"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
He had not seen her, Mazikeen.
Because he had let the curious pressure in his chest chase him out of Hyaline.
(How strange that it seemed to ease the closer he got to the forest and then, when he’d crossed into the shadows of those great trees, it had gone altogether.)
And this is for the best because the sight of her surely would have taken him to his knees. (Would he have had the strength to get up again? Surely someone so young could not watch a friend die twice.)
There is comfort in the forest’s crushing darkness because it is the darkness he is most accustomed to. He was born in the darkness, created there. It was in the darkness that he learned how to navigate the terrain in Hyaline, learned how to make himself scarce. (This is a task made all the more difficult now by the way the deep, glacial crevasses in his skin glow bright blue now.)
He is not a thing that begs to be unseen now. No, he is something of a beacon, Selaphiel, as he moves slowly through the forest and wonders if perhaps today will be the day that he teaches himself to fly. (No, no, the canopy overhead is thick, crowded, hardly any light gets through. One cannot learn to fly in the forest.)
He is not a coltish thing anymore. He has grown into himself, the wings. There is nothing childish left in him. To the children, he must look like the rest of the adults and he is grateful for this because he never felt like a child himself. Always too solemn, too serious.
Especially now, as he moves through the forest, trying so hard not to smell death here.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
It is a glow, bright like a star within the lovely deep, dark of the woods that captures Leoniidas’ golden eyes. It moves like mist, no - he thinks - like a phantom. This light, this soft glow of winter, has form. Slow, slow and feline the other-world boy slinks closer to this new light.
Ah, it is a boy, not much younger than Leonidas. They are opposites, one boy sculpted of winter ice and the other, the heat of the earth, the gold of a brilliant sun. Already this wood is becoming familiar, the great cathedral trees echoing hymns and lamentations of magic and peril that he has come to recognise and know. They make his bones hum as roots and leaves, flowers and vines tangle themselves into the crown of his gilded antlers.
It is fitting, Leo thinks, that a boy with a halo should be here in this cathedral place where leaves are stone floors, trees are pillars, glens are cloisters and boughs the vaulted ceiling. Yet, despite light tumbling through stained glass leaves to dance upon the pale skin of the ice angel boy, there is something darker, wilder, unholy. Icicles hang from that wide halo like the foliage hangs from the tines of Leoniidas’ antlers.
Slowly, silent as wild cat, watching, watching and steady as a stag with the proud arch of his muscling neck, the otherworld boy steps out before the other. He stands in a pool of emerald light and like fingers his gilded eyes trail the cracks of the boy’s skin. Dustmotes tumble slow, slow and slower still, caught in the rare pool of light this deep, dark wood offers.
“Are you cold?” Leoniidas murmurs, low, low, low. The avian tilt of his head is the only sign he was an orphan prince left to raise himself in the wilderness, growing up amongst the feral animals and monsters of his home world. Leo knows the settling of frost on his skin as the dawn chases away the frigid grasp of midnight - is that how this stranger boy feels with his ice skin and frozen halo?
Time slows and slows and slows until the dust motes hang around them, until the chanting whispers of leaves are lost to silence and stillness. It is easier, Leoniidas thinks, for time to be still than racing away from him, slipping through his grasp, erasing friends and families and girls he had grown to love.
He does not mind being alone, Sela, he has been alone much of his life.
(Watching from some great distance while his mother worked so diligently to keep his sister from succumbing to the darkness, sticking close to the nearest border in case someone remembered that he was not welcome in Hyaline. And then even after Mazikeen had invited him to stay, he had made himself scarce simply because the habit had become ritual.)
But there is some strange shift in his chest when a figure emerges from the shadows and does not reek of death. (Is it relief or something else entirely?) He stops short, the young angel, but he is not afraid. Even as time begins to slow around them (and, with it, his heartbeat) and Sela wonders if it is the boy’s doing or some residue left over from all that darkness.
For a long moment (made even longer by the way time stretches long and thin), the two boys simply look at each other. Selaphiel is much too solemn, you see, to ever speak unless spoken to. He does not smile at the winged boy, though they are similarly aged. He does not look at him and think that he might be a potential friend, not because they could not be friends but because there is something severely skewed about his concept of friendship to begin with. No, there is nothing for him to say at all until the darker boy asks his question and invites Sela to answer.
“I don’t know,” he offers, the only honest thing. He has only ever been one thing and it occurs to him that he has no way of knowing if it’s hot or if it’s cold. He blinks while the dust drifts through the air like snow. “How can I tell?” he asks softly.
I just bite my tongue a bit harder
@[Leoniidas] sorry for the delay the depression has been REAL
