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.
She says she would find him in her mountains, but has Aspara ever tried searching out a wildling boy, grown by the Novus wilderness itself?
He hears her.
He smells her.
He listens to how she crashes through the woods and thinks how he might teach her to walk quiet as a doe, cunning as a fox. But when he sees the flash of her between the columns of the trees, he knows she is more wolf than girl. Even then, wolves know how to creep and slink and go unheard.
The fae-youth’s lips are berry stained and his tongue still holds the puddled juice until he swallows down that last sweet taste. Apsara has drawn him from the berry bush as she fills the woodland with his name.
Leonidas goes to her, of course he does. Stepping through the wood he nears her like a nymph and she the god brought to summon him. But still her rejection stings his young-thin skin. Still that frustration at her rejection is a tidal wave that breaks against the corners of him. So he does not step out of the brush and into her path. No. The wildling boy sinks into his woodland greens, his gold darkens with the dim-wood light. He steps around fireflies that beg him to remember that this was the girl who he nearly faded with. The glowing beetles fly out between the woods, from him, to her. But already he is gone from where they came.
How he wants to go to her, to share the taste of berries with her, to see her lips stain as red as his. But he doesn’t. Instead he watches as she wonders, as softly pale as a phantom through the wood, her skin stained faintly gold by the champagne light.
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