So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace:
A dream once lost among sorrows and songs
A dream once lost among sorrows and songs
He doesn’t know how her heart skips with his touch - he would not understand it even if he could feel it fluttering in her slender neck. But what he would appreciate is how she longs to be a wild woodland thing. If he knew, if only he knew he would steal her away in the night, drag her into the forest to be wild with him, like him. If only he knew he would create for her a fairytale to rival all the ones she has read.
She presses her lips to his cheek. He does not understand the meaning of kisses. Leonidas has long forgotten his mother’s kisses when he was not an orphan, when he was young enough to take every touch for granted. Now all he thinks is how warm her lips feel, how soft her touch. It is like no other feeling he has experienced before. Maret kisses and is gone. The touch is as fleeting as a swallow swooping by.
As Maret catches his scent. He catches hers in turn. If he knew how libraries smelled - of parchment and ink and leaves bearing words upon words upon words. Not for a moment does Leonidas think that this is how fairytales smell. He likes it.
Slowly the boy blinks and the scratch of her quill across the paper draws him back to her paper. She writes and it is a slow dance leaving trails across a new leaf of her book. Greedily, Leonidas drinks in her every written word. They mean nothing to him, except for the beauty of them and that she says each word as she forms it upon the paper.
Leonidas grins too. Wild as a briar, sharp and rugged as heather. He stands tall as a stag, regal and flighty but curious. She presses the paper into his grasp but does not let him have until his own vow crosses his lips in turn for hers. His eyes gleam brilliant as the dawn sun that rises laughing and resplendent. “I promise,” the wild-wood boy says without pause. It is an easy vow to make. The boy trails his eyes up the sunflower she has drawn upon the page. He knows he will find one, for the next time that he sees her (with her goldsm her whites, her blacks).
“Dawn, four days from now.” the boy calls out as Maret disappears. He believes her promise, but a part of him wants to help ensure she will be by their lake at dawn, four days from this moment.
@Maret - Fin <3
