. “I am all those things.” And he looks into her blood-eyes as they press so close to the gold of his.
Somewhere within him something is waking. Something depthless, timeless, it is his immortality, pressed in his being with time magic. It rouses and rises through the spell of her death magic. It spills up through the choking loneliness that drowns the boy in this creek of rot and loss. It turns his head to his pretty girl of death and spills time magic out like ichor between his lips. It spills bright and gold upon the surface of the lake and turns it blue with new growth, new, fast growing life.
@Isolt
