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.
His head tilts as he listens. It is a whispering noise at first, the way she moves through the brush. The distance turns it soft, little louder than the busy susurration of the trees. Yet the wildling boy hears it. Of course he does.
Upon the exposed rock he crouches, there in the early morning wood. He listens to her as she moves - not that he knows it is a girl. Not yet, not yet. Not until she comes a little closer, with her fine boned limbs and hair of spider-silk gold. It gleams as fine as a web in the early dawn light. His chin tips up to where it dapples through the leafy canopy and tumbles down, down, down to pool upon the curve of the child’s spine.
From his place, with his golden brace of antlers, strung and woven through with leaves and vines and blossoms, he watches her like a spirit of the wood. But when he rises from his crouch, to move as a mirror to her, to trail the child through his woods, the wildling boy is more stag, a monarch of his woodland space. Though really, he is king of nothing at all, nothing but the air that fills his lungs. He has no home, no bed but the grasses and flowers he lays down to sleep upon.
His time he spends roaming and scavenging. Yet this day, this morning, he spends watching. Watching a girl who smells of woods belonging to other worlds. The scent of her is an intoxicating thing and he follows, drinking in the mahogany of her skin - so much like his. But Leonidas wears his wild wood upon his growing body. It is painted as dirt across his ribs and limbs and cheeks. It is draped and woven like jewelry through his gilded antlers.
He follows until he can no more, until he intrigues her too much. Then, oh, and only then, does he step out of the woodland’s sleepy, morning dark, and out into her path. He stands, taller, older, boy and man warring across his growing body. Neither adult, neither boy. Beneath his long black lashes he watches her, leonine eyes gleaming with wanderlust. “Who are you?” The fae-boy breathes and turns like a nymph, a stag, a fox. The woodland cannot decide what he should be. It paints him all things and when he grins at her, keen to pull from this girl’s lips her every story of new and wonderful worlds, there is something of his parents in him. Something godly, something not of this world.
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