The gods have trapped the regimes.
 
The note had been an untidy scrawl, the messenger-bird windblown and weary. But Lysander did not need the words to tell him the news; he already knew it, in the deep-dark of his heart. He’d known it since the first shudder that had rolled through the city, knocking vases from tables and rattling pictures in their frames.
 
He had not believed in the gods of this place. If they’d ever lived, he’d thought them long since faded to dust and bones and silent monuments.
 
But it seemed they were awake, and their appetites for praise were all the sharper after their long slumber. And Florentine was not made for bowing.
 
Nor were those gilded and guilty horses of the night court, though they were as hungry for it as the gods themselves, and Lysander did not like to think of the golden girl encaged with such a group. He did not, in fact, want to think at all –
 
And so instead he ran, heedless and harried through the long grasses that whispered against his legs, his sides. It was easier to run, to feel the stretch and burn of muscle and sinew and ignore the world but for the burn of his lungs and the wind in his hair.
 
It was easier because he knew even as he did it that he was helpless to do anything else.
 
 
When he arrives at the temple it is dusk, and the fireflies mirror the stars above, little guidelights in the gathering dark.
 
The building is long-abandoned, and nearly consumed by weeds. Vines trail up one side, a living wall with leaves that whisper like a secret in the breeze. Its walls, once smooth, are bleached to the color of bone and chipped and worn with time.
 
His hooves echo on the marble as he steps inside.
 
Once a place like this was a home to him, too. Now it’s with a stranger’s eye that he appraises it: a long, low offering table with withered flowers and polished stones, empty thurible with the ghost of incense drifting through the empty space.
 
A gleam in a dim corner catches his eye; a rough-hewn face, a horse head cut from stone with blank and staring eyes of marble. Lysander crosses to it slowly, his shadow slanting across the dusty floor, his antlers curved like scythes.
 
It is autumn and his antlers are once again shedding their velvet. It hangs in bloody strips, just as it had when he’d first arrived; born into blood on Novus’s soil. All the blood he’d smelled since his arrival here had been his own, salt and iron and sin.
 
Florentine had saved him before, but he can do nothing for her. He is not a man accustomed to feeling helpless. He is not a man accustomed to the kind of rage, of dark wrath, that unwinds within him as he stares at that impassive stone face in the near-black.
 
Now he leans forward, scraping first one arc of bloody bone and then the other across the statue of the god. His antlers clatter and rattle against the bust, striping it dark and wet and gruesome, and at last he steps back, grimly satisfied.
 
Vespera is a frightening, feral thing with her cheeks and eyes streaked red-black in the dim. Surely this is more in her image. 
 
Men were sinners, but men could change. Gods –
 
He thinks of the black unicorn, then, her voice acrid and black as gunpowder. Blood is to be paid in blood. He thinks of what had been written at the bottom of the summons the bird had brought to Terrastella.
 
“Go in peace,” he murmurs, and then he shoves his shoulder against the bust, harder and harder until it topples off its column to splinter on the floor with a shattering crash.
 
The temple seems to shiver and moan, but it is nothing like when the whole of the world shook as stones from the summit crumbled in.
 
Afterward, there is only silence.

we wake with bright eyes now

all welcome! come share in his blasphemy or accost him over it

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

Lysander hears the ocean there in her words.

It is not the shoreline sea, that soft susurrus like a lullaby, a thing that soothes. No; this is the truth of the waves, the deep-dark beneath and beneath that, where the light doesn’t reach. Where things are born and live and die without ever being seen because there is nothing but darkness, nothing but devour and be devoured. What waits below that word, he thinks –

Nothing but teeth and blackness.

Her laughter is nothing at all like Florentine’s. It is not a bell that rings high and clear or a brook that leaps and glints with light. It is like the crumble of the god-statue behind him, like a slick vine that wants to pull him in. He will remember that laugh tonight when he closes his eyes (if, the mortal part of his mind insists, but Lysander is still an arrogant thing in his heart-of-hearts, and he pushes the thought away).

Like a statue himself he stands, neck still arched and antlers a neat cage, still smeared bloody. They scent the air with iron like a spell against the salt of her, but he knows this is no fairytale. Later he might think of Indra, of the scars on her neck and her wry words - sometimes too close.

Now he doesn’t think at all. If there wasn’t that black rage running hot in his blood, a new bloom of heat with each beat of his heart, he might have tried to reason with her – the once-god had always enjoyed such a challenge with monsters and with men.

But he is wrathful and she is ravenous. And there is no gleam in her eye, not when she blots out the light, and Lysander’s breathing is too loud in the echoing stillness.

Yet he smiles at her promise, and scrapes a cloven hoof against the marble just to hear it ring out beneath him like a sword being drawn.

“I’ve been to that kind of rite before.” His words are rich dark earth, all fearless and full. The kind of soil where anything might grow.

Blackness falls across him as she lifts her terrible wings, and the bars of sky behind her are cut away by the veil of them. Maybe it is a blessing that he does not see her teeth.

When she steps forward he does too, and it is something like a ritual in that desecrated, holy place. Her wings blot out the autumn breeze and all he smells is rot and brine. It is easy to imagine what his bones might look like once she is finished with them: half-covered in silt, crawling with barnacles, a heathens’ kind of art. Would his bones still be holy with him no longer a god? Would they remember being cradled in ichor, not in blood?

They are so close, now, he can smell the sour sweetness of her breath. He can smell the tide on her scales, and yet he still smiles.

“It’s never as fun as it sounds,” he says, and Lysander leaps forward.

He had never been a man made for fighting, but he is tired of bleeding his own blood – here where it is so limited, so precious. Like a stag he leaps, not toward her fearsome center and waiting jaws but for the endless sail of her left wing. He will tear a hole in it if he must, with his antlers so new-sharp they are still smeared with red – even now he tosses his head for the stretch of her feathers and prays to feel the catch and pull.

With his hooves, too, he lashes out, a rear that becomes a lunge. If he had thoughts at all, they would be praying for an opening, for a split moment of daylight he might flee too – there from the plains back into the relative safety of the woods, if only he can be swift enough.

Maybe this is why men loved violence so –

Maybe their bodies craved it, remembering when there was no other option to survive.  

we wake with bright eyes now

@Wormlust

One of the great marvels of mortality is this:

The way a moment can stretch out into an eternity, a single heartbeat pulled into a great black sea with no beginning and no end.

Lysander is in such a moment now. This is why men could laugh at the gods: their whole worlds, their very existence, compacted down to the ragged pull of one breath into warm lungs. Each movement, each red wash of blood through a canyon of veins, mattered more than anything.

It seems impossible that this monster, too, might be a living thing – but cradled in the dark shadow of her wing, there below the smell of brine and the tang of salt thick on his tongue, there is a smell of iron, of blood not his own. He clings to that scent over the gnash of her teeth and the dread flood of her words, the rustle of her wings like a hundred carrion birds on a whale carcass.

Lysander needs, too.

He needs her blood to live as much as she needs his. Her wing drops down over him even as he rises to meet it, and her blood is hot hot hot where it speckles his skin like holy water. Each breath he pulls in tastes like a shipwreck, like an alien beach at low tide.  

She drops her wing.

It covers him like a shroud as he tries to tear away; it threatens to bow his copper neck, to buckle his dark knees. It is a killing embrace and he feels her begin to curl in to press teeth to skin, a kiss he will not recover from.

Lysander wonders if the gods must be laughing and his fury swallows his fear.

There had been no struggle when the Night King came for him, when he was surrounded by men with laughing mouths and glinting knives. There had been no time to fight back. Now the stallion makes up for that inaction: he is teeth and hooves and antlers, black rage and bright blood and panting breath between dark lips.  

And nothing is coming of it. Closer come her jaws, until he can feel her hot breath on his side; at last Lysander stops struggling beneath the weight of her wings and drops his head as if vanquished. There is a hint of dusky light against the marble floor, filtering through the tips of her feathers; he sucks in a breath of autumn night and kicks out with his hind feet.

He is too close, too wrapped in her wing, to be sure of the angle. If he is lucky, a hoof will catch her in the chest, in the neck, along her curving cheek. If he is lucky it will be enough for her to withdraw, just for a moment, just long enough for him to tear himself from her wing and flee like a stag, like the hunted thing he is, carrying a few feathers and the suffocating smell of her.

If he is unlucky –

But he is a man now, and there is no room in this eternal moment to consider such an outcome.

we wake with bright eyes now

@Wormlust