[AW] where a dead man called out for his love to flee

[Andromeda]

you spend so many nights dreaming of spilling your blood to the moonlight. slipping out of your bones, and slithering into the soul of someone else

The world drifts into a wounded stillness.  All around me, the wind is singing – a faint breeze of restless apathy.  I watch dusk fall like a crown tilting down upon the brow of a midnight heaven.  Everywhere is silence, and I enjoy this silence, this unnerving calm, as much as I enjoy the soft moonlight.  It is still, like the whisper of death's kiss upon a pale, white hand; and its hunger roams like a lone wolf roams, bristling through aching moonlight and forest-shadow.  Everywhere, the darkness drips like a drug.  Everywhere, fragments of moonlight pool through the cracks of me, like rainwater escaping between a bone-white ribcage.  I feel the night's cold, and lean into its embrace like a lover.  I feel the soft breeze singing, and I feel alive; alive with the chill of nightime, coaxing my soul to wake from its eternal slumber. 

Her world is a place full of darkness, of fairy-tales – of religion and celestial appetite. Her hunger, is one of dreams and ethereal beauty.   When she dances beneath a thick, stream of moonlight, the gauzy moon-silver wraps for her curves like a flowing nightgown.  The silver veil flutters by her side, riveting and rippling as a midnight spell. Smoothing, all around her with all that vibrant, light-filled hunger. Andromeda feels more angel than mortal. She feels more like sunlight, that doesn't belong in the shadows of a dead, decaying world. She does not feel like she belongs of this universe made of diamonds and stardust.  Like a crescent moon, she feels incomplete – her heart, the secret notes of a mysterious song. She feels too new; an orphaned child, abandoned by the gods.  She feels so helpless yet, so unafraid.

When she walks through her dreaming, desolation becomes her companion.  When she walks through the valley of stars, her heart feels more empty than it does full. Her voice becomes silent, like swan-songs lost to the wind. Still, she moves on into the deep throes of night. Into the darkness, that caresses her delicate figure. She is but a young girl; soft and holy. A light-bearing torch, full of almost-laughter and echoes of laughter, begging like tears upon night's shadowy visage.  Andromeda only laughs, quietly, as soft as the hush of wind; as whisper-thin as a wolf's howl. A silent whisper, a cold song.  She is tethered to no place, no being. And yet with her she carries oceans of emotion. With her are the swell of seas.

When she moves, she moves slowly, dances sensually. Waking and wishing upon a night full of dreams. Her legs are slender, as her muscles purr and ripple beneath taut flesh. Behind her bodice, trails her eternal flames. An endless train of amber fire, as they glide like soft silk against her skin. Her tail is lupine, as it flutters behind her; beneath the soft notes of spring, Andromeda looks like a dragon for all the fire she brings. She moves like a swan over a grey lake.  All fine-edges, and fragile poetry, feathered into soft, girlish brilliance.  Andromeda is a girl of fire, of desire, of dreams.  Beneath the shadowy ambience of night, she glows – impossibly celestial. A soft figure of porcelain slenderness made so gentle you'd fear to break her. But her eyes, o, how they scream of another universe, entirely. One full of violence and fire. One full of dark music and the gentle, long-awaited suffering of a half-moon.

When she finally stops dancing, Andromeda stands before the cavern's maw, and gazes deep within their black abyss. A breeze sweeps forward, sirenic and haunting. When the moonlight touches her physique through the fortress of trees, her complexion gives off a mysterious afterglow. Dressed in moonlight, the silver ink feels like silk upon her skin. It feels soft and pale and made by gentle hands, as such tender moonlight smoothes down her curves in a waterfall of pale illumination and wicked cadence. She wonders if she should enter the cave. She wonders if monsters lay among their darkest corners, like gargoyle statues waiting for her with sharp talons. She wonders, she wonders and yet she does not enter the cave. She only steps half-way and then, pauses. She only looks within, as the winds begin to sigh with harsh laughter, and her voice begs quicksilver from her lips;  "Hello?"

you're the dawn that rises bloody, and wrecks ships in its wake.  but you're a siren too, somewhere deep in the aching heart of you

[Leonidas]

I am not like any ordinary world

He is minding his own business when she comes, bringing something angelic, altogether holy into his life. Andromeda, Leonidas knows, even by that first glimpse, is so different to a boy like he. They both glow, yes, him with burnished gold and she, with her tail of divine flame. Yet that is where their similarities end. For Leonidas is a wild-wood boy, he lifts his chin from amidst the flowers. Atop his poll his gilded antlers lift the woodland offerings up to the sky. Vines and leaves and flowers and seeds, lie like a wildwood meadow hung between his pointed tines (like fingers and palm uplifted to a god). But Leonidas has no god to make such offerings to. Instead he lives rough and alive, unholy and alone in his feral wood with his kingdom of animals.


The boy watches the girl and he is entranced. She moves, not like any girl he has ever seen, but she dances. Her body liquid light, her eyes not of this world. Oh, none of her is of this world. The sight of her fills his mind with tales his mothers once told him. Stories that have grown rough and forgotten with time. They are smudged and worn in his memory bank, he has thought of them too often and yet not often enough. These stories are loved and held, worried through like years of fingers upon paper. But also, their ink has faded for he has not opened his memories enough.


She disappears into the wood. A glimmer of light and then gone. The woodland feels dark and colder without her light. It takes but a moment to consider, but really, for the boy there is nothing to consider at all. He leaps, elven, from his place. He chases her, caught as if she were a siren. She glows, he is dusted in dirt, dark, but for his gold that gleams in answer, crying out to her vitality with a sun-gold-glow.


They run, her ahead and him, fleeting as a fox through the brush. The fae-boy runs, at times a man and at others still a boy upon the cusp of manhood. But in his eyes is only the awe of a boy, ensnared by a magic he has never seen before. A creature rare within his woodland home.


She stops, suddenly, in a clearing where sunlight gleams down and dapples the earth. She stops before the maw of a cave where lit dustmotes dance in its black maw. He has stopped at the edge of the wood. There is nothing boyish now in the way he gazes at the dark cave and the girl before it. The girl, ivory and crimson, speaks into the cave. A hello that swallowed by darkness and sounds like bells as it sinks beneath the earth.


Slow, calm as any monarch within his glen, the boy steps up beside her, his nape thick with adult muscle, his shoulders growing. He is a boy, so nearly a man. It is easy to forget he is one or the other. But always he is fae, always he is a wild-wood creature, lost beneath stars and deep into the lovely dark of woodlands deep. “Will you go in?” He asks, his voice so deep. It does not break, it emboldens him, “Do you want company?” For he does not think he can leave her holiness, not yet, his unholy body breathes, not yet, not yet. 


His voice, however, it breaks at the last word and reminds them both that his is still just a boy, not yet a man.

@Andromeda

"Speaking."

credits

[Andromeda]

you spend so many nights dreaming of spilling your blood to the moonlight. slipping out of your bones, and slithering into the soul of someone else
I dance beneath the moon until the night takes away my breath and my heart is carved by the flowers of the woods.  I have no care in this world except for the music in my blood and the songs that echo like wishes on my lips.  Everywhere I look, I see a kingdom made of forests and moonlight and fairytales.  Everywhere I look, I see a holy stillness made of hunger and starlight and darkness so sweet, it is a darkness that wears the scent of roses and romance and not sin and suffering.  I want to live in this beautiful trance and beg my soul to pour in endless waves of ethereal light.  I want to run through this fairytale universe and laugh with the melody of the moon and the braids of starlight in my wildly, flowing hair.  I feel so alive, I could laugh with joy, or sadness.  It's when I see him approaching me beneath thick streams of silverlight, that my lips almost gasp and I sigh like a nymph too shy to swim upstream before the swollen belly of a full, aching moon.  It's when I see the bright, golden light of his antlers, the regal curve of his wings and the way he holds his head high, as though he wears a king's crown.  How handsome he is, a boy made of elven magic and darkness so feral – dusted in starlight so wild and golden, he could have been the sun to the soft, moonlight-slenderness of me.  I want to touch his lips with the gentle prayer of my kiss.  I want to press my lips into the dark spaces between his heart and soul.  I want to ask him if he's as wild as me – but I fear a single whisper, a single kiss, or a touch, might break this spell and shatter this dream.  Instead, I smile at him, a tender smile not of this world, but something far sweeter, far pure. 

In the secret moments caught between moonsong and religion –  where the pages of a dark, fairytale lift, and you see a true glimpse of her – Andromeda is more woman than girl.  It's in the whisper of her hips.  The fullness of her mouth.  The darkness of her smoldering, otherworldly gaze brimming with holyfire and untamed wrath. Andromeda is an infernal angel, too hot, too wild, for this universe.  Holy light pours from her body.  Sacred Fire licks at her valkyrie-curves.  When she dances, she dances to the rhythm of sweet Armageddon.  From her sleek, porcelain body and slim thighs covered in war-flames, Andromeda screams heaven-born.  From her angelic lips, breathes fabled ruin.  From her too-long lashes, sings the black-grey of fallen ashes and seraphic flame.  Even her halo glistens with silken luminosity; their ice-blue crystals dipped in the inky blood of demons; hungry and sharp and only remedied by visceral impulse. It thirsts for blood, the way a heavenly sword thirsts for retribution. And for all her deceptive slenderness, Andromeda is decadently carved into a soft weapon of heaven; a snarling inferno, full of blazing teeth and desirous curves made pure and supple with her tender youth.

In the moments she is dancing, she is too wild to touch.  Too savage to tame.  When she turns into her truest form, she becomes the embodiment of violence - she becomes brighter than suns. When she turns into light holier than prayer, every curve of her is laced in elegant ruination, as she descends like a dragoness upon the earth. Her blood feels hot like molten gold; her heart, a howling storm, ravaging like scripture beneath her ivory breast.  The hunger she feels inside is endless, with their million mouths all salivating at once.  Her hunger pours like religion in her veins, made of fire and thunder and ash.  Her world is one of light and darkness, hunger and fullness.  When she feels her world shattering before her; bits of her eternal hunger, climbs the desolation of space like a devouring void in heaven.  Every piece of her becomes fractured light too hot, too deadly, to gaze upon.  Every melody of her is laced in absolute chaos; like stardust drifting from space – she feels her own divine spirit, drifting against a timeless symphony. Every piece of her feels like a broken mirror shard, reflecting too much of her violent soul.  As fire dances along her lithe physique, she becomes absolutely immortal – ageless.  From her whispering kiss, she becomes divine destruction.  Alive, passionate, constantly consuming.  A girl made of desire, of moonlight, of fire, of dreams.

“If you should go with me – yes,” Andromeda sighs like rain and laughs like heaven.  Her voice is sweet and wild, trailing over his skin like a rose in half-bloom (a rose who forgets her tenderness amid the promise of their thorns). She dances as free as the wind, as ethereal.  Her lavender tresses descend like a free-flowing nightgown upon a flush, midnight breeze.  Her body dances like flames beneath starlight, twirling and waltzing along a fertile, spring moon.  Into the darkness of the caves, she spins atlast, overcoming her initial worry – a single, graceful motion full of girlish awe and gentle laughter.  She smiles back at him, gazing into the dark-night of his swarthy face; beckoning him with a warm whisper of graceful words. "Come quick, my brave Prince – before the night steals you away, and I am left without company,"  She ushers, she begs.  Her voice made playful, her body bathed in half-moonlight and half-shadow. "My heart yearns for wilderness, for adventure, and I won't have anyone else accompany me but you."

@Leonidas

you're the dawn that rises bloody, and wrecks ships in its wake.  but you're a siren too, somewhere deep in the aching heart of you

[Leonidas]

I am not like any ordinary world

Leonidas watches her, like a boy drunk on dreams. The loveliness of her turns all around her dim and soft and unfocussed. She glows. He stares and does not blink. He is as a fly within a web, a month flying toward what it thinks is the moon. She is like that, soft lunar light, ancient, forgotten religion. He gazes at her and the wild-wood boy is drugged upon a thing he has no name for, no words with which to describe it. Will she, like the flame to the moth, scald him if she ever reveals herself as no moon at all but some beautiful destruction, come to ruin the hearts of mortals.


There is a silence to Leonidas and a loudness that is as restless as the song of birds. His silence is the quiet of a midwood, the way he stands, unmoved by even the smallest breeze. The boy is watchful, a sentinel of his feral home that rises green and dark and lovely at his back. The susurrations of the trees still whisper to the boy, begging him to return and not sink beneath the grounds like roots that may never see daylight again. They only hope that he will sink like a seed and rise back up a shoot, a man growing bright and hungry and boldly beautiful.


Adorned with soil and leaves and roots and vines, the gilded boy studies her and tilts his head away, shyly, delightfully proud when she says she will have him for this adventure. The girl does not reach to touch him, as so many have before her and he thinks that he likes it. Except… except that he has also begun to crave it. Born a tactile boy into a tactile family his body years to touch, to be touched. But he has lived most of his life without, touch now is still so new, so surprising. It is rough (like Aspara), gentle, cautious (like his uncle), full of friendship and fun (like Nicnevin) and then full of something altogether different - things that he has no name for (like Maret). Ah, there are so many things Leonidas has yet to have a name for. So many things an orphan boy of the woods has never encountered before. 


He walks past the winter and summer of her skin. The air about her is warm - or maybe it is just his skin, feverish with her closeness, with the imminence of their adventure? The boy has never feared darkness, nor the steps down into the bowels of the earth. He heard once his mother stepped down into the deepest cave and stepped off the edge of it, tumbling into Time, into eternity. Maybe that is why her son watches the girl beside him as if she is a creature woven by the threads of other worlds. Other magics. 


His antlers glow, long after darkness swallows his body. The cave’s maw begins wide and open but at its throat it narrows, narrows until the darkness grows cool, its breath damp and old. He hears her feet whispering behind him and he turns thinking, knowing that she will glow, her skin will be a candle in the darkness that drowns them, luring the youngsters deeper, deeper. The boy walks like the prince she called him, a prince of nothing but the wilderness she also named upon her tongue, between her teeth. He wonders of the word Prince, of how Aspara is a princess. The boy knows nothing of his blood, how royal it once was. How he is the grandson of a Winter Court, a son and nephew to a Dusk Court. He is a prince, a prince of nothing at all. 


He looks to her with gold eyes gleaming and grins like all good wild boys should, “I go where I wish. The night cannot steal me away.” For the night is his own and wild orphan boys have always lived as they pleased beneath the watchful wide eyes of the midnight moon. He says it like a boy proud and it heralds the coming of a man who will know no binds. He laughs low, low like a man, reckless and deep (though his voice only moments before had been that of a boy), “What adventures do you want?” He asks, for all of his life was one. When he whispered into a child’s ear and begged her to join him in the wood, to run away and heal his loneliness, he was unsurprised when she did not - no one ever had, maybe no one ever will. So he looks to this girl of religion and strange, beautiful magic and knows this adventure will ease his loneliness for now.


@Andromeda

"Speaking."

credits