Darkness fell silent and thick. It might have been the first time she didn’t watch the sky as day tumbled into night with a sky full of bruises.
 
Flora’s heart is a slow, slow beat within her chest. The music pushes her and pulls. It drifts, light and enchanting, from the stage and slips through the crowds that press and sway together like grasses in a meadow.
 
Children run by her, sticky sweet and breathless with joy. Florentine watches them go. A part of her timeless soul, the part not yet fully grown, is tugged and pulled loose by their smiles. It is a flag upon a pole, pulled by the winds of childish abandon.
 
Florentine thinks of Raymond, of Calliope who have found their way from the Riftlands to here. It was only ever supposed to be Florentine’s mistake, but the Rift magic was a wily thing. It heeded Fate not at all. It had no need for Gods. Rift was its own master and a chaotic blend of magic and time.
 
Their presence here was warming and yet to look at them was to feel a blade in her heart. A part of her has waited, has woken each morning waiting, wondering if her parents too might find their way from the Rift… But they don’t.
 
The Riftlands are ending.
 
Lysander, Lysander.
 
All at once, Florentine is no longer a slow, serene stream meandering through the crowds. Instead she turns into the rush of a river approaching rapids. She weaves faster through the crowds with eyes that search and look and peer beyond the crowds.
 
She said he would tell her more and he told her he would, if she kept him alive. Florentine had, with blood upon her skin and a jagged piece of a dagger pulled from behind his ribs. She had tied that boy more firmly to the earth, to mortality.
 
Anger bubbles within her, it urges her steady heart to beat faster, faster. She pushed through the crowds like water through rapids and stops only when she sees a glint of antlers.
 
She breaks from the masses like an electron from an atom. There is no part of her that does not stalk. Those eyes of amethyst and tiger orange do not stray from him. Of course she would find him here, upon the fringes of the festival, watching. Always watching.
 
Every time Florentine turns to him, he is watching, from the edges, the corners. Always he is relaxed, drinking in the world as though it is whiskey from a crystal glass.
 
Florentine might have been hesitant in her approach had she known the gods of Ravos her brother told her of, included Lysander. Maybe she would have stood and regarded him, wondering where the darkness lay in him, like a pot of ink waiting to be dipped. Ah, but wasn’t Florentine just as likely to be the girl to hold the feathered quill and draw carelessly upon her skin with that black, black ink?
 
For once she does not go to him, does not start their encounter with a touch. It feels strange to stand away from him, but she does, for this moment. “You owe me, Lysander.” His anthousai breathes. But it is not his life she wants payback for, it would never be that. His life was a gift she would forever give him, if she could. Florentine is not selfish, but she is about losing her flower boy.
 
“Why did you come to Novus?” The fae girl asks and steps towards him. There is more than one answer that might please her, but many, many more that would leave her unsatisfied. Yet, above all, she simply wants to know. It is her time to know.

@Lysander

FLORENTINE

-- ♕ --

That anger, it is needle pricks along her golden skin. It is hot acid in her stomach. Florentine has learned to wear her anger well, but it will never fit her comfortably. She is glorious in the throes of this ill-fitting feeling, but it rubs her, it chafes her.
 
In amethyst the flower girl drinks in the way he watches her, as calm as ever – she never expected anything else from this fellow boy of hidden worlds and eternal mysteries.
 
Was there anything about her that surprised Lysander now? She surprised herself often, so very often.
 
So caught up in his unwavering gaze, his utter knowing, the flower girl does not notice the way the crowds biblically part for her.
 
Lysander turns to her, full of calm readiness and she wonders how long he might have known she was there. Did he know she would come before the thought had even formed in the secrets of her mind? Flora thought she was unpredictable. He makes her think again.
 
It is warm awareness that sweeps over her as sunlight warms the earth. No one has ever looked unsurprised by her and she blinks away her wonder. She begins to open herself to the thought that someone might know her better than she knows herself.
 
But his deference throws her ears to her skull and her chin toward the sky. It is a sharp rejection. Any other day she might have met him with a smile, with a smile that turned shy but pleased. This afternoon she does not. She meets his smile with lips pulled down, down.
 
For many things, he agrees when she tells him that he owes her. Her chin lowers, so she no longer gazes at him from on high, but lowly, from beneath her fringe, as she always has.
 
Her flower boy had always said he was not made for love and now she thinks that she begins to see. She dares to believe he may be right. Florentine has so many questions now, of boys and their hearts’ desires.  It is not his words that make her question, but his voice. His careless tone cuts the anthousai deep, deeper than it should.  
 
It was not what she wanted to hear.
 
So many things he could have said, but he said that. Her eyes close and she holds fast. In the dark of her she thinks of the Rift, of how she looked up to him as a child. Oh she was naive then, when she imagined an adult life as nothing but simple. She didn’t understand him then either, but she is learning to now.
 
When she opens her eyes and looks to Lysander she knows that nothing was ever simple. Florentine wonders what friends she has now (ones close enough to hold her together when she cannot) they are so few and far between. This girl has loved and lost.
 
She holds herself together, then takes a step back from him and lifts her chin.
 
“And is your curiosity sated?” The world seems to vibrate, but it is only her trembling. Accusations build upon her tongue, impulse building in her muscles. He owes her so many things, but offers her none of them. His answer would be a dangerous one, but she thinks that she is ready to burn.
 
“Were you ever going to tell me about the Riftlands?” Oh small, sad voice, “my parents are there, Lysander.” And her heart shatters at the last.

---

@Lysander |    | notes: text

FLORENTINE

-- ♕ --


And is your curiosity sated? She had asked him with hurt and anger writhing like serpents through her every thread of gold. Florentine had watched him, even as she shivered, even as she quaked with turmoil and sadness.
 
The answer he will give, she already knows it will make her a martyr upon the pyres of the festival fires. He does not deny her, moving closer, stealing her space; her judge and jury (she does not know yet just how much).
 
There is only smoke between them and the air expelled from their lungs. He has stolen everything else, but her eyes gleam firefly bright. She is gold, buried in the dark of his mahogany skin.
 
If she were any other girl, Flora might have leant back as he pressed in upon her. She doesn’t, though her muzzle pulls in toward her chest.
 
Never. Ah, Florentine had known to be wary of his answer. She had known it would bring her to her knees, but she did not think it would be this way. Feline, she had waited for his answer, ready to seize it with sharp teeth and justify her anger.
 
It does not burn her, but rather it was the spark and she the match. He lights her up, electric and so full of fire. Her gaze is fervent amethyst glittering in the dark of a cave. A thrill slips like electricity through her nerves, the air between them crackling where they do not touch but stand so close. She begins to smile, knowing, feeling, relating. Florentine knows what it is to never have her curiosity sated, to strive for more, always.
 
Ah, she begins to reach for him, as he to her, a moth for the flame he holds. Her hurt is forgotten, replaced by a traitorous thrill. But Lysander never touches her. He stops close enough to touch, yet still as far from her as the stars in the sky. With soft, deft words, he rouses her from the heady drug of such a thrill.
 
That is when she remembers her anger, though with that look, with those words, he douses her with ice.
 
He steals the words from her tongue and the breath from her lungs; Florentine lets her flower boy take them all.
 
She opens her eyes, her tenacity retuning, seeping along her limbs. Her ears fall back as feline fury melds with a rabbit’s hurt. Lysander undoes her with words and Florentine no longer knows who she is in the wake of his damning questions.
 
“Yes!” She breathes at last, all fierce fire. She leans into whatever space is left between them. “In any of those times, in all of them you should have told me!” Flora’s sad eyes close, even as she relishes their proximity, dragging in the scent of him, the familiarity. Oh how his anthousai wants to hate him, but a part of him is Home to her.
 
Lysander once told her he had never been in love but this was different – was it not? “Have you never loved anything enough to want to bend everything for them? To want to know at the first instance if they are in trouble and keep them, even a second longer than existence will allow you?” Florentine asks of him. Each word is an explosion, each one rips from her tongue, dragging a piece of her soul out with it. There is something dangerous within her questions, something powerful and consuming and darker than she has ever known.
 
So, when he speaks again, his every word a mirror he holds up to her. He delves deeper in the dark of her than any have ventured before and the anthousai reels with what he finds. Realisation is a cold, fetid shiver down her slender spine and needles through her heart. Reichenbach might have pulled apart her heart, but Lysander so deftly breaks open the rest of her. There is no part he leaves unexposed with his words.
 
Petals fall in disarray; she has no answer for him. Softly, gently, he has exposed her contrary heart. His voice is a a cool balm across her fevered skin. She might have naively wished for her sins to end there, but they run deeper still.
 
Her flower boy’s revelation that he followed her here, ah what a thrill it is. How long had she hoped he might have come for her? It was there even that first day, when she still loved Reichenbach (though their love was already threadbare and breaking). It is a terrible, contrary girl who stands before this fallen god and still hopes he came for her and not to tell her of the Rift.
 
Though her every folly lies between them, she tips up her gaze to his, prepared to walk naked before his judgement. “I came because I was curious.” And she pushes his words back at him (though they are true) as she dares to keep her eyes on his – where she might fall, where she dares to ground herself in his earthen gaze. “I was trapped as Novus stole my magic.’ Florentine need not tell him, But it is restored now. So she takes a breath, solemn and heavy, “In one timeline I will have gone back to them.” Of that she is sure. But she curls into herself and away from Lysander as her shame crowds in like shadows from the deep.
 
“I could go at any time to change the past, then return here, to the moment I left, before even a second passes.” Her gaze holds his, her brutal truth cutting like a knife between them. “I haven’t wanted to go back, Lysander,” Such a small voice it is that reveals the Dusk girl’s deepest sin yet.
 
“I challenge you about love, but wont even go back to save my parents.” Florentine concedes, her blade as quiet as the dead.

---

@Lysander |    | notes: text

Oh, each time he thinks she could be a god (such a god to make Time itself tremble) she reminds him how very human she is. How each feeling flickers across her face, visible as heat lightning on the horizon, written for the world to read. Does she hide at all, or is it only for him she lays herself so bare?

She thinks he takes from her; how wrong she is. Not even a god could take the shine of her eyes, flecks of citrine amid their amethyst. No god could hope to steal the timbre of her voice, or seize the particular shape her mouth made in a smile or a frown.

Florentine belongs to herself. It is one of the many things that draws him to her. There is no lie in her fire and like any twisted midnight creature that makes its haunt far beyond the borders of town it pulls him in.

As if to prove him correct, he watches, rapt, as her fervent gaze (a kind of look he’s seen before, in his years and in his worlds, but oh, never for him) flickers back to anger.

Lysander knows he shouldn’t smile, but the little delights of the party have made him sleepy-slow, a contended cat, and so he does into the shadows they make between them even as she scolds him. It does not last; when she continues, each word spoken so close he can nearly feel the vibration of them from the air, each little breath that comes with them, it fades from his face.

He has not, he has never – to love in such a way was not for the likes of him. Such a truth has never rested so uneasy in his mind, before, and the first thing that rises to his tongue is not yet. But he keeps it safe behind his teeth.

“And you have the ability to bend it – are you a god, Florentine, to choose who to save, and what to change?” The words are cruel but his tone is soft and wondering, his muzzle a hair’s-breadth from her own. Of course she smells of flowers and festival smoke, but below that – oh, below that is the cloying scent of magic, vital and wild, and the metallic scent of her dagger. Does it remember the taste, the color, of his blood?

Petals drift around them, but Lysander is so still, a marble statue of a man. Each arc of smooth bone antler, each curl of dark hair waits for her to speak. He stands like a juror, he waits like a defendant, but the once-god is neither. What he is, as he waits for her gaze to tip up to his – well, for once he doesn’t know.

Curiosity, such a quiet little temptation. If there were no gods but words and wants he thinks that it would be his; certainly he has followed it long enough. And to hear her say it (even though he knew it already, for he has watched her, and known her, and she has let him) unfurls something cool and pleased within him. It is a dark vine that opens up and oh, he wonders what fruit it will bear.

This time, as she speaks, he says nothing in response; he only listens as she works out the things that weigh on her heart until she is silent.

And then he at last closes the final distance between them, and presses his lips to the gold plane of her cheek.

“I cannot give you absolution, Flora. But neither do I think you need it.” It has never been for Lysander to forgive sins, not when he has never hesitated to commit his own (not when he does not believe in them at all). It would be easy, then, to stay with his skin against hers like this, or perhaps move his muzzle to the curve of her neck, or rest his chin across her withers. She is as warm as she is gold, and though it is late summer, the night is cooling fast.

But Lysander leans away with almost a shrug, and slants his gaze at her, now languid as a cat’s.

“If you think it is right to go back and do what you can to save those you love, then I’ve no doubt that you will do it. But I wonder, now that you know, what you will do in the meantime.”

we wake with bright eyes now

FLORENTINE

-- ♕ --


She knows now that there is no emotion he cannot make her feel. She stands both tall and small beneath his scrutiny and thinks that she has learned to much about him. And yet he tells her nothing at all.
 
Her eyes blink slow, slow as she watches him. They blink slower still as she regrets all that she has confessed to him and hopes that he might hide her every transgression.
 
There is no part of him she does not watch and she might wonder when she ever came to watch him so, except that this has always been their way. In the dark chasm of a leviathan’s skull she watched this boy (through a child’s eyes who knew so little but believed everything was hers to know). Beneath a sky of satin and stars, upon a sea of glass she danced and watched him until the faded into into nothingness.
 
Now she looks and sees him again. Oh she recognizes his every inch in her shame and in her joy. He is so steady beneath her gaze, her rock to which she clings. But Lysander is too steady; he holds himself too fast. His secrets are his own but oh she wants him shaken free and as loose as she. She wants his secrets as her own, for she is greedy and she is keen.
 
Florentine is in too deep and she does not even recognize the smile that curls her lips when he offers her no absolution but rather gives her everything else.
 
Are you a god? He had asked her earlier and that is all Florentine still hears. Even as she laughs, even as she leans away as though she is not worthy. May gods rise between them and smite her for her refusal to love them and worship at their dusty altars! “I am no god, Lysander.” She says as his lips press upon her cheek, as her skin thrums for his proximity. “If I were a god I would not have cried over your broken body but healed you as one could.” Her laughter is gone, her smile fled too. “I do not worship gods, but if there had been one able to save you, I might have been tempted.”
 
She sways as he leaves her and feels the thrum of something other.  He pulls back, but does he know he only pulls her in? She moves like a magnet beneath the allure of him. Yet her gaze is not for him, it is for the festival that thrums around them.
 
What would she do in the meantime, if she will not go back now and save the ones she loves? This girl stands, selfish and gold and full of a magic she will not use. Her eyes sway to Lysander. They are waters running in to pull him down into the deep of her. Oh she had heard of kelpies pulling their prey into the depths. As she looks back to Lysander she wonders just who hunts who.
 
Florentine leans into her flower boy, lets her body rest against his as she never has (but has a thousand times before and a thousand more to come). She lifts her face to hide in the curve of his jaw and there her selfishness does not end.  For there she seizes fate fiercely and whispers, “Make you stay with me.”

---

@Lysander |    | notes: so um... yeah. o.o

Her laugh is a balm to his ears, a ringing bell, a reminder that however swiftly she is torn between emotions it is always this merriness, this joy she returns to. It is a spring below the surface of her heart and it nourishes them both.

But still on his mind, so recent the sweet-sorrow of it clings to him yet, is his conversation with the storyteller. Of love and wanting and freedom – of regret. The unicorn with the drowning ocean in her eyes had reminded him of a wish he’d made, a long time ago, for a little girl of gold with flowers in her hair.

He’d wished then only for her happiness – he’d given no thought to his own. And now…?

So strange it is, to talk of gods and remember his body, broken, weeping blood. A fear thicker, more sour than that blood heavy on his mind and on his tongue. Surely that is the furthest he’s ever been from being a god – yet he feels further still now.

“You saved me,” he chides softly, “which you only just reminded me of.” Owing he thinks, all the things he owes her – not once but twice has she saved him with her dagger, there on bloody sheets and again when he followed her from the riftlands in the first place.

And she – she owes him nothing at all, and yet she gives and gives. Does she know it? Does she realize each word, each look, each laugh is its own little gift? She is teaching him, in each moment, how to live. Not as a god, but as a man.

Lysander is rarely surprised, but she surprises him when she tucks her side against his, when she fits her shoulder behind his own and her hip to the smooth golden rise of his. It is not the first time they have touched – it is not the most intimate (that, of course, would be the touch of silver dagger to torn skin, iron of blade to iron of blood), but it feels like both.

And it feels, too, a little like home. Like a foregone conclusion, a thing that they have done before, will do again, another dance through the looping endless wheels of time.

Her whisper is so faint, so soft, but she is near enough he could never miss it. She is too close, even, to see him smile in response, but maybe she feels it in the way his body shifts against hers, making room.

“I have little choice,” he answers, and his tone, his eyes, the dark corners of his mouth are all laughing. But he is quick to continue, lest his words wound where they were not meant to, and slow to quietly wonder at the way their bodies fit, the downy-soft of her feathers against his side. “But if I did I would still stay.”

It is as close as he can get to a truth that has not yet revealed itself, even to him. But oh, it is beginning to.

we wake with bright eyes now

@Florentine

FLORENTINE

-- ♕ --


He chides her, but this contrary girl only smiles. “I did,” Florentine says with a smile, with a shrug as careless as his own. It is clear she has spent too much time watching him and pondering all that he is, for that shrug is a mirror of Lysander’s. It is an honour that she studies him so but it may be their curse too…
 
Though the din of the festival is a loud and vibrant backdrop, the girl peers up at him as if he is the only thing in Delumine. None of it seems to matter any more. Not even the music can bring her limbs to desire dance. They are still – oh they are full of energy, brilliant and restless, but it is not to dance. No, Florentine’s body thrums with something else: a music that is  both wonderful and terrifying. Ah, she shivers into his side.
 
Up, up from beneath the thick of her fringe she gazes; she is forever looking up to Lysander. “But I also saved you with only a moment to spare.” Her lips pull down, “A god might have been able to save you faster.” A grim memory seeps like blood between them. The anthousai knows her dagger still remembers the taste of his blood and she wonders of the difference between blood and the essence between worlds. But Florentine need not wonder, for her dagger already knows: there is no difference.
 
He does not move as she fits herself against him. Neither does she when at last he does, if only to make space for her there. Fate binds them (as it always has) with heartstrings and the gossamer of eternal souls. Though she thinks of this embrace as home, like he, she does not say so. Instead she lets it be known in the way she leans against him, as if he might be the only thing that could ever keep her from stumbling.
 
His answer is a rumble through his bones, it vibrates through his jaw and where her nose touches it. Her lips twitch with the sensation and her skull tilts her cheek pressing where her nose once was. Her laughter rings like a bell for she has no space in her to be offended. Not this night, when she too is so filled with the false courage of liquor and adrenaline.
 
“Good.” She hums into the intimate space between them. She speaks before he can finish, “You are learning.” Her smile is wicked and playful. If they speak of gods then she is surely the jester who weaves time for her own devices and makes everything her playground. Except Lysander. Oh, she is forever chasing him.
 
Her voice as light as air as she tells him, “I wouldn’t let you slide away from me, even in death.” And it does not feel new, but like an old warning; a reminder he should heed. Then, more seriously, Flora withdraws from her place beneath his jaw. She turns to better watch him, to better know his expression - and he hers, of course. “I am not ready to find you again. Not yet.” She takes a breath, leaning in to the space she made between them, and there drinks him in. ah she is drunk of alchol but it is nothing compared to the way her flower boy intoxicates her. She is drunk on liquor, festival joy and love.
 
Her smile fades with such revelation and she stands up straighter, if only to keep from leaning in. All at once it is not a game, it is not the simple love she thought it was.
 
Florentine has always been a selfish girl, but wonders then if he might be the thing she is most selfish over. Yet he is the only one she has been able to share her life in new worlds with, over and over. She loves him a little more for that too.
 
She could be shy, yes. She could retreat into herself and hide from this fresh revelation. Yet she does not, again she smiles and pulls away from him, peering out at the stalls before them. “I am not done with paint.” She muses to him lightly. “Will you come and help me decide on a design?” Her eyes return to him as she leads him forward, each step an ache she cannot evade.

---

@Lysander |   

“I would not have changed it. A moment was all that was needed.” He smiles then, a secret, sly thing, and is glad she does not see it. Lysander is not ready to answer when she asks him why he smiles. “Besides, gods are insufferable. I wouldn’t wish to be saved by one.” Florentine, he knows, is much more pleasant to owe.

The gods preferred their debts paid in blood and worship, and there was only one creature he is willing to give either to.

She leans against him, bright gold against his darker bronze, and he wonders if his body has ever been used this way. For a moment he thinks back, back, sorting through Novus and the Rift and Ravos, too, and Lysander comes up empty.

He wonders if he had been lonely. He wonders why their embrace now feels as though it has been done a hundred, a thousand times. (His world is still a linear thing, so why does he close his eyes and smell starglass? Why does the music seem to be swallowed up by a sky where shifting things pass from darkness to darkness? Why does he want to cast off his shoes and dance?)

Oh, she is as full of mysteries as he. He would spend an eternity untangling them.

And so he smiles back when she says good, and he makes to touch that wicked smile. There is something sorry in him when she pulls away, something strange, something that misses her.

Lysander thinks that it is a more frightening feeling than dying.

“I’ll try not to die,” he vows, still smiling. “I’ll stay away from kings and kirins, just in case. You’ve too many responsibilities to make me one.”

Her smile fades and he thinks, stay. How many expressions has she given him to read, a book he’d know blind? Ah, but Lysander misreads her now. He thinks her worried again by talk of death, unhappy with mention of kings. But in the space of a heartbeat her smile is there again, new gold, and he settles once more.

I am not done with paint, she claims, and he arches a brow at her. Someone had begun the task of painting her – there are blue whorls and rose stripes, designs that might mark her ready for war were they not in such soft colors. “No?” he asks, half-laughing, but of course he follows her (will always follow her). “We’ll see what we can add, then, if I can find the space.” As if searching for a spot, his new-leaf gaze drifts over the curve of her neck, the line of her back, her sloping shoulders and whisper-soft wings.

He drives it down, down, down, this bright-dark twist of hope-fear-want. “Maybe I’ll let you paint me, too,” he says, and is relieved that his voice does not betray him. It is steady-cool as he follows her on.

She is the only gold he’s ever treasured, and how terrifying a thing that is.

we wake with bright eyes now

@Florentine uh oh. closing here, <3 as always