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.
You are a ghost.
He knows she is not, even as he says it. Still his brow remembers her skin. It still feels the heat of her against him. It reminds his body how it was tangled with hers in the womb. They are one, made together at the beginning of everything. He knows it. The wild-wood boy knows this belonging and so why does his loneliness protest? Why does it cry out and yawn, as open and deep as a vast chasm?
His heart beats slower. Slower than Leonidas knows it should. It is her, he can almost feel how her magic reaches into his chest and demands it slow down. It slows, liek the glass that falls quiet and graceful as snow from her foot. But the sound remains, high pitched and sudden. He startles, a wild boy, not used to the sounds of handmade things. His twin smiles and it is a phantom grin. The boy longs to reach for his sibling again and press his nose into the slim curve of her neck, breath in the strangeness of her, the way she is him and her and years of separation.
But he does not. He lets his eyes trickle along her smile aloof as a cat, as a phantom. The gold of her is as leaves turning in the fall. The white of her, snarls of mist melting in the midday sun. Her brother wonders if he blinks, will she be gone again?
Then she advances upon him, stalking like a panther bleached to bone-white. She lifts her cheek to a tine and presses until he feels the weight of her question against his crown. His ears fall and he twists away, his brace of antlers arcing like the limbs of a tree caught in a gust. He does not care if she is cut with his move, but he looks back, to see if a crimson line lies upon her porcelain cheek. He still wishes to know, to his shame, if she is real. Leonidas knows it, as readily as he knew when he climbed the island today it was to find her, only her. Of course she is real!
The boy presses his golden gaze upon his twin and it might as well be a dagger of blistering sunlight. Sharply, sharply he regards her. No, the boy thinks. You are no ghost.
She is a wild thing like him. But a different one, one made of darker forces, stranger things that weave her together from Time and dust and ancient magic. He feels slow beside her, slow as he always has. The world groans in its slowness, it feels as if it almost stands still. The glass about her limbs surely does.
“Why did you go?” A brother asks his twin. “What took you so long to come to me again?” Leonidas asks like a greedy child. Was he not content to rot in his woodland, tying his antlers up in the vines of loneliness. He grows like a solitary wild flower.
And he thinks with jealousy of all the unicorn twins and how they would all die for each other. But none of them had a brother, and maybe that was why.
@Aster
