Time slips away from him much the same way his blood does – steadily at first, then more erratically, little pieces of himself he can never put back.
When he escaped from the Eater it had been just after dusk, as the stars were just beginning to burn through the skin of the sky; after that, beneath the darkness of the trees, he only knows he walks until his lungs burn and muscles ache like dying. There is no time beneath the canopy, only darkness, only crickets and cicadas and the terrain beginning to climb up and up and turn rocky.
Fear drives him on where exhaustion would have him stop. She will not hunt him here, he thinks, not where the branches are close as secrets and the stars only a legend. Even so he keeps walking, like any wounded thing going to water.
Morning creeps up on him, damp as tears with silver fog, and the trees begin to turn to conifers, filling the world with their sharp clean scent of spruce and pine. Lysander isn’t sure where he is, only that he has never been here before, and that he is still not ready to leave the cover of the trees, not when he can still smell his own blood (and hers, bitter and darkened to black on his bright skin).
His second brush with death has altered him in a way he can’t yet untangle from the dark snarl of his thoughts. It has made him more mortal than anything yet, a hateful, fearful thing, and there is no victory for Lysander in the fact that he escaped. And oh, he is so weary – each lichen-green boulder looks a pillow, each faint breeze a whisper to sleep.
And so, at last, he gives in – for he is only flesh and blood, and losing the latter fast.
Swathed in morning mist he bends like a stag to the forest floor beneath a towering pine. The bark is rough against his back, the needles soft beneath his knees, and he cannot see the sky overhead.
Exhausted, still bleeding from tattered ribs, he lets the current of sleep carry him away.
and I know this is a weakness
@Isra
