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.
The way Leonidas watches her is as if he can see the stories shed from her like feathers from a swan. He wonders if the stories she keeps between tooth and tongue and left behind in her leaf-covered footsteps are of her life or the fanciful tales of ancient myth.
This fae creature, with his long neck and proud brace of gilded antlers, would feast upon her every word. It would be as if each one was a crumb to a pauper. The wildwood boy who stands before her is poor of so many things.
His eyes are the glow of the setting sun framed beneath an arcing frond of thick black lashes. What are you? the girl asks him as he stands before her, gilding her like Midas. But Leonidas is more feral than that cursed king. He would rather turn her into buttercups than the gold of metal, the hot bright of the sun. His eyes darken at her question, they tarnish, his gold darkening too. His magic turns the air metallic as it strips the glow from his gilt points.
That grin straightens like a slackened bow string as shadows sculpt a frown upon his fine face. She did not ask him who he was but, what. His nape arches, her question pushing him back into woods from which he came. The ferns and bracken reach out like arms for him, reminding him that he is nothing but a woodland orphan, no matter how he has grown, no matter how his sadness tries to sculpt him anew.
His chin tips in toward his muscled breast and steadily he holds her, still turning every inch of her black to gold. “Do you not think I am just a -” Boy? Man? His pause is brief, barely perceptible, as he stumbles over what exactly he is. He feels more man than boy now, but it feels too much to call himself a man just yet. “-a horse?” He finishes and it is a blessing he watches her like a feral thing (a fox watching with a quiet calm, and wild-loving eyes, from between the leaves of a bush) for it mostly hides his boyish uncertainty. The tangle of his hair across his muddied cheek, the twist and hang of leaves and vines and flowers that wrap about his crown of golden tines. He blinks and then braver, braver grins at the pretty girl a murmurs, low, like the man he if growing into, “I am just Leonidas.” A boy of Time. An orphan of the woods.
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