He tries not to think about what he’s doing, as he rummages through a near-empty store-room not far from the kitchens in the bowels of the castle. Of course he fails. Lysander is not yet so far from himself, so distant from the ichor in his blood and the centuries behind his eyes, that he doesn’t consider like a scholar each decision he makes.

It is not just unlike him to be helping this gods-delivered gopher. It is antithetical to the man that he had been - a cool observer, fully and cheerfully removed from the endless, futile dealings of mortals.

Florentine might laugh at him, were she not lying with bandaged body and broken memories in a water-logged tree in a flooded swamp.

This is enough to sober his errant thoughts. He sweeps from the castle again with a few bits of valerian root, a handful of precious alfalfa. All the city’s stores were low; he knows Terrastella would yield few replacements in the weeks to come, especially with winter on their heels like a hungry dog.

He finds them easily, given the crowd gathered around them, the golden shimmer of the beast, the pale pegasus. Lysander pulls the plants from a satchel at his side, mixes the sweet-smelling grass with the bitter root, and sets it before the oversized rodent. His gleaming, green-eyed gaze never leaves the bedraggled creature, and he nods for it to eat as he speaks to the group.

“This will ease him to sleep. Then we can check him for injuries and see what else needs to be done.”

He wonders what Isra might have done; better than him, he is sure. He wonders if he should ask the gopher if it could speak - stranger things were happening around them.

In the end he does none of these things, only watches the animal with an unsettling intensity, and wonders what any of them thought they were doing, playing along with the gods’ games.

you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night