This keening soul;
Light is fading. The rise of the tree before them is tall and overbearing. It arches over the duo with gnarled shadow fingers that she feels creeping their cool touch along her skin.
But was the darkness really there, or is it the line of Asterion’s lips? Is it the presence of death looming thicker than darkness and more inevitable than the rising of the sun? She named it and it comes, obediently to watch her, to watch him.
Death creeps along her spine, knock, knock, knocking like the Witch Doctor’s horn over each of her vertebrae. She feels its song humming, vibrating within her bones, she feels it lacing through her veins. It’s grip grows as vines around her heart wild and thorned and as ready as a constrictor to tie tight. She takes a breath, it trembles in her mouth, it stutters in her lungs and her chest aches as she makes it bloom out, out, out. Her chest flutters with fireflies enough to challenge the ones that bring the flurry of unspoken questions to his lips.
Though the dark is softer, though it smudges with shadows and sweeps light away with the grimness of her revelation, Asterion’s softness is gone. He is sharper, the grim line of his lips pressed like razor wire against her confession. She longs to lean into it, with silver eyes blazing, with a wicked desire to see it her tether to fate may snap. Might that draw of his lips save her? Might a king have power enough to save his subject? She would hope for anything since all she had were the backs of her Ilati brethren for comfort. Each turning away from her for they say fate is binding and it will come for her, however she may try to change it.
“I won’t be afraid,” Leto whispers and hopes she means every syllable of it. She picks up a stone wet from the earth, covered in moss. She presses it into the tree, she carves her own morbid fate into the flesh of the bark. The tree groans with the afternoon wind, the leaves laugh with Fate’s coarse mockery yet she stands brave and bold and looks upon her new sigil and wonders how it is beautiful when all it heralds is her demise in salt and water.
Then she turns and with the stone, smears green moss upon Asterion’s shoulder. Her salvation is told upon his skin in curves and lines and when the moss is upon his skin and no longer the stone, Leto finishes the rune in mud.
She smiles as he speaks and she does not lift her eyes from the rune. Ah it is a sad smile, it is the earth weeping, it is stars shedding like tears from the sky. Oh she would burn death from her veins with starfire if she could. Like a twinkling star growing brighter, larger, turning itself into a blazing sun that reaches and burns and swallows all around it, so her smile grows into something fierce, something full of vitriol and yet as softly sad as a moaning winter wind.
“I need the sea.” She says with irony and laugh pouring like bitter wine from her ebony lips. Her lips wear a smile sadder than sad and as lost as a north wind full of Saharan sand. Her bells, as she moves, resound through the trees and sound like weeping. She hears the crying as if it were her own, and oh what self-hatred soars through her like acid.
Still her eyes have not lifted from the rune she painted upon him. Not even as he says he will teach her dos she lift her gaze from the rune upon his skin. But then the star-fire girl is laughing. Oh how she is laughing! What irony it is that this boy, this man, this king, is adorned in stars and bears control over water when Leto is forged of stars that have blessed her with a magic enough to kill her, were the sea not there to stop it from consuming her with white-hot star-fire. Asterion commands water and water will kill her, one day.
He hates him. Oh how she hates him! Leto has never needed anyone: she is her own help, always.
Never. Never has she feared her death and never should she.
But…
She has painted Asterion as her salvation and she does not tell him what weight the rune has, what heavy hopes (enough to cripple him, enough to cripple her) it carries. Leto ties her lips shut with the thread of selfishness and flinches with every prick of the needle.
This girl should be brave, she should stand like the earth’s cliffs: defiant before the sea. She should not fear death, she should not want to fall to her knees and beg a boy to save her. But she does, as she shudders and moves closer and as she did upon the tree, whispers “thank you,” upon his skin, upon his rune.
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: loooooong
