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.
His blood wants to run, his heart wants to fall into a staccato beat, but her magic is in his blood, it commands his body to slow, slow, slow. Her soul is knitting itself back into his. It eases over the scars of his heart, it twines like sinking roots of a great oak.
Slowly her brother realises that his sister was never gone. Aster’s roots have always been there within him. They were planted seeds at their conception and they have grown like tangling roots and twining limbs. They interlock like the strings of time, endless and eternal. She never left him, he merely forgot her.
Aster turns her face to him like a lily toward the sun and about them the world slows beneath the shadow hand of their magic. It skips like music from a scratched disc. Horses start and stop as time grows unsettled and changes with the reunion of these twins.
She tells him of a storm at their parting. Her words are a gale in his ears, her voice howling. The memory steals the breath from his lungs with a gust. A wind blew her away, like a shaving of wood, a petal, a flower. His sibling was always destined to drift, like him. But she has roamed better places than he. She has always been braver, wilder than him. Was that not the nature of the women in their family? He does not know it yet, but he has always seen it in her. Leonidas will learn his place within their family, the role of the men with their wide, lonely and wanting eyes and the women who will not rest.
He frowns a the thought of a storm. He does not remember, he does not wish to. Leonidas turns his leonine eyes upon her and holds his sister in the claws and the teeth of that look. But she is untouchable to him - or so she feels (though his magic nulls hers as hers nulls his).
His sister makes her vow standing bold and bright as porcelain. If he touched her, would she shatter? Would her promise break into sharp shards that will cut him for eternity. Still the wildling has not answered his strangeling sister. His look is enough to stop everything around them. “That is something mother would say,” her lonely brother says at last. Each word is quiet, dripping with distrust. “But it did not stop her leaving either.”
And with a final look he leaves his sister like the storm that stole her. The beating of his wings cracks the air like lightning. The air stirs like a gust beneath his gilded feathers. His leaving is ripping the place where her soul reunited with his - no, where he was reminded her soul had always been, just forgotten, choked by weeds and forgotten things and a smothering darkness of hurt and solitude.
He flees her, having become so very good at fleeing girls. Loneliness reigns, his unrelenting illness and pain and yet the refuge into which he turns, only to become more sick more agonised with its love.
@Aster
