There are no limits to where an orphan boy will roam. He lets the winds guide him and roams, foraging upon berries and leaves as he goes. The boy bears no bag with which to carry fruit. But why does he need to when the magic of time is at his fingertips? If a plant is not ready to bear fruit. Leonidas charms it and like a spell it grows and flourishes, bearing fruit so an orphan boy will not starve.
It is the turning season that brings the boy to the edge of Terrastella. There might have been recognition in his gaze, that this is where he spent most of his early years - yet there is nothing like that within his eyes. Nimble and light the boy traverses the landscape. He is swift as a swallow with his gilded wings. The woodland has taught the boy well, he bears the fruits of a life int he woodland across his small frame. Vines rich and green wrap about his throat, in his hair ivy grows wild and free. The ends of his mane are sundrenched as if he somehow dipped it within sunlight itself.
Already his antlers are beginning to turn. Their gold is growing darker, parts turning to gold dust as autumn lays her command (to perish) across the land. Leonidas eats like a boy about to hibernate, yet his coat is already turning, readying itself for the cool winds that approach, chasing the summer warm away.
His nose brings him to the apple trees, an orchard overflowing. He skips a line of those waiting to enter. A feral boy has no idea of decorum. The orchard welcomes the time-boy in. It lets him pluck an apple from a tree and then another and another. It is easier to build a store now than exhaust himself by charming plants to bear him fruit in deepest winter. He takes no seed to replant, he does not know to. A stranger stops him and the boy bears his teeth, leonine. His sunbright eyes are already searching for an escape. He spots one and lunges, yet the stranger catches his wing. The boy cries, he howls lupine and outraged and hurting. Wildly he thrashes in the grip of the stranger, until he frees from his hair a wickedly sharp shard of a blade. Time magic glints along its fractured edge as the boy brandishes it threateningly.
It feels as strange to walk the Dusk Court as it did those first days here, when he still thought of Ravos as home, when he knew no names and only sought a black unicorn with lightning marking her side.
Only now Asterion is familiar with each copse of trees, each bird-cry, each scent that says summer is done. Instead of a stranger he feels like a ghost, trapped in a home that changes around him, unrecognizable to those he meets. For a long time he avoided Terrastella altogether; now the festival brings him home, though he will not go near the city, where memories lie like bricks and failures are the shadow-cracks between.
But the orchard, that is not such a bad place for a ghost.
The air smells fruit-laden and sweet, the sun is warm on his back and the wind is cool when it tugs at his hair, kisses his throat. The once-king does not partake, only watches with a mouth soft-smiling as others do, spring-born foals with their mothers beside them and groups of boys all bravado and flash. Unlike some years there are no faces creased with worry, no slat-ribs or hollow cheeks. Dusk is prospering, and Novus with it, and he is glad. Even if it only shows he isn’t needed.
A cry catches his attention; Asterion’s head lifts, ears pricking forward and then back at the splintering sound, and he turns to see a big gray stallion with a half-grown boy bucking in his grasp.
Asterion’s reponse is immediate, instinctual from years of command. “Let him go,” he orders, loping to the pair, but the man already is, sputtering back as the boy brandishes a blade toward his throat. The gray is afraid; Asterion is sure the boy is too, although his face is turned away. “Easy,” the bay addresses him, “it’s okay,” and he motions the other stallion away (if the boy will let him go).
There had been no recognition yet; too much adrenaline, and too much improbability, kept Asterion’s thoughts far from the nephew he’d met so briefly a year ago. And yet something in him is trembling, something in him is waking like the piece of blade in the boy’s hand, something is wondering, remembering -
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.
The air is pungent, sickly-sweet, of rotten apples when they should be ripe. At their feet grass grows tall and goes to seed; blossoms flower and wilt. Asterion’s heart feels as bruised as the fruit when he notices these small signs, and thinks of his sister. The moment he realizes what bit of weapon the boy grasps, the events on the island make more sense. The jagged bit of dagger is a puzzle-piece now settled into dreadful place.
But without Florentine, there is no rewriting the past.
There is only his nephew, tangle-haired, elven-thin, clothed in wilderness. His eyes are arresting, as gold and wild as any monster or miracle the riftlands could birth. Gold glints like treasure still half-buried from his wings, his antlers. His hair seems spun of it, or caught mid-change. All of it sears the bay stallion’s heart.
They study one another. Asterion doesn’t draw his gaze from the feral boy’s even as the shard drops into the grass and a bit of his breath falls with it before catching in his throat. The unlucky stranger is forgotten and fled; there is only the two of them, sparse family, and the smell of bloom and rot. He can feel the boy’s magic trembling, unsteady, a frequency he can almost taste; the bay lets go some of his own and the air grows damp and slow, as after a rain, a calming balm like the silent depths of a lake.
“I have your name because I have your blood.” His voice is like his magic - soft-steady-deep, calm as a hand below a trembling bird. Asterion does not yet come nearer, but when the boy raises the bit of silver again, he presses it gently down. “I am Asterion, and your mother is my sister. You know me - you called me Uncle. Do you remember, Leonidas?”
The air grows damp, petrichor emanating from the dried grass. The boy inhales as all becomes clear, the smell of rot and blossom fading as the air grows cool and fresh. It is a new magic, reaching out to ease the boys fractured nerves.
Still his skin burns where the man touched him. It was a touch so different to Aspara’s. Both had been rough yet the man’s had been tight. And a clutching grip upon skin that has almost forgotten what touch is was overwhelming. The boy trembles, though he stands still and brave as a stag against a predator.
The new stranger talks of blood and Leonidas knows about blood. He has shed enough of it with cut banged knees and cut shoulders. But this man says he has Leonidas’ blood. No, that cannot be right. Leonidas is alive, his blood still surges in his veins. Every part of him is still whole. His last wound stopped bleeding weeks ago. All his blood is still in his veins. He blinks slowly, his lips now twisting with confusion. He huffs a breath and wonders how the man caught any of his blood.
“You don’t.” The boy murmurs, unsure. He knows nothing of shared blood and already his nerves are fatiguing, already he feels weary. The air is damp and it makes the boy weary, all of this day has been wearisome. If at first the look within his eyes was leonine, now it turns cervine as his gaze flits toward the woodland. In the deep of the woods he could sleep away the stress of the day.
Leonidas goes to move , but then, then the man mentions his mother. Family. The boy freezes, but not before he lifts his chin sharply to stare at the star-hewn man.
Asterion.
His mother.
His uncle.
How long had Leonidas been alone, and now this? “I don’t have family.” The boy says swiftly, his voice low, his look flighty.
Do you remember Leonidas?
Remember.
No.
There is something wrong with remembering. Just being asked twists something within him. It hurts, it feels like falling. There is a flood within him and it fills him with desperation. An old, malevolent desperation. It disturbs the equilibrium the child has cultivated in his solitude.
“I don’t have a mother.” Leonidas’ heart aches, wounded. He dares not say the man’s name, Asterion. It feels as dangerous as the feelings the man disturbs within him. The stranger had clutched him, held him violently. Leonidas had screamed and fought, but this growing hurt, this strangeness with Asterion is worse. Asterion is worse. Dangerous.
His Uncle tries to placate him but the boy is a young and startled colt. His cheeks are wet, but the boy does not know when he started crying. Maybe it was at that first awful twist of his stomach, or maybe at the second. Either way the tears trickle from his lashes and spill down toward his chin.
“I don’t remember. Go away.” That small piece of dagger rises again, held up between them as the boy steps back, even as he tremulously commands Asterion to leave. With just words Asterion has left him aching as if from blow upon blow.
Leonidas denies him, but Asterion feels only relief at that murmur; he can hear the quiet in it, the uncertainty, and knows that the battle is half won (but what is the battle?). Still, he watches those golden eyes - and where had he inherited them, had it been Karou? - dart to the woods. Oh, his nephew is a wild thing, more feral than his mother, and it builds up the bay stallion’s guilt brick by solid brick. Don’t run, he begs. Don’t go where I cannot follow. And
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
“Everyone has a family,” he says, softly. And in some way he understands. Yes, because he, too, was born with a twin; they slept together, dreaming before they lived, tangled like ivy. He, too, never knew his father, and left his mother young. But not so young, and not so terribly.
Slowly, gently, he takes a step nearer. Near enough to see the silver gleam at the corner of the boy’s eye, near enough to see it become a tear and track down. Asterion wishes he could take it from him. He, too, wants to cry. “You have a mother,” he says, quietly, insistently. “She loves you very much.” His voice does not stay steady; it wavers on the words. Oh, Flora, he thinks. I don’t know how to do this.
When Leonidas tells him to go, the bay shakes his head. But he stops, though his heart begs him to close up the distance between them, to run his muzzle over the boy’s neck, to breathe soft breaths into his mane, to soothe him like a father (how does a father soothe?). “Let me stay with you,” he says, and he is half-begging himself. He wants to close his eyes, to gather his thoughts, but he is afraid the boy will dissolve like a specter if he does. “Leonidas, I - I have no home. Let me stay with you?”
Asterion pushes his nephew into that secret, overgrown garden. They traverse an aged path of uneven dreams and broken hopes. His uncle forces the boy to look upon the wild weeds that grow protectively about his memories. The roots grow virulent and they hide from Leonidas all the things he does not wish to see. He wants this place to grow wild, secret, forgotten.
Everyone has a family. No, they don’t. Leonidas fights, like a lion cub caught within a bear trap. He snarls against the sharp teeth of remembrance that cut into his fragile, solitary existence. It is easier to go on not remembering but the time for forgetting is over.
Your mother loves you very much. The wild wood boy falls as still as a fawn beneath an eagle’s shadow. His mother. The mere concept inspired something warm within him, a moment of peace before his stomach turns sour. He spent a year without her. Leonidas cannot remember how she sounded, how she really looked. Her face is a smudge upon an old picture fondly opened and closed too many times. The boy remembers his gold is his mother’s his brown his fathers. But that is all.
Loves. She is still alive. And maybe that is what hurts the most.
“I don’t have a mother.” Leonidas says again, firmly, bitter as the winter wind that gathers at the fringes of Novus. He denies her and yet, yet, “Why is she not here, with you?” He asks, small tentative, wary. He presses back the weeds that choke her memory, he fears what he might find of her beneath the grimy layers of tears and loneliness and struggling youth. If his uncle made it back, why not her? Why was she not the first to return?
Asterion talks of home and through the film of his silver tears Leonidas merely watches, blank, unmoved. What is a home? The idea means nothing to a boy who roams and sleeps wherever his head falls - beneath the stars, beneath the rain, beneath leaves, beneath stone.
“I have no home either.” The feral boy breathes standing still as a stag. His home is his wood, his sprawling kingdom he lays claim to each night he lays his head upon the earth and dreams of wilder things than families and friends.
“But you can stay.” Leonidas’ voice wavers, unsure. He sees the pain upon his uncle’s face and maybe it is the compassion of his mother, her brother, her father that makes him pause and offer his companionship.
“If you tell me more about my family.” And maybe his garden is not so secret any more. Maybe he realises that others have been living there before him, cultivating it, growing love like buds. They just forgot his corner like he forgot theirs.
His nephew’s face has the same delicate fae features of Florentine - the high cheekbones, the dip of the muzzle, the wide expressive eyes. Now, Asterion watches a battle being fought across that so-familiar face.
He wonders what winning would be, for Leonidas. Certainly not being forced to remember an absence so painful he’d blocked it from memory. Certainly not feeling again the pain of being left.
But maybe, one day, he would understand the bittersweet joy of being found again.
Once again the boy denies his mother, but before Asterion can respond he continues, his words smaller, defiant but unsure. The bay stallion, his head on a level with his nephew’s, smiles a small, sad smile. “Because I wouldn’t let her. We couldn’t be sure that the doorway was safe. She has a magic dagger that lets her travel worlds, but it broke.” His eyes do not drop to the sliver of silver the boy still holds in his grasp; he doesn’t wonder at it, not yet. “She wanted to be here. She told me to tell you she is coming for you. And your sister.”But where is Aster? He still does not ask, and he is still afraid to guess.
There are so many shadows in the world. Novus has fewer monsters than the rift lands, but it is not free of them, and some of them wore friendly faces.
But you can stay. His breath is shaky when it releases. Asterion hadn’t realized how much he’d meant the words, how taut and tangled like barbed wire those thoughts of Terrastella now were, how rigid and wounded his heart was until Leonidas speaks them, a few small sounds that add up to absolution. Inside him the waves quiet, the whirlpool fades. His expression softens, even turns to a smile at the added requirement.
“I have enough stories to talk until you’re old as I am,” he says. And then he reaches out, offering his muzzle, a mingling of breath - if Leonidas will meet him there, where the air is sweet with fallen apples.
There are tears fading on both their cheeks when together they fade into the woods.
