This keening soul;
Leto smells of many things this day. She smells of the sweetness of flowers, the bitterness of poison leaves, the metallic tang of paint that draws whimsically, fiercely, and brightly in changeable strokes across her skin. Each line of paint creates a sigil, a story, a potent dream, wish, lament, vow. Magic ancient and old as Verenor’s towering peak, hums through the paint reaching across her ebony flesh.
In her mane, tied with long grasses hang herbs and flowering plants. They paint her in ever more colour. They illuminate the shadows that billow across her skin and weave like ghosts between the sigils. From her skin they banish the smell of burning stars, they rid this girl of stardust and the emptiness of space. She is full of Ilati magic, of whispering incantations. Chants beat to the rhythm of her heart, to every step she takes that shakes her bones like a drum. The trees sigh in the winds and oh how bare she thinks them to be, without the carvings of Ilati history upon their trunks.
Slowly she moves toward the water’s edge. The dry of her tongue has her lips lowering to where the stream laps upon the shore. There, upon the surface moving, bending is her face reflected back. Oh that reflection’s lips are sharp and then soft, curved like a scythe and then straight like the knife – so does the water toy with her reflection over and over. Laughter fills the air, a babbling brook that says it knows, it knows, it knows what fate awaits her.
Starfire warms her veins and her silver eyes blink away dust and the pollen that drifts from the flowers in her hair. A hiss slips past her teeth, her mouth tight, tight. Unsated, unnerved, she draws back from the waters that rise for her, that whisper of a king and a kelpie. At once her heart is racing, at once her blood is hot as molten rock. A star glows bright, bright, it pierces the midday sky and waits for her call. It waits for the moment it may fall in fire and ruin to the earth. Oh how it smolders as it waits, burning ozone, it was made to turn water into nothingness.
Yet no longer does she merely thirst, no longer is her tongue simply dry. Oh how her heart clamours! Fate is in her blood and she begs for the cool of water! Leto drinks, her blood suddenly cooled as that high up star keens and blinks its wild white stare. The starfire girl drinks until she could drain the stream, until she could make the waterfall run dry – but she stops. She stops when a stranger comes to the water’s edge and then beyond, stepping, stepping out, out into the water. It babbles about the other girl’s knees, it cradles her in silver and blue. Leto watches and wonders, “Is it deep?”
And oh how the water laughs: No, not deep, but deep enough for you.
And how Leto shivers then, that star at last unseated.
@Kindred
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
