[P] perches in the soul

[Leonidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

His head tilts as he listens. It is a whispering noise at first, the way she moves through the brush. The distance turns it soft, little louder than the busy susurration of the trees. Yet the wildling boy hears it. Of course he does. 


Upon the exposed rock he crouches, there in the early morning wood. He listens to her as she moves - not that he knows it is a girl. Not yet, not yet. Not until she comes a little closer, with her fine boned limbs and hair of spider-silk gold. It gleams as fine as a web in the early dawn light. His chin tips up to where it dapples through the leafy canopy and tumbles down, down, down to pool upon the curve of the child’s spine. 


From his place, with his golden brace of antlers, strung and woven through with leaves and vines and blossoms, he watches her like a spirit of the wood. But when he rises from his crouch, to move as a mirror to her, to trail the child through his woods, the wildling boy is more stag, a monarch of his woodland space. Though really, he is king of nothing at all, nothing but the air that fills his lungs. He has no home, no bed but the grasses and flowers he lays down to sleep upon. 


His time he spends roaming and scavenging. Yet this day, this morning, he spends watching. Watching a girl who smells of woods belonging to other worlds. The scent of her is an intoxicating thing and he follows, drinking in the mahogany of her skin - so much like his. But Leonidas wears his wild wood upon his growing body. It is painted as dirt across his ribs and limbs and cheeks. It is draped and woven like jewelry through his gilded antlers. 


He follows until he can no more, until he intrigues her too much. Then, oh, and only then, does he step out of the woodland’s sleepy, morning dark, and out into her path. He stands, taller, older, boy and man warring across his growing body. Neither adult, neither boy. Beneath his long black lashes he watches her, leonine eyes gleaming with wanderlust. “Who are you?” The fae-boy breathes and turns like a nymph, a stag, a fox. The woodland cannot decide what he should be. It paints him all things and when he grins at her, keen to pull from this girl’s lips her every story of new and wonderful worlds, there is something of his parents in him. Something godly, something not of this world. 



@Roselin
“Speaking.”

credits

[Roselin]

The dream came again.

Roselin doesn't have it often but sometimes when the moon fully waned from the sky, when her father failed to show for their nightly rituals, when the stories that her mother shared had been too fanciful, she would have the dream. It is always the same. She is young and fleet-footed. She runs through Taiga and laughs beneath the cathedral Sequoias. Oren - her twin - is somewhere nearby and she is trying to find him.

There are shadow-dwellers and they are close enough to hear: It could take any shape it wanted. (Roselin always stopped running then but she could hear her mother's reprimand that it was rude to eavesdrop.) But she stays. She listens. It could be anything, says another shadow-dweller. Rose always looks around then, looks to the branches. Could it be a bird, she wonders?

Yes, something whispers.

She thinks of the wolves that she has heard on winter lonely nights.
Could it be that?

Yes, comes the voice again.

Her mind is racing now, though her hooves do not move. What do you call something that could be anything? This thing - this monster she later learns through the whispers - could be any shape. Would her eyes recognize the trickster, she wonders? The Northerners had a memory that was long as their winters (and they could go on for eons, a place that was always last be to kissed by the warmth of summer and the first to the feel the frost of fall). They recalled and they remembered and even though this was just a dream, it was a story planted around a seed of truth. (As time passed, it grew more fantastic and the 'monster' became many things.)

One of the shapes it took was the reoccurring dream - a nightmare - of a child.

This dream doesn't come often but she has had it more frequently here. Roselin often wakes in a room that feels too confined and the shadows dwell too close. She can hear the breaking of the waves from her bedroom window but it isn't enough. Rose was a girl who dreamed fare more easily beneath the stars. The nightmare would come and she would wake and so she would go, not giving the dream a chance to come back. (If she had been home, if she had been nestled beneath the might Taigan trees, her father would be there. He would wrap her up in his shadows and smile. He would tell her, See? They can chase the nightmares away.)

As was becoming a common habit for Roselin, she leaves her aunt's cottage while the stars are still out.

She greets the day as it rises.

But she doesn't go to the cliffs. She turns away from them and the seashore and ventures towards an unfamiliar direction. Roselin doesn't care where she goes; she just wants to leave her dreams behind her. They can stay in that little room and the cottage by the sea.

Instead of a coast, she finds a forest and Rose is happy. For the first time since she has arrived in Terrastella, she smiles. Fire-bright (familial for the women of the Legacy line) and yet hers has a secret lingering on the corners of her dark lips. She looks up and is baptized in this foreign wood. It is not like the one she was born in but it is close and for now, that is enough. Roselin breathes in the heady scent of pine and damp earth, of decaying leaves and broken branches. These are the smells of her childhood and so she becomes a youth again; she doesn't have the pretend to be the Guardian's daughter or the Healer's ward.

Up tilts her dark slender head and-

until a boy distracts her. She stops and looks towards him.

He has gold-tipped wings - wings like her brother Nashua - and he is antlered like her other brother, Yanhua. There is not much of Terrastella that she knows and yet this boy doesn't look out of place. He looks like he has always been here. "Roselin," she says slowly, blinking at the sight of him. "What are you?"


@Leonidas

[Leonidas]

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.

The way Leonidas watches her is as if he can see the stories shed from her like feathers from a swan. He wonders if the stories she keeps between tooth and tongue and left behind in her leaf-covered footsteps are of her life or the fanciful tales of ancient myth. 


This fae creature, with his long neck and proud brace of gilded antlers, would feast upon her every word. It would be as if each one was a crumb to a pauper. The wildwood boy who stands before her is poor of so many things. 


His eyes are the glow of the setting sun framed beneath an arcing frond of thick black lashes. What are you? the girl asks him as he stands before her, gilding her like Midas. But Leonidas is more feral than that cursed king. He would rather turn her into buttercups than the gold of metal, the hot bright of the sun. His eyes darken at her question, they tarnish, his gold darkening too. His magic turns the air metallic as it strips the glow from his gilt points. 


That grin straightens like a slackened bow string as shadows sculpt a frown upon his fine face. She did not ask him who he was but, what. His nape arches, her question pushing him back into woods from which he came. The ferns and bracken reach out like arms for him, reminding him that he is nothing but a woodland orphan, no matter how he has grown, no matter how his sadness tries to sculpt him anew. 


His chin tips in toward his muscled breast and steadily he holds her, still turning every inch of her black to gold. “Do you not think I am just a -” Boy? Man? His pause is brief, barely perceptible, as he stumbles over what exactly he is. He feels more man than boy now, but it feels too much to call himself a man just yet. “-a horse?” He finishes and it is a blessing he watches her like a feral thing (a fox watching with a quiet calm, and wild-loving eyes, from between the leaves of a bush) for it mostly hides his boyish uncertainty. The tangle of his hair across his muddied cheek, the twist and hang of leaves and vines and flowers that wrap about his crown of golden tines. He blinks and then braver, braver grins at the pretty girl a murmurs, low, like the man he if growing into, “I am just Leonidas.” A boy of Time. An orphan of the woods.


@Roselin
“Speaking.”

credits