There is nothing he says with words when she speaks of learning together, but with the angle of his head, with the look in his green eyes, he says yes. He says we will. And if she had given voice to that other thought – that suffering-thought – well, Lysander would have agreed then, too.

For the careless, for the cruel and cold, there was no suffering. Certainly he had never suffered before – though he had died and been reborn, presided over rites few could speak of, he was only acting out his endless script. Gods loved their circles, their paths, their stories told over and over again, and little could reach them in places so well worn.

When the first cool slip of birch touches him, smooth pale bark to bloody skin, Lysander closes his eyes. It tickles a little; it hurts a little as pressure is applied to keep it tight, but it is only a ghost of pain compared to yesterday’s, and that only a memory to the day before.

Oh, how greedy he is, to take up so much of her time, her healing. Her stories.

It is easier, with his eyes shut tight, to turn his breathing into something steady as the sea, and focus only on that and her words. Everything is dark – no shapes behind his eyelids, no light to betray them – and he might be floating in a place before the world. Perhaps he is; perhaps Isra is calling it into being around them, the way some said a god once did. Who is to say whether her world isn’t true, and spun out even now on a spider’s web?

And so he breathes, and tries to keep his skin from shivering and twitching, and lets every word soak into the thirsty soil of his soul. He has eaten nothing since fleeing from that temple beneath the evening, but he is hungry only for each sentence, each phrase she speaks. The shape of the story takes shape in his heart as Isra binds him together.

He feels the wound as at last it is covered. He opens his eyes as she ties off the bow – and is glad, so glad that he did, for he catches the last of that meteor-smile. Lulled by the story, the once-god sighs like a boy at her kiss. Once more he is surprised by how quickly time has fled, as though her words have moved the wheel of it. When he looks at her, he sees the moment the scales along her belly go from blue-silver to blue-gold in the changing light.

But surely that was only his imagination, a starving wondrous beast woken by her tale.

Lysander smiles at her parting words, laughs at the way she’s withheld the ending from him; his teeth are as pale as birch bark in the gathering light and his lips curl the same way. “You are clever, Isra,” he says, and like a secret told she is gone.

“I’ll see you again, friend,” he calls after her, and his words are rich gold in the dawn, though he isn’t sure she is near enough to hear. Maybe only the last of the night-insects heard him, maybe only the owls winging back to their nests, maybe only the wind.

And then Lysander stretches, to test his newmade bandage, and shakes his head in wonder and gratitude at how well it holds. His antlers make neat pale arcs in the newborn morning, and he starts again through the still forest.

It is a last lingering effect of the storyteller’s particular magic that he does not think at all of monsters and hunters as he makes his slow way back to Terrastella and Florentine.

and found the spirit that I crave

@Isra <3 thank you for another lovely thread