HERE IS THE HOUR THAT HAS FORGOTTEN THE MINUTE though the minnow remembers the stream.
These are decidedly not the sorts of trees that I was anticipating.
My nose crinkles up as I stare – with something like concern – at the first one I come across. It’s withered, and black, with a few dark green leaves hanging off its scraggly branches. It is not particularly ancient-looking, nor particularly lively, nor particularly large, nor particularly majestic and beautiful. I am sure that it still possesses considerable value (though I have never been a tree before, so I cannot say how it feels to be one), but I cannot help but feel somewhat disappointed by the sight of it, because I was somehow expecting something more, when I caught the sight of dark things rising like spires up towards the sky.
It is still wonderful, in the way that it is new – and I suppose that not all new things need to be beautiful anyways.
The ground feels sticky, here; my hooves sink down into the soil in a way that I do not find entirely comfortable. It’s almost wet, but I don’t see any water – not until I walk towards the rest of the trees, which stick up like needles from the soil ahead. Stunted, morose shrubs stick out from the soil at odd angles, and I feel some amount of admiration for their will to persist; their roots are half-uprooted and milk-white. Thick moss grows a coat on every rock I stumble upon, and most of the tree trunks, and well-grown, dark plants with long leaves that seem to be made of numerous individual leaves arch out over the path. Some of them stir away when I brush up against them, curling in on themselves with far more enthusiasm than I have ever seen a plant exhibit before. For a moment, I wonder if it thinks like I do, but I remember when I was a vine and dismiss the though.
White mushrooms grow in rings, here and there, and poke out from around roots and underneath rocks. I have the good sense not to eat them, though; and even if I didn’t, they smell moldy, like plant-rot.
A pale, grey substance hangs over the entire region – I can’t quite bring myself to call it a forest, even with the trees –, somewhat obscuring my vision of the way forward. I saw it before, the day I arrived, but I don’t know what it’s called; only that it smells wet (though everything in this place does), and it makes it a little bit harder to breathe. I press on regardless. The paths here are well-worn in a way that suggests this part of Terrastella is inhabited, though by who, I don’t know – I am not even sure that the paths were made by other equines.
(At home, you can follow deer-trails or elk-paths through the brush. It is a good way to get lost, intentionally or otherwise. I will not speak of several incidents a few months ago, where I, desperate for a break from my training (draconian as it has been in this lifetime), “accidentally” took an elk-path instead of the trail back to the temple after a hunt. If I spent the evening plucking sweet-apples from the boughs of fruit-heavy trees and chasing an owl who looked quite like my sister, rather than trying desperately to find my way back, then who would ever know?)
The ground sinks deeper the further I proceed, and the trees grow thicker; there is more green now, and it is still unfamiliar, because my forest is spun gold. These trees have trunks like thick mud and charcoal, and their leaves are not like emerald jewels but a green that is dull, subdued; they are small and frail, and they do not grow nearly tall enough to block out the sky. Still, they smell like the earth, and, when I look at them, in some confusing way, I am still put in mind of my father. (I know that he is still growing in the depths of the woods, a thousand times more elegant than any of this.)
But. This darkness is alluring – there is something to the sad heart of this place that makes me want to keep going.
I spill out onto the side of a lake, in a place where the ground is so wet that my hooves sink several inches into the frothing murk wherever I walk. The water is grey, but not a grey like the ocean; it is too listless for that, and, when I move to stand near the bank, the shallows look browner than anything. A few darting, silver fish disturb the surface, but they quickly disappear entirely, and I am left in a place that is almost unnervingly quiet. The grey haze hangs especially thick over the water – I feel as though I should be able to touch it, but, when I reach out my muzzle towards it, it seems to dissipate, and I feel nothing at all. I can see the sky above, though only through a layer of grey, but, when I left this morning, it seemed like the clouds were in preamble to storm anyways. (I have never seen a storm before; I have heard about rain, which still seems dubious to me, but what are even more unbelievable are mentions of roaring sounds and burning light that streaks across the sky in quick bursts.)
Normally, I would find a silent forest disturbing. Ominous, even – a sign that something had scared all the noisy things away. But I don’t know how loud this place should be (there is something to it that makes me feel as though it should always be subdued), and, as I stand, staring out at the grey-shrouded water, I feel strangely serene in a way that I’m not sure that I want to.
In a way I shouldn’t feel, at least. I have work ahead of me, and plenty of it – but there’s probably nothing wrong with stopping a moment to enjoy the newness of everything around me. It will only be new once, after all.
@Leonidas|| forest baby meetup party || "elegy," gregory orr "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
The forest waits with bated breath. All is still as sleep, but there is no slumber to be found in any of the swamps lovely, dark corners. Yet still the boy picks his way quiet as a stag through the ever thick roots and verdant greens.
Even the mists lie still atop the murky waters. He stirs them with the tip of his wing in a way only a daring, wild boy might. The damp air swirls like mild within a cauldron. But Leo leaves them before they grow agitated and wanders on, slowly, quietly. The mists settle, soothed and still once more.
Now and again the boy pauses, turning to look upon the sound an uncareful creature makes. Do they not know, he thinks, that now is the time for silence? All others have retreated and the air has grown warm, warm, warm. It presses in upon his soil-dark skin. It whispers fretting warnings across his body of the darkening clouds up in the sky.
The buttress trees creak and groan, restless with their waiting. Stagnant water bubbles, chattering now and again to their neighbouring pools. Boldly (for a boy who has stepped so quietly that even his breathing has become more of a myth than a truth this day), Leonidas stepps down into a pond. He wades slowly, deeply. He steps high and careful and allows the pool to lap wetly at his knobbly knees. His knees, sometimes, might be the only part of him to remind one that he is a boy with still much growing to do. Nature and her wilderness have taught him harsh lessons that have built premature muscle along his body and over his crest.
Assured of himself, assured of his place within Novus’ wilder reaches, he walks like a god - though he possesses no understanding of kingship, let alone godliness. There is no space in a boy like Leonidas for monarchs or gods.
He turns a bend and his stopping is as silent as his moving. The water ripples only lightly before it too falls silent. Upon the bank, beyond the mists through which he wades, a girl stands, strange as an elf within a court of gnomes. She has within her, all of the loveliness he thinks an elf might possess. She is painted in myriad hues of brown as if the earth has been scooped up and from it her body molded. Gold lies in accents through her body, like sunlight tumbling through the umbra, dappling the ground below.
Leonidas does not hear the swamp now he watches her, but even if he did, there is no sound, as if all Tinea’s eyes are no longer upon the sky but upon the children who meet with twin bodies of brown and gold and brown and gold. Her youth is lovely within her face, her eyes as vital and alive as the blood that thunders through their veins. But it is the way she stands that enraptures him most and the way Tinea does not know how to frame a girl like her.
“You do not belong here,” the boy observes, his voice made of leaves and grasses and other wild, growing things. He belongs too well and she too little. The press of his leonine eyes upon her is soft and curious. “A storm is coming.” It is nearly here Tinea whispers, fretful. “Do you have shelter?” He asks the girl whose eyes seem to watch the world with a wonder and curiosity that turns her eyes as bright as oxygenated blood.
“I can offer you some.” The wild boy says to a girl so strange, so lovely.
HERE IS THE HOUR THAT HAS FORGOTTEN THE MINUTE though the minnow remembers the stream.
I do not notice him until well after he has noticed me, I’m sure; and I am not so sure that I would have noticed him at all, had he not wished me to do so.
But I raise my eyes from the grey-coated lake – and I see him.
It is rather strange to see the boy, about the age of this form of me (I think; but there is something to him that seems older than his face), emerge from the trees. Not because he appears out-of-place; he doesn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact – he looks as much a part of this landscape as the lake or the stones or the withered forest. What surprises me is that he looks like he could just as easily be at home in my autumnal homeland. He is rich brown, dark as the wood of the most ancient oak in the forest, and gold, brilliant gold; gold that trails in his wake and fizzles away like dust when he moves. It is probably to my discredit that I did not notice him before he noticed me. (The knight, buried deep in my thoughts, whispers into my ear that it certainly is, that it suggests my instincts have grown dull, that I could be in some horrible trouble if he desired me to be – and I snap back that he is a feature of this landscape, and I am not one at all. I don’t know how to tread quietly among the branches and the leaves, to be so well-aware of the way that I move through these winding woodland passages to not even disturb their silence with my breathing. He does. He knows in the way that a bird knows, or a tree, or a drop of dew in the morning.)
I look at him, and I think that, if he has lived more lives than one, then he surely remembers his others.
Strangeling creature. You look like magic. “You do not belong here,” he says, and, though his accent is wholly unfamiliar to me, there is something to the way he speaks that reminds me of another life – of the way my voice sounded when I was another creature entirely. I think it might have been the sound of me as a firefly, or as the vine. I nod my head a single time, slowly, and, for once, I do not send my hair spilling into my eyes. “You’re right,” I agree, softly, “this land is foreign to me.” I am sure that it is obvious (with the way that I have been stumbling through this “Novus,” it would be more surprising if someone mistook me for a native), but even more so to a woodland creature like him; even as a vine or a firefly, or especially as a vine or a firefly, I could tell a foreigner from a native, and I suspect that he is more clever than either.
But – that is not exactly what he means, I think. I am not suited for this kind of wildness. Mine was always gilded; this is bare.
His eyes linger on me, and I raise my own to meet them. “A storm is coming,” he says, and I hadn’t even noticed – but I suppose there is a tension to the air, the kind that suggests some change is coming. “Do you have shelter?” The question surprises me, in my ignorance. “You need to take shelter in a storm?” I feel my eyes widen, by fractions, with surprise. I suppose that it isn’t as though I know what a storm is like – my only point of reference is the winds on the beach, and, if it is like that, or worse, it might be buffeting or overpowering. (But I could not see the danger in falling droplets of water, or in bright lights in the sky or loud noises; but I can see the danger in so terribly few things in this land, and I am sure that it is more dangerous than I would like to imagine.)
He offers me shelter; I am still somewhat taken aback by the kindness of foreigners, in this land, and I smile gently. Gratefully. “I would appreciate it,” I say, and take a step closer.
If I were older, I might feel worried. More harrowed by kind offers. But I am still young – and my curiosity overwhelms every last vestige of my caution.
@Leonidas|| leo is about to wonder what galaxy nic is from, I suspect || "elegy," gregory orr "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
If he had grown up on his mother’s tales of other worlds, he might have better understood the look in her eyes and why the swamp watches her as it does. Already the land is filled with trepidation and hushed anticipation. So when she stands, her body glowing as if it belongs and yet so utterly other Tinea seems at a loss for how to hold her. Her golds are like none he has seen here. The hue of her body like no root or soil. Her shades are uniquely her own.
Wonder gleams in her eyes. It fortells the wild wood boy of all the scents that cling to her from her homeland. Her home world. Leonidas is the son of a time travelling woman. He has seen a portal open and a new world peek through. It’s breath was feral, ancient magic. In his nightmares he still tastes it. It orchestrates his wildest dreams. But that too was the day he saw his parents step into another world and disappear. Forever. He does not think of such a time. He lets those memories become lost in a secret garden overrun with discarded memories and those he does not need each day to live. He locks them away and forgets how they make him feel. He is a wild wood boy and only survival is needed here. Life is simpler when he is focussed upon that.
Yet what if young Leonidas looked past the wild weeds that encompass his memories and deep into those of his mother. Then he might see why today should be so significant. The boy would see how Time calls in an echo, here within Terrastella. Upon his lips is a smile as bright as his mother’s when she first beheld her brother amidst a midsummer storm. The way she laughed, the way she ran with her sibling through lightning and rain that fell like a sheet…
But though Leo does not look into his memories, he still plays into history’s hands as he smiles, elven, at this new, strange girl. His grin is electric, as wicked as the lightning that reaches her slim, jagged fingers across the sky for the two young horses. She pulls herself closer, her belly dark and full of hungry rumbling. Leonine eyes tip up toward the sky. He cannot see it for the canopy of green, but with every passing second the swamp falls darker, darker. Shadows creep where there were none before. They are the few things that dare to move now. The mists tremble and the boy returns his gaze to the strange girl.
Quietly he wades towards her. His movement setting the green water lapping in ripples at the girl’s toes. The mists swirl in his wake. His approach is slow, as easy as a lion, as proud as a stag. He has nothing to fear here and he does not fear a strange, other-world girl, for he was made from an eternity of other worlds. Ancient magic and Time are dust within his blood and desire in his heart. He can run better than she, he can hide better than her. Through blue eyes she watches him as fearlessly as he regards her.
One might think he would ask her where she is from. But her bones are singing and know the scents upon her skin are whispering (so much nearer to her he now is). He has an eternity to learn where she came from and he will tease the mysteries from her as if she were a flower opening beneath Spring’s coaxing fingers. Her hair does not fall across her eyes, but his does. From beneath its dark and golden veil the boy studies her like a monarch sat upon his throne or a god marvelling at the creation of another divine being.
Do you need to take shelter in a storm?
She asks her question but Tinea steals the words as they fall, they secret them away. They barely echo before they are gone. But the boy catches every syllable anyway. They are of near equal height when he finally steps out of the pool. Water runs from him in rivulets. Still that smile has not left him, but closer to her he drinks her in, studying her as if she were a new sapling. He hopes she will not go before the winter’s up.
“No,” Leonidas replies, answering her question at last. “Most prefer it and I assumed you might, but…” His eyes gleam and maybe now he speaks to the sword she once was, that did not shy from the flash of lights, the roar of men like thunder, the shock and the violence. “Have you ever seen a storm?” Run beneath it’s heavy wet tears, felt the lightning curl the hairs along your spine, felt the thunder rattle your bones… He does not say more, but his eyes glint with all the questions he did not ask. The boy’s lips forever cradle that feral, impish smirk. “Come.” He breathes, suddenly like a magician with mystery and wonder held behind his eyes and wet upon his tongue. “Let me show you something wonderful and then, if you still wish for shelter, then I will give it to you.”
The boy passes her, but his eyes tangle into hers. Gold roots within the water of her sea blue eyes. He watches her, asking her, daring her, until he turns away at last, finding a non-existant path that stretches itself out towards the edge of the swamp where the sky reaches out beyond the meadow and across the sea.
Come, Strangeling. Tinea seems to say, for Leonidas is not the only strange creature within the swamp this day.
HERE IS THE HOUR THAT HAS FORGOTTEN THE MINUTE though the minnow remembers the stream.
He could go around the lake, or spread his wings and fly over it.
He does not do either.
He wades into the murky water, gold-dark fibers of his long hair spreading out like a bloom on the surface; the ripples lap at the pale half-moons of my hooves buried in the bank below, not quite hungry. I watch the water part around him as he moves, perfectly still. The forest is changing, now, growing darker with each passing second, and the air around me seems to tremble with tension. (I have been the wind; I know how it feels to tremble.) There is a low sound, like a growl, barely perceptible. I breathe in the grey haze, and it feels wet against my nose.
He emerges from the water, thin streams of green running like vines down his sides; I think that it would look better if they were real ones. (I can almost see him with vines and leaves strewn about his antlers, like a deer gone through a thicket.) He is near as tall as me, but not quite, and his eyes put me, somehow, in mind of the reflective gold as a speckled forest cat, prowling in the undergrowth. (I do not think that he has the teeth to match.) Those eyes linger on me, terribly intent, but I do not shy away from his stare. “No. Most prefer it, and I assumed you might, but…have you ever seen a storm? “I haven’t,” I breathe. I haven’t ever, I nearly say, in all of my many lifetimes – but somehow I don’t think that I need to. It isn’t that he knows. How could he?
(A memory, faint, knocks at the door of my mind – it is sepia-tone and crisp around the edges, like old paper. In it, a man with golden laurels woven into his mane is watching me, but I can’t see his eyes, so I don’t know how. “No one will ever know what you aren’t willing to tell them,” he says, but with my name; I no longer recall it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I know that I was sorry, when I said it, but I no longer recall what I was apologizing for.) “Come. Let me show you something wonderful and then, if you still wish for shelter, then I will give it to you.”
Regardless. What is the difference between never, in all my lifetimes, and never, now? Two angles converge on the same point. His lips curve a smirk, and he tells me that he’ll show me something wonderful, and I know without thought or hesitation that I will follow where he leads.
It’s foolish, probably. I should know better than most not to go chasing after forest things – golden-eyed spirits and whispered winds will always lead you astray. I know this. I remember chasing after the dead, in the past; I remember trying to catch my mother, the cat, or my sister, the owl. They only led me into thickets, into the deepest and darkest parts of the Woods, where we do not go on principle.
(Golden-laurels shakes his head. His mane falls in his eyes, and I could laugh at the memory; his hair reminds me, somehow, of mine. “I know that you are grieving, but…”
“There is no death,” I say, and even through the indistinct haze of memory, even though I feel that I am hearing it through water, I know that my voice sounds a bit colder than usual.
“There is no death,” he repeats, “but that does not mean that there is no grief.”
He is wise, he is wise, he has always been so wise - I can almost remember his name, sometimes. Wise, but heavy. I think that he told me that I needed to value myself more, and I think that I laughed, and I told him the same. My shoulder pressed to his; wishing I could take the world off him. I was reckless for the things I loved, and for myself, and I still am.
He was reckless because it was his duty to be.)
I have never hesitated to chase after wisps or ghosts. And whatever he is – he is neither.
He passes me by – but not for long.
I turn on my heels and chase after him through the brush, following unseen paths through the bleak darkness and perpetual green of the wood; I am running blind, but I know that he isn’t. The ground spins beneath my hooves. The air is colder now, bitten by sudden chill, and the wind works through my feathers, tears through my chestnut hair-
When we bound out of the cover of trees and into the meadow, it streams behind me, as violent-copper-bright as tongues of flame. The wind weaves it behind me; it dances like a blaze, even as the storm comes in.
The sky is magnificently grey, coated in thick clouds. There is a brief, magical moment before it reaches us – I can see droplets of water tumbling down from the sky, less like tears than droplets of murky water shaken from the fur of a bear, just as he ambles out onto the riverbank. I breathe in deep of the air, which is thick with moisture and still humming, and I embrace the way that the temperature has dropped, a growing cold that I have never experienced before. “Oh, it’s-“ I gasp out, stumbling over my words, “beautiful, or maybe-“ Beautiful seems like the wrong word. As the water reaches us, streaming down on my skin, fighting with the wind tangles of my chestnut hair, I can’t think that beautiful is the right word; it’s too weak for this. Not enough, and too soft. The water dribbles down my face, catching on my lashes, and somehow, I don’t want to shake it off. “Is this…rain?”
A flash of blue-violet streaks the sky. The earth rumbles to follow it. I stare at the aftermath, wide-eyed, my chest heaving like I’ve been running – and I have, but not enough to warrant it.
I look over at my companion, wild-eyed and somehow transcendent, like I have just been reborn again.
@Leonidas|| aaaaa <3 || "elegy," gregory orr "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He waits for her to join him, standing a few trees away where the woodland begins to stretch away and beckon the young horses with it. It seems like an age to Leonidas as he stands pausing to see if she will indeed follow. He does not doubt that she will, but ah, as the Swamp remains victim to her silence, now Leonidas has committed himself to a moment beneath the energy of the storm, he ripples with electricity. He feels the power in the air, the crackle of the afternoon rousing, wild and bright.
The air trembles as he watches her move to him and the thunder has not even yet reached them. Though the boy reckons he can hear it, like a giant’s groan, a thundering stampede out in the canyons, heard all through Novus as a dull roar. The girl reaches him, lovely in her strangeness and he greets her with a wild smile before he leaps into the brush.
They run, no, they fly, over root and brush and branch. Leaves bat playfully at the children as they pass. The woodland is beckoning winter in but first she rushes the golden children through complimenting their coats with bronzes and browns and crimson reds.
Leonidas runs fleet footed, always peeing back for her, waiting, waiting and then on and on faster and faster until he strides mirror his and their wings become unnecessary for the way they fly. As they run he tries to teach her, to show her how to be quiet, silent as they run, but all he can think is how she sounds like a singing sword and time, endless Time. He knows about time and he laughs as he thinks of it. In answer snowdrops spring out of the ground, waiting for the snow that is still many days away.
But then, then they burst out of the trees into a meadow whose grasses are dark, dark green. Her flowers glow beautiful and rich caught by the fleeing sun and darkened by the chasing storm. The sky is iron grey and yet darker, darker to where the storm broods and angers and grows restless, restless. The cool wind blows and rain tips out of the clouds. It falls like a sheet upon the boy, the girl.
He turns back to her, his steps jaunty his skin twitching, his limbs as restless as the sea over the edge of the Praistigia Cliffs. It comes, it comes, he knows. She stands still strange and still so lovely. The rain falls to greet her, momentarily soft, before it falls heavier, heavier. A cloud of rain settles across the meadow, mixed by the cool winds. It swirls, it dances and beneath his drenched lashes (and the droplets that tumble from his lashes to the arch of his cheek) he watches her. For so long it is only she leonidas watches. The boy knows storms, he has slept beneath them, fled from their wrath, danced in their rains, let its ire bleach his own… but this girl… she stands and smiles and her eyes are filled with new awe. She watches the storm as a newborn might.
The weather does not disappoint her. Lightning splits the sky, the clouds cleave into two and light spills suddenly brilliant. In its bright, brief light leonidas thinks he might see all the world and the universe too. He wonders of his family, those people he thinks of infrequently - too afraid, too afraid… Where are they now? Does his mother still run beneath the storms? Does she laugh too?
Nicnevin glints like a gilded sword beneath the storm, the electricity is as a tuning fork upon her body. She rings and the note is beautiful and strange. It rings on and on and on and Time whispers in leonidas’ ears. It reminds him how she is different. She asks if it is rain that drecnhes their skin. He goes to her and through the water that gathers on his lips he tells her, “yes.” And laughs again, still elvin and reckless as any wild boy is. A second bolt splits the sky and alert, poised he looks to her and calls suddenly, “Run!”
He has seen her wings. The boy knows they reach even further than his. The wind calls to them and he answers, leaping into the air as his wings unfurl, mahogany and gold down feathers pressing upon the wind, carrying him up, up. He twists back to her and calls her into the sky, to fly with the lightning and a boy, reckless and free.
HERE IS THE HOUR THAT HAS FORGOTTEN THE MINUTE though the minnow remembers the stream.
The air crackles. Even burns.
Not in the way that the salt burnt my lungs when first I set hoof on Novus’s soil. It doesn’t burn like that. It burns like the tug of a rope pulled taught, nearly at its limits, fraying in the middle. It burns like something that is about to burn – the fraught second before the fire starts, spark put to dry wood. It’s difficult to explain, but I can feel the tension run across my skin, pricking and pulling. I remember exactly enough about being the wind to know that the feeling is violent, but-
Violence can be beautiful, when committed properly.
The water pours rivulets down my skin, traces and taints and darkens every inch of my form. It plasters the wild tangle of my mane to my skin, and I think, only vaguely, only absently, that it will almost certainly be impossible to deal with later. But that really isn’t important. The only important things are the rain, those sharp cracks of light that seem to split open the sky, the low rumble of the wind growling, and the boy beside of me. Yes, he tells me, although I already know the answer – like it came from somewhere inside of me, innate as breathing – and he laughs, and somehow I hear the sound distinctly over the howl of the storm. Run! he says, suddenly, the bright gold gleam of his eyes on me for only a moment before he leaps into motion, and I am following him before I can think about it, before I can even bother to think twice. I think I might be laughing, and I think that my laughter is as close of a mimicry as I can make it of the wind I once was – just as wild and just as light and just as fleeting. The world stumbles and crashes again in a splash of blinding light, and he leaps into the air to follow it, a dark silhouette against an even darker sky, trailing gold dust like flecks of glittering metal in the wake of his wings. I nearly hesitate, when he does. My wings are powerful, and expansive, and I know that they are all but aching for better use, but I am so unaccustomed to flying in anything but tranquility, and I am so unused to such great heights, such powerful wind, the tempestuous rage of this wonderfully fleeting world-
But I don’t hesitate. My wings outstretch, charcoal feathers buffeted by the wind, and I leap, spiraling up and up into the storm in his wake. Higher up, the wind is wilder (and colder, made colder still by the pelt of rain), and-
When I was the wind, I did not recognize my own strength. It only seemed natural. Same when I was a sword; slicing things open, and doing it apathetically, only seemed natural. It only seems natural to flit from place to place as a firefly, to stretch thoughtlessly up towards the sun as a vine, to pool and run down to the forest floor as a single drop of dew. When I was the wind, I did not recognize how I could tear. I did not recognize what destructive capacity I had in me. I simply was. I never thought about the way that I had teeth, without even intending it.
But now the wind is all around me, and I am nearly helpless to it. I don’t feel the sense of danger I’m sure I should, even when all my vision is illuminated by white light and I smell electricity in the air; I’m sure I should, but I have this young body, and this young heart, and this young mind, and every other me, every other part of my soul that has ever existed falls into place inside of me in the face of all this beauty.
(But the part of me that was a sword – that part lingers.)
I circle him in the air, seeking another glimpse of those lion’s eyes of his, and, once I find them, I smile broadly. (I think that I might be smiling like a sword smiles, in the only way a sword knows how; a smile with a sharp edge.) I let the part of me that is full-wild and full-rampant rise to the surface, the part of me that is Nicnevin, composed of herself and so many others, and I nearly laugh, but the sound never makes it out of my lips. It is hard to hear, over the pelt of rain and the scream of light and the wail of wind, but I ask, suddenly, “So, strangeling boy – do you know how to dance?”
I do.
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
She turns dark with the storm. The rain turns her bright copper skin from glowing metal to damp soil. Her laughter accompanies her as she rises. This strange girl, who has been so many things, smells of petrichor and the wild flowers of the wood they just fled out from.
The sky beckons the young ones up into its eternal, endless embrace. They are young, the storm is young but there is nothing new or green about this great sky. The groan of the storm is as an ols soul within a new body. The song of the storm is as ancient as water carving stone, weaving its way through the earth. Such simple, natural truths cut their way deep within Leonidas. Where some read from books, he reads of the sky, the leaves, the earthen floor beneath his feet.
So it is no wonder he waits for her with a smile upon his mahogany lips. It is no wonder that he flies within the sky as if he belongs here amidst all the things that drift free and limitless. Together they circle one another, tangling together like butterflies caught within the wind.
The electric light frames her as lightning branches, pointing down toward the earth. He watches how the world illuminates below him, lit by this chaotic sky and the storm’s whim. The lightning snags within her eyes. She calls him strangeling but it is nothing to the wicked-sharp smile upon her lips and the shock of lightning in her eye. Even her laughter is the song of a blade, it drowns out the crack and groan of the thunder. The soundwaves of thunder reverberate in his bones. They rattle him, but they do not move him in the ways her laughter does.
As she rises to him, so he spirals up and up, beckoning her closer to him and higher into the storm. The clouds kiss their poll, the children wear them like crowns. The lightning branches from them as twists of divine metal. Leonidas snags his gilded antlers upon the darkest cloud, it bleeds rain that pours as a river down the canyons and grooves of his Davidic face. The wild boy grins when she meets his eye and at last he lets her reach for him.
Strangeling, this other-world girl had called him and all he can think is how she is the strangeling. She is the creature woven from the fabric of things he cannot name nor even comprehend. It is her body that whispers old fables into his ears. It is she who makes the woodland come alive around her, whispering ancient things across his mind, painting them into his gaze. She turns things lovely and strange.
His wings beat and rain showers from his gilded feathers like ichor. (It turns grey as the clouds as it falls further and further from his glow). Dance. That is what she asks him and the boy looks to the sky and the way she moves with the wind, the way he does too. They circle as partners and he swoops in close as lightning lances through the air where he had just been. He laughs reckless with the near miss. The laughter presses itself into her ears, “Are we not already dancing?” Leonidas’ words chase his laughter. The boy stalks through the sky, a stag ascended or a lion prowling its heavenly savanna. Yet behind his smile is something that gathers, darkening the corners of his lips. It is doubt, for he knows nothing of dance in the way others do. The orphan boy knows only what he has seen when spying upon festivals. There bodies move close, grounded, there is something intimate in it, something free and yet restrained. He wonders what her dancing is, this girl made from other worlds and strange magic. “This is the only dance I know.” He says and the lightning beckons to her. But it is not enough, he circles her reaching in like a cat to tug with his teeth at the windswept curl of her hair. “Show me.”
HERE IS THE HOUR THAT HAS FORGOTTEN THE MINUTE though the minnow remembers the stream.
The static tingles against my skin. The world is all light, then all dark – violet-stained, and then white. I twist through dark clouds, half-wondering at my own bravery, half too enamored by the wild and dangerous beauty of the storm swirling around us to care about things like caution. I remember, innately, being a blade. I remember being a conductor, metal-bound. I remember my swing through the air, each arc of my blade, and it guides me as I cut through each ridge of cloud in his wake, following this strange, magical boy like the gold dust that trails from his wings. I feel the hot sear of lightning striking too close, and then the chill of the wind, the wet pelt of rain. It is too much to consider. I don’t. I just feel it, try to feel each passing moment, to imprint it in my memory – so, after my next death, it remains.
(It is futile to try to impress particulars. This much I know. Still. I think that my first storm should be significant, that it should matter enough to stay, but- but I don’t even recall any of my other names.)
I can’t catch him until he lets me. He is swift as a rabbit, even in the air, swift as a stag in the thicket; but he lets me, eventually, and I come to him. I am shivering – and I am not sure if it is from the cold, or the electricity, or the anticipation, the way that the wind calls to me in a language that I can almost, almost remember (the almost is agonizing) and tells me to dance, to return to the currents that once bore me. This is the only dance I know, he says, bridging the gap between us; he reaches towards me, and, though I wonder at the motion, I don’t pull away.
Whatever I am expecting, it is not for his teeth to catch in my chestnut curls and tug on them. I blink at him, and then a smile – almost mischievous, almost provoked - begins to curl its way across my lips. I always knew that long hair would be trouble; the other lives I’ve lead, the real knights, always had the good sense to keep it shorn. Show me, he says, then, and I make up my mind to do just that, even though he pulled my hair.
Two can play at that game.
I lean in close and snap my teeth right by his ear, grinning broadly. “I will,” I say – and then I dance away from him, coasting on undercurrents of breeze, writhing a bit like the wind. I tell myself, down to my bones, to remember what it feels like to be something else. I know I will never remember right, but I try regardless; I know this heavy, clumsy body will never be able to capture for an instant the grace of a falling leaf, or a bobbing firefly, or the wind, or any of the separate, wildly different ways that they are graceful, but I try. I try, and there is a moment when I think I have it, when I think – feel – like I am a part of the storm and the great, wide world around me, not just a creature inhabiting it.
I am still laughing, maybe. It’s hard to tell; the wind swallows up my voice as soon as it passes my lips. Still, as I twist in the air, newly unafraid of the way it pulls and buffets, newly unafraid of the thing that used to be me, my bird-of-prey wings shift and twist with an agility that I did not know I possessed. I dance for him. I dance with him, but only if he can catch me.
Oh, I dance with him – and then, when the storm is gone, so am I.
@Leonidas|| thanks for the lovely thread (& Nic's first finished one, to boot!); can't wait for the next one! || "elegy," gregory orr "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Nicnevin trembles like a leaf in the wind. She is the gold of autumn, an arresting colour that captures his gaze and holds it. Leonidas knows that the most dangerous thing in the skies now is not the storm, but the girl who glows like a crimson leaf. She would set him ablaze with just a touch across her copper skin. The silk of her hair is still a ghost between his teeth. She had blinked slowly, bemused and yet, as the smile crept its way, bright and glorious, across her lips, delighted.
Her laughter is other-worldly. It is the song of a sword, the cry of a bird. It is bells resounding through the waves of thunder that shake the earth. The air trembles with the storm and it runs like static along her skin. That is the ghost between his teeth: the static of Nicnevin. The girl who sets his nerves ablaze.
There are many things Leonidas knows about the wild, things he has learnt and taught himself. But he does not expect girls, he does not expect proximity. This other-world-girl gives him both. She darts in, swift as a gazelle, playful as a wolf as she snaps her teeth beside his ear. It is not often he is caught off-guard. Leonidas twitches back, his skull twisting away from her, his gilded eyes wide as twin suns. He stares at her and meets her gold with his until they glow like halos, like great suns colliding. The wildling boy has been touched so little. He flinches at her proximity, he startles like a stag at the cocking of a gun. Remember, his young soul whispers to her ancient one, just in case she feels offence, remember when you lay beneath the earth untouched for a hundred years. What was it like when at last you were?
But all seems forgotten in their chase, their sprawling, waltzing dance that reaches all across the storm, drenched sky. They play cat and mouse and then, then she moves. It is more than a leaf, more than flames and suns.
She becomes the air, her laughter the petrichor that fills his nose and wets his tongue.
She becomes the rain that soaks their skin.
She becomes the shocks of lightning that strike deep into his chest and demand he remembers this moment at every second of his eternity.
Leonidas does not watch a girl, but a god dance. Her movement is transcendent and he goes to her, he matches her, he learns what it is to dance, taught by a goddess-girl.
They dance until the skies clear, until she leaves, until his wild-wood beckons him back and home, to his bed of rain soaked leaves.
