I am not like any ordinary world
The blade glints and Time sings as the blade slices the air. It does not shy as it cuts close to the stallion who grasps its owner tight. The shard remembers what blood is. It recalls the feel of flesh when it was once part of an entire blade.
Its magic shudders, broken and yet still living. The boy tastes it and his own magic flares as flowers burst into bloom at his feet. They are crimson poppies, sharp with the demands of the shard.
Let him go. A voice calls.
But already the stallion is retreating, his eyes warily fixed upon the sharp metal pointed at his throat. All around the orchard, trees are dropping apples which grow bruised, soft and shrivelled. Tendrils of time magic reach out like fingers whispering faster, faster to leaves and branches and apples flowers. Each thing touched begins to age faster, blooming and dying when they should not. Strands of hair upon the man’s mane grow grey as frost.
Warily the boy steps back as his magic continues to reach out, out. Leonidas casts his golden eyes upon the man who canters close, his command still upon his lips. The boy turns his snarl upon him as the stranger finally leaves.
Easy, the once-king murmurs. It is soft, as if the child were a dangerous thing. Maybe he is right. The tip of his hoof cuts into the earth, a gouge that carves through his rotting apples. Nature hangs gloriously from his body - leaves and flowers, twigs and berries. The woodland has already claimed its orphan boy. Loneliness has let her fingers smudge his memories like a balm, healing, soothing. It was blissful to forget and to become something new, taught by Nature and Survival. They have carved the boy rough and elven. He sleeps beneath the canopy of leaves, grasses his bed, roots his pillow. He has never given a thought to the Court he was born in, the weeks he spent in a room, in a bed, tangled in the ivory of his twin.
Leonidas? The new stallion speaks his name. It might be the only thing the wild-wood orphan does remember, except the word Aster. That too is a word he clings to, though he cannot remember why. It is carved as deeply into his soul as his own name. Always his magic has felt lopsided, always he has felt strange.
Slowly he turns his gaze upon the man. Starlight is splashed across the grown up’s skin. Was he plucked out of the sky? A mostly forgotten memory stirs. It’s smudged edges remember stars and the shard warms in his grasp. It heats until it burns, until the air it cuts begins to keen. The boy drops it, but already something like pain is coursing through his body. It is chaotic and unsettling. The boy’s antlers lower as he turns his feral gaze fully upon the man. None have spoken his name in all the time he can remember. Now it comes from the man’s lips and stirs something dark and worrisome. Time bends in upon itself. His own magic swells, worried and set alight.
“Who are you?” The boy asks with a soft wariness. His brace of antlers, still gold, though weakening in the season, point towards the stranger. “How do you have my name?” Leonidas asks as he peers up from beneath his lashes, a gesture so much like a forgotten mother. The twist of his lips so like a forgotten father. Maybe there is nothing of a forgotten uncle, except that the boy has acquired a kingdom for himself, boundless and wild as he. His subjects are the animals, his sprawling palace, the flora and fauna. The feral-boy-king answers to no one and he lifts the dagger again to point it at his forgotten memory. The dagger trembles, it recalls what the boy does not; it remembers family.
@Asterion
