there are nights when the wolves are silent and only the horses howl
The cliffs rose abruptly from the ocean, towering ramparts of stone that glinted jade-blue and swarthy merlot in the boughs of light thrown upon them by the sun. They established themselves in the east and arched southwest towards the realm dedicated to solely Vespera, where horses roamed with the setting sun chasing their backs - Dusk Court. The palisade was insurmountable from below, with its sheer curtains of solid rock in which bits of exposed ore winked in the light.
When she stepped closer to the edge, centimeters from plummeting downwards with nothing to land on besides shards of beaten boulders and waves, there was a soothing warmth that overtook her. Her mauve eyes drove towards the water beneath as she recognized how wave after wave swayed like the drums of war as they hammered against the stone-clad shoreline. When the sun descended every evening it was consumed by those waves and as it lifted it was birthed from those waves. The ocean was unceasingly morphing, while eternally the same; it was something that was invariably amending yet in the same breath prevailing constant. There was something inexplicable and noble that composed that mass of water, something no poem could describe and no image could capture.
Maerys recalled when she was young she would covet the shore, filling incalculable hours deftly laid on the coast with her chin extended out in front of her. She cherished how the tide would draw a breath and hum profoundly, lagging towards her like a sea-foam serpent that strained and strained towards her until it was too feeble to endure, mere iotas from her snout. It would recede and try again.
The memory dissipated as swiftly as it came.
There was no time to reminisce. There was no time to imagine. The reality she remembered was long gone, like petals on the wind.
She knew that in thoughts the destination may be beautiful, bewitching even - the laughter of her mother; the remembrance of a time when she was still alive - but it would always temporary at best, a fleeting second. She never reminisced too long, for she would feel her heart beat faster and fear slip into her bones.
What if I get stuck in the past?
With the faint flutter of her lids, she would always return to the present where she would stay until the sentiments and recollections came to alter her attention once more, to show her another place, another breath-taking illustration of an alternate life.
Vradara, in all her voracious despair, chirped at the silver-haired doe's side. Even the dragon understood.
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
The wild wood listens to a boy who runs like a hunter through its midst. The wild wood howls the echo of a boy who crows as he races. He is the boy of a once forest god and the trees adorn him so. Ivy links about his throat like a sash, a verdant necklace of leaves like tiny daggers. Twigs cling in his hair and mud splatters up his limbs. He is cut from where branches reach curious of this little feral boy who runs like he owns them, who laughs like he breathes them.
With a shout the boy-child shatters the peace of the meadow as he peels from the trees. His breath is hot in his lungs and he is so wrong here, in a world that does not move, so wrong, so wrong, so wrong, until he leaps atop a rock and stops.
His chin lifts and his nostrils flare and grasps at the air again and again and again. He drinks the air madly, like a drunkard their final sip. But oh, the boy knows nothing of alcohol, he knows nothing of the troubles of adults. His gold eyes reflect the too-still sun above his head and he laughs for a sister he has lost so far back. He laughs for the shadow he raced that never leaves him. It clings to him, anchors itself and never moves.
He is a boy born into a still world and he thinks nothing of the birds above him that do not fly. He thinks nothing of a sea that rises in a wave that never falls. He thinks nothing of a world that sounds so silent. Were worlds not made just for horses?
He looks where he perches atop his rock, crouched like a boy-hunter. Twigs hang in the gold of his hair, leaves tangle in the roots of his mane where it is dark as soil, before it fades to glowing gold. Thoughtfully his tail flips against his rump, its gilded end gleaming. Suddenly the boy falls still and he leans forward, his muzzle extending as he scents the air.
A figure stands upon the edge of the world. She gazes down at the unmoving sea and the boy’s head tilts. He crouches atop his rock, considering, before suddenly he is leaping down. Suddenly he is running again and the world just watches him pass. The grasses whip against his knobbly knees, they reach for his sash of ivy and roots and twigs. If he loses a rock from that woven necklace he does not stop to collect it. Not when there is a world full of trinkets a boy could collect!
He reaches the girl who looks down into a sea and begs not to fall into the past. He slows as he reaches her. He gilds her in gold as those wild-sun eyes trail over the moonlight of her. She is the silver to his gold and the boy wonders what it is like to touch a girl like her. Where she gazes out at the end of the world, her head hung low, Leonidas presses his small muzzle to her cheek, as he has seen his father do to his mother.
“Hullo.” He murmurs hot against her cheek, breathless with running. Then he draws back and gazes up beneath his black lashes, up past the wild-wood tangle of hair atop his brow. “Why do you look so sad?”
@Maerys | "speaks" | notes: thank you for threading with him! Please bear with me whilst i work out how to write him and who he is!
there are nights when the wolves are silent and only the horses howl
Who's heart didn't belong to this earth? Who didn't admire the loam and the delicate breath that percolated through the burgeoning leaves of compact trunks and boughs? The earth was excellence and attraction; heaven by divine design. Was Maerys not supposed to view the child who ran with the hues of this realm on his spine - locks of marigolds, skull of an elk, projections of a quail - how was she to look upon his earth-kissed limbs and ivy cable and not query if he was more a part of this world than she could conceive?
She had only one particular question that stung and ached, clawed her from the inside out - did she belong here? Did the girl of Varak belong among a land she knew nothing about and believed she knew no one within?
The boy was alongside her before she recognized, his snout smoothed against her jowl in succor as if he could taste all the things she felt and could understand. But he couldn't. "It doth take wintertide to ascertain that there is an enduring heat within." When her eyes moved to him, she already knew what she would see.
On his withers was a draping infant fur quilt, carried as a cape, as if all those memories of him and his mother gave him invincibility. He had eyes that flashed with a writhing tarn of emotion - insight, celebration, clemency, vibrancy. She'd been similar to him only two fleeting years ago.
"Where art thou home?" His home - whatever brick or clay or stone it had been composed of - had been his cocoon; a much-needed sanctuary. His eyes may wander the crack and dents in its architecture and feel the urge to leave and explore greater, more plentiful things, but a home is not something one should take leave of lightly at that age. The hazy sunlight imparted a passion on the body and made one feel as though the world loved you, but the earth could be cruel; there would be no mercy for even the ones mere days old.
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
Her cheek is warm against his lips, even as he draws back his lips still remember what it was like to touch her. They still tingle with the silk of her hair, the heat of her skin, warmed ever more by her sorrow and the sun that blooms bright with summertime.
He is slow to draw away from her. Slow because beneath the thick of his lashes he drinks in the lines of her face each of them straight as an arrow and yet curved as all things in nature are. He has spent much time within nature’s masterpiece, loose upon the woodland floor (for his wings are still not yet fledged) and wildly across the meadow and riverbanks.
Leonidas looks at this girl because he has never been so close to a girl who is not of his blood. He knows how his mother smelled and how his sister does too, their scent is a comforting thing, it is home and everything about their smell is welcome. But oh, this girl’s skin bears a scent so different, so utterly, wonderfully strange. There is no part of her familiar to him and how that sparks curiosity within him. It burns hot and bright and slowly, boldly he reaches for her again, to run his lips like fingers along the contours of her cheek, her brow, her nose. Never does he think this improper, never has he learned social etiquette or how to not touch unless invited.
She is too different, too wonderful, too beautiful for him not to. He counts the lashes that curve over each eye and thinks that hers might outnumber all the trees within Novus for how thick each one is. Or yet, maybe only the stars are enough to outnumber them…
Eventually, though still not satisfied, Leo draws back and watches her with a frown upon his young face. This wild boy does not understand her words, but oh if he did, he might understand just something of what she feels. Still his heart is raw, still he aches (as if run through with a blade) for the family who disappeared from him so suddenly. He has felt winter’s desolate, lonely bite and yet lived and continues to live with blood warm in his veins. But he does not know the symbolism of her words and so, offers with the softest sigh from curious lips, “I can show you how to keep warm in winter if you would like?”
Her next question, however, Leonidas understands. Where is his home? “Anywhere I choose.” The boy says, smiling like a god who could make it any place he wished. Already he feels the sigh of the woods and the begging of the seaside sand, as if either would make for him the grandest bed for the night. His leaves rustle in his hair, they whisper questions about the girl along his throat. Wild and unkempt he looks to her, this masterpiece of creation, and smiles, feral and bright. There is something untameable in his smile. There is a boy unruly, and yet in love and awe of everything about him.
“The sea, the woods, the meadows, the sky” the fae boy says and looks so longingly upward. “The sky, when my wings grow large enough to take me there.” He trails off his gaze tumbling down and down and back to Maerys, to her sides to…. where no wings reside. Oh!
Her sides are slim and unblemished by angles of feathered arms. Oh! He gazes at her as if she is now not merely beautiful – another marvel of nature- but a strange one, a mysterious one. “Where are your wings?” His wide eyes look over her every inch and yet find no feather to bear her into the sky. “Is that why you are sad? Did you lose them like I lost my parents?”
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