“Mama, will you braid my hair?” She asks, walking across the floor of their family’s cottage. Elena obliges (as she so often does for her daughter). Her hair is still short, though no longer the mohawk of her newborn days, she has gained some length, enough for small braids throughout. Elena weaves a flower up near the top by her ears. “There, perfect,” she says as Elli rushes to the window to look herself in the mirror. She is pleased enough and she turns blue eyes to her mother. “I am going to pick you a bouquet,” she says determined before rushing out the door to head to the festival.
Today, she decides, she feels like the color yellow (not yellow like her mother, nor yellow like the sun, but maybe yellow like the center of daisies in a daisy chain). So when she reaches the flowers, Elli moves to those yellow tulips that stand there, ready to be picked and made into a present for her mother.
Elli is young of body but old of spirit. She feels a constant rustling in her soul, her mind straining against the confines of its walls, and her heart thrumming against the edges of her ribcage, as if so eager to burst from her chest and fly around the world. She can feel it now even, as she gathers up the flowers, placing them together. Dusk Court, while beautiful, cannot fully quench her desire to see the entire world. She thinks of the forest she had dove into and the twins that had she had met there. She would find them again, maybe, find them, follow them. Maybe they knew where the end of the world rested. If anyone knew, she thinks, it would be them. It had to be.
She moves to pick another flower, this time a red tulip, to represent the godmother she hears so much about and admires so greatly. But as she goes to pick it, she is met by another. “Excuse me,” she says politely, eyes coming to rest on the stranger’s face. “Could I have this flower?”
dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
The boy stands in a lake of rippling gold. His hair seems dipped into the sunrise sea of tulip flowers. The bright of the petals turn the bark-deep hue of his skin as dark as a silhouette.
He does not know the girl approaches, not when his eyes are closed and his chin upturned to the sky. His antlers arch back, pointing directly up to the sky and down, down toward his spine. He could have stood here, bathing in the warm gold of the flowers for an eternity. He is more nymph than colt. More wild boy than the smartly presented children who pass by him.
They watch, those children, with their eyes wide open. They recognise a feral boy when they see one. The clues are there in the dirt upon his body, the starlight tan of a thousand sleeps spend beneath the night sky and the foliage that twines through the brace of his antlers. Leonidas is not merely a feral boy of the woods, he is the woods and he stands as still as regal as an oak in the heart of the meadow.
A child speaks and the boy opens his eyes. His gaze tumbles out of the sky and down to her. Oh. She is so like them, with her delicate plaits and the flower woven into her hair. Warmly he gazes at her and looks down beneath his lashes to the upturned face of the tulip she seeks. It sways for them, keen to be plucked. Are you really? The wild-wood boy wants to ask it. Do you know what it means?
If the flower knows, it does not care, for still it sways, hopeful. Leonidas leans down and plucks the flower out of the earth, it comes, rising in his grasp. It seems brighter now, the glow of a sunrise. The girl is watching him, her eyes a shade of blue he has never seen before. He has no name for it, has never seen it in the wild-wood. Maybe it is a deep sea-hue. His breath flutters and he reaches out, but does not wait for her to take it. He knows what Maeve would like, to have the flower woven into her hair. Is this girl the same? The colt wonders as his brow furrows with the effort of weaving her flaxen hair around the stem. When he stands back the flower is nestled against her neck, bright and gleaming.
“It suits you.” Leonidas says, high like a boy. He has no hope that it will last. He is too much a man tonight.
His gaze unfurls like petals opening on flowers. (She so does love when flowers blossom.) And she is immediately taken with him, something not even Aeneas can claim to have accomplished. Elliana slow to trust, and slower to let into her soul. The biggest difference between her and her mother. Elli falls in love with paintings, not people. But she admires the dirt of him, like there is a layer of wild and wilderness ingrained in him that she so aches to have for herself one day. There is a look burrowed into his eyes that speaks of wanderings and explorations and she wants to bury herself in the ebony of his hair to see if she can smell the wanderlust that she has only dreamed about.
“Hi,” she says with not the softness of sunlight like her mother, but the ease of snowflakes against a blade of grass. She is almost breathless. Almost. She is not so in amazed by the living as her mother when the dead whisper to her of beauty she cannot even imagine. “Thank you,” she says, plucking it for herself, but thinking it is for them, it is their flower. She will put it in water when she goes home, and think of the wild boy. She will admire the red of it in the warm glow of their home and think of the wild boy. She will watch it wilt and die until all the petals have fallen, and still she will think of the wild boy.
Then she will forget.
Till she remembers again.
Tilting her head back, she considers the wide expanse of sky that blankets the pair of them. How much of the sky has he seen? She wonders inside her head. “How much of the sky have you seen?” She wonders aloud. “Could you plant flowers in the clouds? And grow trees in storms? Are rainbows made of fall leaves?” And she asks maybe because he feels like a man tonight, and maybe he can answer her. But she asks too because he sounds like a boy, and maybe he feels just as curious she does. And she likes to think this wild boy must know about the sky and the clouds and just how feral it is.
dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
She asks him of things even wildling boys have no answers for. But he thinks that he would like to.
As she cradles the plucked flower and looks upon it with a warmth he cannot place, Leonidas thinks of all the wondrous questions she has asked. Her wanderings beckon a grin to slip free as a breeze across his lips. It is an untameable thing, that smile of his. It is the bated breath of a storm in the eternal few seconds before the first strike of lightning splits the sky.
The boy moves, less a horse than a slinking fox, possessing the unharnessed energy of a river rapids. He turns his golden eyes upon her and in them are every picture her words have woven. The fae youth tips his chin up into the sky, until the twigs hang and dance down the muscles of his neck. He looks for flowers amidst the clouds, grasses growing and trees reaching. He looks to where he has seen lightning branch like the reaching limbs of a tree. ”No”, the reckless forest-boy whispers, his voice a susurration of leaves filling the space between him and her. “i have not seen flowers planted in clouds - “ and there is a bleak morning’s lament to him as he tips his gaze from her, “- but i have danced within storms.” Ah! Then he grins and laughs elven and delightful.
Her curiosity is magic in the air. It is as sweet upon his tongue as the strawberries in Sussuro Fields. Leonidas peers down at her beneath his long, midnight lashes as he stands like an oak, full of strange magic, So still and yet ever moving. An energy blooms across his earthen, soil dusted skin, it ripples out like static. He would wonder if it played across her skin like fitful delight.
The wild-wood boy anticipates her smile and presses his muzzle against the soft petals of the flower she plucked and named theirs. Slowly he turns from her, less a boy than a god, a king of the woodlands deep. “Shall we find some strange magic?” The boy whispers and turns his head toward her, his crown of gilded tines and tangled green foliage, glinting atop his brow. “Will you come?” And his telekinesis reaches out for hers, a palm laid up, an invitation open.
“It is a perfect flower,” she says only, but there is a smile on her full pale lips that says a little more. “Are you sure you wish for me to have it?” She asks, before allowing her dark muzzle to press against it, as if she were more butterfly than equine. He smiles and she thinks it bold and beautiful, like comets across skies. (Has he flown in the night with them before?)
He moves.
She moves.
He tips his head upwards she follows the action, but sees her world through blue eyes (forget-me-nots) instead of gold (buttercups). She pictures the sunny skies growing stormy and how the wild boy must look when he dances inside it. “And how fine of a dance partner does the lightning make?” She asks, tipping her face down and flashing a smile that looks as wild as rain in his direction.
“It's lovely to meet you, storm dancer. I'm Elliana but please, call me Elli.” She says, an echo of her crimson godmother. In the earliest days of her youth, her name had felt like the most important word in the world. It was the only word she knew and she’d happily parroted it back at her mother, GiGi, and father. Now, now it just feels like something she consistently wants to give away, that it would be better suited on the lips of others than her own.
She steps up to his shoulder with his invitation. A nod of her head. What strange magic would they find? The storm dancer and the shadow whisperer? Surely, of all the children in Novus, they would be the ones to discover the strangest of magic it could offer. “Wait,” she says and decides, places hat flower in his hair, nestles it next to the golden, pointed ensemble he wears. “Take me,” she says then, and her smile grows upon her face as adventure sits on her tongue, and it taste not sickly sweet like strawberries, but the sweetness of the summer rain she has yet to know.
dear friend it will be alright, please just stay by my side
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He has never thought strawberries sickly sweet. He loves them unripened: sharp and hard and white. And when they are ripened too. When their skin is as red as a blood drop, their seeds pressed like buttons into a heart. He has eaten strawberries until they have turned his lips red as a rose and turned his tongue numb with their tanging sweetness. They might be his most favourite of all the woodland fruits.
But today his lips are not stained with the juice of wild grown berries. Today he has eyes only for flowers and as she asks him about the lightning he laughs, as reckless as a storm. “It is unpredictable and sharp.” He says with a grin that glows and glows and glows. It belongs to woodland nymphs and the laughing of crickets as the night ebbs into the hidden corners of thickets and groves. Even as he speaks, he thinks of a girl who is as unpredictable as lightning, how being with her feels like dancing with danger. He would be safer, he thinks, dancing with lightning. His heart did not ache and his head did not hurt after a storm.
The younger girl watches him with wide eyes, filled full with the delights of petrichor and wicked skies. He laughs again, reckless once more and turns for the woodland that watches them with greenleaf eyes. The ryegrass brushes at their knees, pale seeds left like kisses to burrow into the silk of their hair. Burrs hang like tangles in his black-gold hair and his eyes darken, deep as midnight water as he drinks in the strangling girl beside him. “Lightning is the most entertaining partner, Elli.” The wildwood’s boy whispers. He guides her with the grace of a king inviting a subject into his palace of leaves and trees and flowers.
He leads her beneath the bough of a hornbeam tree that rises like a great fountain, pouring green foliage out through the dappling sunlight. The air is full only with the taste of hazy sunlight, the afternoon slow and lazy with heat. Dustmotes swirl as the shade stretches out around them. He thinks as they step from the tulip fields into the wilder meadows, filled with enchanting nightshade and daisies. Red clover and yarrow tickle at their knees as they pass and a ferret lifts its head above the petals to watch the children pass.
The air fills with the babble of water and he leads them to an outcrop where a creek meanders dips, water tumbling its merry way down through the woods. The feral boy crouches beside the rocks and peers down onto the water. Sunlight pours in from above as water spray rises in a small, dancing steam from the little waterfall. A rainbow glimmers through the air, made in the meeting of water drops and sunlight. “Have you ever seen a stranger magic than this, Elli?” The boy whispers, enchanted, drawing the girl into his secret delight.
