He does not see her fall behind him like a dreadful star, come to bring ruin and light.
He has been hunted before and he knew it, then – knew the pairs of eyes that rested on him, their drunken, jealous weight. But Lysander does not feel the weight of these eyes, eyes that have seen the end of a hundred thousand lives. If he did, oh, would he know to be afraid?
But there is no room for fear in him as the bust of Vespera lies cracked on the floor. It is no god now, nothing but cleaven stone. Reparable, but there would always be a sign of its breaking.
At first there is only the sound of his breathing in the almost-silence, deep pulls of stale air from a holy place long empty. And then there is a new sound. A susurrus like the sigh of the sea. At first he thinks it is only the wind, but there is no wind; and when a breeze does come, it brings him the truth. A partial truth, at least: the smell of brine, the smell of dead and rotting things long beneath the waves.
As the once-god turns around, a strip of hair rises down his back, the only warning his mortal body can give him.
Then his eyes fall on the unholy thing that stands just inside the entryway.
There is a halo of light around her like the moon on the waves and is seems to him that she should be dripping seawater, that her wings and the wolf’s-gleam of her eyes should be weeping it. The taste of drowning is thick on his tongue and he searches his centuries of memory for something like her in all the gods and monsters he has known.
Lysander comes up empty.
She is nothing like the kelpies he had talked with Indra of; she is nothing he can name but monster.
The temple was made for horses and one wall is nothing but columns, but she stands before that wall and the shadow of her joins the other shadows that stripe the floor, reaching for his cloven feet. Lysander does not take his green eyes from her, but he bows his head, angling the bloody bone of his antlers at the creature before him. Still his rage seethes inside him, foreign anger prickling in his blood-bright veins; it feels a little like intoxication.
Perhaps that is why he is not yet afraid, drunk on two kinds of madness.
“Come to worship?” The words unfurl for her like leaves, soft and dark, and he angles his head so that the moonlight slants in, revealing his grin.
Maybe this is the gods’ punishment, and maybe that is why he welcomes it.
we wake with bright eyes now
@Wormlust
