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.
He stands, halfway up the spiraling staircase that rises up into the Terrastellan sky. Gazing higher up the spiral steps, up to a small window that breathes sunbright air in through the thick stone walls of the tower, he is full of remembering. It is just one memory, an abstract thing really. It is strange, even Leonidas thinks, for it to be caught within a wildling boy’s mind. But it is there, uncovered at last by the roots and weeds of forgetting.
Within his mind’s eye, that place of remembering, Leonidas is a boy running up these stairs with laughter in his throat. It spills from his tongue as he runs higher, higher, chasing amethyst petals, chasing the star-scattered black of a king’s tail. At his heels a sister runs too, her feet a whisper over the stone steps. She is silent as a fox, but upon her lips is the echo of her brother’s laugh. The children chase their mother and uncle up and up and up…
Are you going up?
Oh, and this is the present breaking through. It strikes upon the surface of his memory, scattering it like water. Leonidas looks down and does not know how close he came to being a prince just a moment before.
“Yes,” the feral boy murmurs and continues his climb, listening to the whispers of sand mice forming and un-forming around him. Now, it is not petals that float down the spiral staircase, caught upon the window’s breeze, but earth and leaves, pulled free from a fae youth’s antlers. Now, it is another king who follows a wildling boy up the stone steps into the Terrastellan sky.
Leonidas wonders as he climbs, if he will find his memory at the top, or if that brief flash of remembering is all he has allowed himself. When he spills out upon the top of the turret, gold feathers caught in the mid-spring breeze, he looks out across the tulip fields. Their myriad hues steal any hopes he had of returning memories. He forgets that Terrastella is his blood and looks out over the tulip fields and thinks of how it is all so orchestrated. He has seen these flowers growing secret and wild within the woods, a surprise and delight to stumble across; a secret smile from an even more curious wood.
“They are not wild grown.” The wildling youth says as the wind teases beneath his wings and urges him to jump. Because recklessness is in his blood too. He looks down from the carved tower and loathes how enclosed he is, how rigid the walls around them are. “How can you live like this?” Leonidas groans to the man and means: how can you live around others, how can you sleep entombed in carved stone, how can you not wish to sleep beneath the stars and find tulips growing wild and free.
@Ipomoea
