I am not like any ordinary world
He does not know why he stops her.
He does not know.
The rending part of his soul, the piece that belongs within the bramble-trapped creature, cries out like shattering metal. Leonidas is crashing, he is crumpling up within him. The air is pushed like a blow out of his lungs.
If it were any other creature, he would have saved it. As he looks up to her eyes that douse him in the red of her righteous fury, the pegasus knows he should be trying to save his bonded. There is no raging within him. There is no blind fury like that which pushes her to save, to save, to save.
The girl smiles when he flinches. Each glint of a bone-white tooth is a dance of delight about the bonfire of his pain. She is beautiful as she mocks him with her immortal white and perishable red. The pegasus does not meet the unicorn’s smile with one of his own as they stand at odds within the bowels of the forest’s belly; the god-belly as she thinks of it.
He is of a once-god and those genes, stirred up with his magic have turned him immortal too... but he has never felt more mortal than she makes him now with that smile, with that tail blade she presses into his throat. It is not the touch of a girl seeking to turn his body into art. It is the press of a girl seeking to turn a boy into an example of righteous punishment.
It is odd, how in the most serious moments, the most insignificant moments rise up in sharp relief. She scolds him - as so many girls have done. He does not shy from her as he has done from girls before. He does not cry out with childish rage as he has before. But he does think how he should have said, please. The wild-wood boy thinks how his uncle has schooled him in politeness. How Aspara told him not to steal. Yet none of it comes easily to a boy who has lived his whole life alone and, therefore, only for himself.
Her gaze drowns him in rich red wine. It swallows him down until all his gold is gone. She steps nearer and he sinks only deeper. Though he stands, still and immovable. His bonded is silent. The tragedy is that the boy has forgotten its name. He holds her gaze as she chastises him again. This time he does not flinch and does not lower his gaze to let it run along the ivory of her teeth. But the boy thinks, if he did, it would sound like rain upon parched earth, an adagio of death and life. She is soft and wicked all at once.
How long ago had he made the link? How long ago had the boy realised that he has met her sister too? The girls, two halves of a penny, each one bearing a tongue that has sworn his death. He and she are not too dissimilar, Leonidas thinks, as her magic lifts flowers from the earth. They rise as serpents beneath the music of her magic and curl sweet and soft and beautiful about her feet. But the pegasus does not yield like her flowers. He stands before her as proud as a stag but one with eyes so deep, so sorrowful, so filled with aching as she is with rage. They are two seas meeting, his gaze and hers. Red wine spilling, mixing with ichor.
Behind him, about his wounded creature, the gripping vines begin to die. They wilt and shrivel, growing soft, falling away. Leonidas’ magic reaches out beyond the shrub and the cub it violently cradles with thorn and strangling root. Time feels like wind about them, breathing across their cheeks, pushing existence to its limit, urging it faster, faster. His hair, her hair, together they grow; 6 months’ length within a moment.
Then it stops.
It all stops, except the way he watches her, sad, broken, but unyielding. “My death belongs to your sister alone.” Leonidas says softly at last, a whisper into the small space she has left between them. The rumble of his adult voice vibrating her blade in a low hum.
She makes him a thief again, stealing a piece of her aching pain as he turns from her, hoping it will break through the numbness that has settled in his broken soul. He might know the numbness is there so he does not feel how it lies thin as ice across a chasm, a chasm filled with sorrow and despair and a pain so blisteringly bright he set the world alight with it.
But he gives her a taste of his pain when he murmurs so softly that it is a blessing she stands so close, just near enough to catch the lament, “How would you feel if your parents were trapped in another world… if your twin got lost and with her your soul-bonded...” And he knows what it is to be curled rib to rib and limb-tangled with a twin, as he looks to his cub he wonders if it, too, feels the loss of its twin. “I have searched for them every day.”
And as Leonidas looks to the cub, he wonders why it is not joy he feels, but despair. The ice is breaking upon that black chasm of depthless, deathless grief.
@Danae
