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
In the garden the air is full of the sounds of tools carving at stone and wood and bone. Amidst the echoes and so close to the start of the path, a forest boy sits and carves whitewood. The material is soft, it feels as warm to his as skin. There is a careful art in the way he carves. Though his skill is lacking, his talent is clear. He looks to his work and stops himself from looking back to the start (just a few metres away) where a horse rears, its mouth agape in a scream - a scream Leo hears in his fitful dreams. It looks, to Leonidas, not like a stallion at all, but a woman, distressed, frantic. She has lost something, or someone. Her scream is an echo all through the garden. He carves his own echo, for he thinks it might help stop her crying.
The antlers he makes, are how he thinks his own look. But his mirrors have only ever been living water and his unskilled talents with the tools are not enough to stop the statue’s antlers looking like living water too. Each tine ripples with the invisible wind, or maybe they tremble at the mare’s scream?
His statue’s wood is pale in his grasp. It is almost ivory - almost bone. There is a quietness to his statue, though the boy’s energy brings it to vivid life as he carves wide eyes and a long mane into his echo’s pale, wooden skin. The grains of the wood run, as if like veins, filled with golden blood. It seems fitting, gold upon white. The boy picks up paint brushes from the nearest basket of tools. He turns his statue’s antlers into rippling sunlight.
Wanderers pass him, studying the statues, gazing at the talented work and those less talented and yet carved with love in every chip and cut. The flowers sway and his cheetah sighs beside him. It seems to fall as still as the wood within Leonidas’ grasp. Sometimes he thinks his familiar is but merely wood too. The cheetah is like a shadow, it follows him, yet never speaks. Leonidas, king of the wood and master of his shadowing cheetah, does not think he has ever heard the animal speak. Yet boy and animal sleep as if they are just halves of a larger piece of art, broken away, lost.
But that is the thing, he does not know what he has lost. He thinks he might know what the screaming mare has though. He finishes the carving. It is of a small filly whose antlers mirror his own, whos pose feels familiar - so familiar that he carves until it is perfect. Then, on a whim, he looks to his still cheetah shadow and carves a cheetah as young a his, its body still round with baby fat.
Then he stands and ambles warily back to where the mare rears and screams. Gingerly he places the statues upon her base, he flinches when her screaming stops. He breathes a sigh and dares to look up. She is still and her screams no longer echo in his ears.
@Maret <3 So glad to write these two together again.
and i must pour forth a river of words or i shall suffocate.
T
he garden is full of lights tonight. They dance in the pits of each statues carved eyes; crown the image of a fleeing stag; sit as a wreath around a fox’s shoulders. Maret stares at them all with envy. And she wonders how even carved horses of bone, and marble, and driftwood, and squash can wear light so naturally when it was supposed to be in her blood — and yet the only light she can conjure is the small beams that reflect off of her ice.
It is only a small consolation that their light comes from candles and flames instead of magic (like her father — his sun-bright wings were far more glorious than the glowing eyes watching her in the garden tonight.) But it is enough for her to look past the dancing lights for the moment, to see the expressions carved into each statue’s face, to wonder how that first stallion can look as much like he’s singing as he is screaming, when viewed from different angles.
It all makes Maret want to sing, and scream, and dance, and run through the twisted garden paths like something wild. It makes her want to pretend she is that singing, screaming stallion, a statue carved of bone come back to life for the night. It doesn’t feel that far away tonight; not when that other-world is on everyone’s lips, where ghosts are tapping at the door and asking to be let in.
But she doesn’t. She only pulls out the folded-up scraps of paper that she carries around with her, and scrawls a few verses down while her blood is still humming loudly in her ears.
Skeleton bones rise
at the midnight-tolling of the bells —
The pencil scratches noisily across the page, the words gleaming in the lantern-light cast from the eyes of the nearest statue. As if he is watching, as if he understands how she can’t stop the words once they’ve started. Her heart beats like something reckless in her chest on and on, and Maret writes along to the rhythm it creates.
She doesn’t reread what she’s written (not yet — once the night ends, once the page is full, once she can begin to make sense of the emotions swirling like a ripcurl inside of her belly will she then sit down and sort through all the half-poems she’s written.) She only carefully folds the paper back in upon itself once the words run out and tucks it away somewhere safe. Then the black-and-white girl turns back towards the singing-screaming-stallion, curtsies to him once, and continues along the path. She isn’t sure how long she wanders, or how she somehow makes it back to the beginning of the maze; but this time, she is not the only one staring up in wonder at the statue.
She watches as the boy comes forward and carefully, gingerly, hopefully places his offering at the statue’s feet. He doesn’t look up, not until he is finished, and Maret wonders if he is afraid — and yet, the boy she remembers was not one who seemed easily disturbed.
And when she says “I know you,” and steps forward so that the firelight flickers upon her brow like a blessing, her smile dances with something like mischief.
“What secrets do you have for me today, lost boy?”
{ @Leonidas"speaks" notes: sorry for how late this is, I've been struggling to write her lately. }
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
Silence.
In it he hears his breath escape, relieved and loud. The statue no longer screams and its voice no longer tugs at something old and aching within him. Yet the boy is left feeling raw anyway.
Now the scream no longer echoes, it is not just his breath that comes seeping into the silence but the voices of the crowds who gather to cast their opinions upon the statues. They murmurs like the merry hum of bees. They whisper as if their opinions are secrets.
Leonidas does not know what he thinks of the statue, only that its scream reached deep within him, shattering a thin lid of bottled emotions.
A girl’s voice rings out, louder in the wake of the scream. I know you, she says. And I know your voice, the boy thinks before he even turns. Memories tickle in the back of his mind (a mind that has become an overgrown garden, abandoned and wild and beautiful). Through the flowers and weeds and long stemmed grasses that block his memory, he sees a hint of a secluded cave and an underground pool. More clearly yet he sees a little girl with gold feet that tap over stone like an instrument of music he had never heard before. He remembers the way she carried herself, the tip of her small head, the pride in puff of her chest.
Leonidas tips his head away from the statue to look to the girl who stands before him. She is older now. The dark of her skin is now pure midnight, and the white of her like ivory pearls he has found along the sea shore. The two colours still draw themselves across her skin in stark contrast. The gold of the ornaments she wears still captures his magpie gaze. At once she is the slim child he remembers and yet also so much older. Adulthood is already a whisper away and it breathes into the curves of her body.
At the sight of her he forgets the statue, for there is nothing agonised in the way she watches him. Her lips are soft, closed, not pulled open in an eternal scream. She has become wild, Leonidas thinks, for there is a glint in her eye like sunlight over the mischievous sea. Is she still the same child who swam with him by the light of a glowing pool, deep, deep beneath the earth?
Lost boy, she calls him. It is not the first time he has been called lost. His skull tilts with confusion, the vines snagged within the brace of his antlers sway with the movement. He shakes his head, dismissive, as if to rid himself of the discomforting things he does not understand.
“Hello Secret Keeper.” Leonidas murmurs. The memory of Maret is an easier one for a lost boy to bear, easier than those he conceals from himself. They lie behind thicker, ever more virulent weeds. The flowers there grow lovely yet full of thorns. He dares not tread near those memories less he get hurt, again.
He goes to her, proud as a stag, his footsteps ringing upon the path like their laughter when they played like imps in crystalline pools. “I have so many.” The wild wood boy says of his secrets. The lie between the golden down of his wings, in the dark places between his soil dark mane. His eyes are a treasure trove of them.
Oh Maret, he has made so many in the times you have both been apart…
“Which would like first?” Leonidas asks like Rumplestilskin upon the road, a fairytale boy with his fairytale secrets. But then, as an afterthought he adds, “But before I tell you anything, did you keep my last ones?”
and i must pour forth a river of words or i shall suffocate.
S
ometimes she wonders what it would be like, to live all the stories she creates. To be the one racing through the garden, to be singing, screaming, sobbing, dreaming —
to be the heroine of the story, or the monster. To be something, someone, anyone other than the girl with the frostbitten heart too afraid to beat for itself.
The thought makes her blood begin to feel more warm than cold, like everything in her is chanting yes, yes, yes. And when she tilts her head back to look up into the statue’s roaring eyes it seems now as if the stallion is screaming not at her — but to her. Maybe he, too, is screaming yes, yes, yes, maybe his tears are an invitation.
Maybe he, like all living creatures, wants his story to be told.
She smiles up at him, smiles at the antlered boy, and her smile says I could tell it for you if you’d like.
Leonidas calls her his ‘Secret Keeper’ and oh, Maret thinks it might feel just as good to be that as to be the story maker. And even before he is finished talking she is pulling out her notebook of tangled verses and woven secrets, the pages fluttering open like butterfly wings preparing to take flight.
“Of course I have,” she tells him with a laugh that sounds like water spraying from a fountain. “I could not forget” you “them even if I tried.” And she wouldn’t try. Of that she was certain.
Oh, foolish girl.
Foolish girl with her heart on her sleeve and her dreams in her eyes and a thousand different wants beating in her chest, who loves too deeply before even knowing its meaning.
She takes a step closer, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his eyes when the firelight catches them just right. She wishes she were gold like that, that her eyes could be the same color of sunlight. But she only smiles again, even as a golden horse gallops through her mind and leaves streaks of poetry behind in its hoofprints.
“Will you tell me where you’ve been?” she breathes, and her heart leaps a little bit higher in her chest, high enough that he might see the way it’s reflected in her eyes.
And the pages of her notebook spill open, ready to turn his words immortal.
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
Leonidas knows there is something about her. It is there in the way she holds her book, the way her eyes seem so far away, her body present but her spirit bigger than this world can contain. He is tempted to reach out, to touch her, to see if she is still here when her eyes lower to her book, her words and she falls into them. Gone. the pages of her notebook flutter, each leaf a wing, the words the butterfly pattern that paints them. The orphan boy stares at the art of the words, their curling shape. It is fitting, he thinks, that her words are as pretty as she.
She looks up to him, smiling. No longer is he watching the pages, but her and that small, sweet sweep of her lips. They tip up into a whimsical half-moon smile. Maret thinks her heart is a frostbitten thing. Leonidas thinks her heart is one of the warmest he knows. It is there in her gold, warm as a hazy, golden sunset.
But she tells him nothing of her sorrow and insecurities and he tells her nothing of himself, except for his adventures. Are they even secrets at all? Does Leonidas know what a secret truly is?
He watches her, he feels the cold of her dove white skin, the exotic dark of her black, the transcendent gold of her jewels, her feet. The wild wood boy is still looking at the yin and yang of her body and thinking of the stars at night and the spaces between them that reach in endless black, when she steps closer. He does not shy from her - though he wants to. It is still strange to be close to another, to leave himself exposed to touch. Until Aspara, the last touch he remembers was his mother and hers was merely a ghost, barely there, hardly remembered.
The boy breathes, out slowly, in time with her question. Will you tell me where you have been? “Everywhere.” He answers instantly. But that response is not enough for the look in her eyes, that bright glow, an emotion he cannot name. Maret is watching him, she gazes only at the flecks of gold, but he feels her searching deeper. Does she long for something more? The boy blinks his long black lashes and when he opens his eyes there is something fervent within him. Of course I have, I could not forget them if I tried. His answer is not enough. He could tell her of the monster that tried to kill him and the man who saved him. He could tell her of sleeping beneath the stars. Oh he could describe for her the remotest parts of Novus. But it is not enough, it is not a secret. They are not worthy of the beauty of her words.
“I went back to our lake, but you weren’t there.” He says at last. The wild wood boy still stands proud and brave as a stag, but his words are small, timid as a rabbit before her. His confession exposes his loneliness. It lies open for her to see. No longer does he dare to look at her eyes, but instead he looks to the page and wonders what shape his loneliness will make across her notebook. Will it be a beautiful thing as all her words are? Or will it be as ugly as it feels within his breast?
and i must pour forth a river of words or i shall suffocate.
T
hat story is still shivering in the back of her mind, the one of a boy and a girl who looked into the mouth of a monster and laughed. The ones who wore smiles on their faces when they plunged into the darkness, and did not hesitate to drink from the deep waters they found waiting there for them.
He knows the story — the beginning of it lives in his memory the same as it lives in her’s.
But what he does not know is the ending she created for it, long after they left the lakeside.
She abruptly shivers, and steps closer to the statue that stands like a sentry between the two of them. The light of its eyes falls like the moon across her notebook, as she flips hurriedly past the beginning pages and slows only as the pages turn neater, and crisper, and finally blank.
But Maret is not prepared for his admission.
Our lake, he had said. Not just any lake. Our’s.
The brass tip of her quill hovers just above the page, the end of it quivering in small circles like it simply cannot wait to tell the next story. But it never comes. Maret sets the quill down, and tilts her eyes slowly up, up, up from her leather-bound notebook, up until she is looking at Leonidas again. His antlers gleam in the firelight like magma twisted into the crown of a stag.
“You went looking for me?” she asks, and she does not feel quite so cold anymore. There is a wild thing inside of her, there always has been, with a belly full of fire to keep her warm. And even when the bits of ice creep tighter around her chest and limn the edges of her jewels with frost, she doesn’t feel it.
She wants to step closer, to trace the edge of her quill down his cheek and paint him in all the words she did not know how to say, only write. She wants to tell him how much like a deer he looks, both brave and shy, strong and soft, and how she had always thought bucks to be the kings of the forests.
But she only smiles, and closes her journal (as if to say the best story, and the best secrets, already lived between them.) “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” The statue is watching them, waiting, wondering, and Maret wonders how many secrets it’s been told, to make its eyes shine as brightly as they do. And she thinks it might already know all of her’s, even before the words reach her lips.
“But I’ll promise you this, Leonidas — next time you go back there, I’ll be there waiting.” It is not a secret, and this time she does not call him a lost boy —
but oh, it still makes her heart leap like all the best love stories do.
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
His words still her. Maret becomes as motionless as the forest before a storm. Only her quill moves, it dances a trembling circle. All he can think is how her page is now ruined, how his admission is not so beautiful upon the page as her words. His lips drop into a bow of sorrow. Regret gathers in dark shadows along the seam of his mouth.
If feels like an eternity that she stands, still as stone. The wild-wood boy dares not breathe as he watches her. This feels worse than before a storm. He does not wish to know what will come in place of a storm. He fears what she will be when motion finally returns to her ivory bones and white-dove heart.
He moves to touch her. He does. The fae boy presses his muzzle to the muscle of her neck, so like a swan, he thinks. He breathes. He expects that her skin should be hard like marble and cool like gold metal. But she isn’t. Maret is as warm and soft as he remembers.
She moves and he darts back, swift as a swallow. He has learned to touch others, but to be touched in turn, that he is still not wholly comfortable with. Not yet. Not yet. Her quill lowers. It seems to take forever until it touches the paper. All the while his eyes tracked its slow descent. He stands, poised. A wild boy trained by nature to flee or fight at the first sign of danger. Never has he thought Maret dangerous. Never will he think her dangerous. But he knows girls are strange, confusing creatures. Leonidas does not want her ire.
Steady eyes watch her from beneath the thick tangles of his forelock sewn through with woodland greens (blades of grasses, stems of flowers, vines and leaves). His antlers stand as proud as he, so much like a woodland prince. Their eyes meet, when hers finally rise enough to snag upon his. He blinks, the only sign of his wariness. His breath flutters in his lungs. He breathes out slow, slow and his sigh begs her to speak. Was it wrong, to think of the lake as theirs? He could not bear to go alone, or take anyone else with him - not that he had anyone.
“I did.” Leonidas rushes to reply when she finally speaks. Her apology follows and he relaxes in its wake. His head lowers, his shoulders softening, exposing him as only a prince, not yet a king of his wood. But he will ascend, because he is a boy whose self-appointed kingdom of flowers and roots and wild, untameable things has made him grow up too fast.
“Will you?” He asks of her promise and does not release her eyes. He holds no accusation, only hope. “The waters are lost without you.” The boy tells her. For the way the waters sang in the cave, their sound was wrong and full of sorrow. “Will you write me your promise upon your paper?” He asks as his eyes flit keenly to the open page and its tremulous circle. “And sign it.” Leonidas dares to whisper. For he wants to see her name upon the page, to carry it with him that he might learn the shape of it.
and i must pour forth a river of words or i shall suffocate.
S
he can feel her lungs trembling like a butterfly taking flight when he answers her. And every look, every whisper of his voice, and touch of his muzzle to her neck, and every glint of his golden antlers against the firelight — it’s all so much like a song she has not yet learned the rhythm of. But she wants to — oh, how she wants to learn to be the shy, wild thing in the wood, looking at the world lit in light for the first time, blinking her eyes against the brightness after so long spent in the dark. She wants the softness of discovery, of growing.
It feels as though there is sunlight in her smile, when this time she is the one to move forward and press her lips to his cheek like a daring sparrow. Only for a moment, only long enough to feel the velvet of his skin and memorize the way he smells both like the woods and the meadows, and then she steps back.
"I will," the promise is a sigh on her lips, sealed in heartbeats and breaths. For you, anything, her eyes are whispering as she closes them against the firelight. And she sees the cave again — their cave — in her mind when she does, all glistening moon-bright waters and echoes that went on forever, and ever, and ever, like the cave was holding all their secrets for them.
Her notebook spills open again, this time to a blank page (one not ruined by her wandering pen’s aimless track). And as she writes in it, she whispers her promise aloud to him:
"I, Maret,
do solemnly swear
to always
be waiting for Leonidas,
at the cave where we met,
when he looks for me there."
And, as quickly as she can, she signs it with a sunflower growing up alongside her words.
The page she tears carefully from the seam, and holds it out between them like a dandelion offering. "Promise you’ll think of me any time you see a sunflower?" she makes him swear, when she presses the page into his grasp.
She is still smiling, and her heart is still singing like a dove in the morning, when she leaves him there beside the statue. And when she looks back to him, it seems now as if the statue is laughing and singing, too, and not screaming or sobbing like it was before.
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
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.
