Amidst all the destruction, all the pain of a world undergoing change (but are they growing-pains or dying-pains?) winter has come at last to Novus.
 
What strange storms have circled the summits of the Arma Mountains have finally wrung out their fury, and left softer cloudbanks in their wake, and a dusting of snow. It is not so easy, now, to tell the burned-places from the ones that are simply bare for the season, with all of them coated in white.
 
Lysander is a bright spot against a mute day, burnished copper against the white and brown and evergreen. He is hunting, but his prey, mistletoe, is proving an evasive thing. Still he is in no true hurry; his days are as idle as they’ve ever been, unconcerned as he is with court politics. There are no more rescues to be made, no more floods to flee from, no more bedsides to sit beside and spin out stories until he feels something like numbness.
 
He spots the fox first, small and tawny and far more out of place than he is, here at the foot of the mountains. It is a curious thing, and he pauses to watch it pass by – and is not wholly surprised to see the figure not far behind it, emerging from a copse of aspen, as striped as birch-bark.
 
As for himself, Lysander is impossible to miss where he stands amid the briar and leaf-litter and snow, and he inclines his angular head when the stallion’s gaze finds him.
 
“If you’re one of the Ilati, you’re some ways from home,” he says easily, but if it is true the stranger could hardly be blamed – Tinea was still barely habitable, and a flooded swamp in winter sounded like a terrible place to be.

And anyway, anyone familiar with him would know Lysander is far from home, too. 



@Kauri

 


Lysander watches the stranger lift the little fox with a peculiar kind of curiosity; it is not entirely detached, it is not quite jealousy, it is nothing he has a name for. Certainly he is new enough to the possibility of friendship that the kind of connection a horse shared with their bonded is well beyond his imaging, but the antlered stallion tries anyway.

Is it like sharing a piece of your soul, he wonders, and never being alone again? Is it a frightening thing, to have something so different from you tied to you so closely?

He does not think he would want such a bond – but then, loneliness is such a new feeling to him.

He flicks his ears forward at the stranger’s response, and there is nothing in the other’s tone that suggests a lie. Lysander shrugs a dark copper shoulder, and drifts a step nearer to the man and his fox.

“The mask you wear,” he answers, “and the feathers. I don’t know much of them, but I do know they have a fondness for adorning themselves similarly. They’ve only recently emerged from the deeper places of the swamp…” The once-god trails off, less interested in offering a lecture than in learning about the two before him.

When he tilts his head, it is with the frank, curious expression of a wolf, but in truth Lysander is grateful not to have been happened on by a kelpie or a gang with a knife, as on his previous solo forays. Neither did this stranger exude the kind of electric danger of Calliope –

But still he does not fully relax. Little, he has found, is safe here in Novus.

“If you are not of Terrastella, where is it you travel from, and how does it fare? My news of the other courts has been…limited, of late.”

An understatement: his days had been spent beside Florentine’s bedside, cradled in the heart of a great tree like owls in winter. Outside the rain went on and on, each day gray enough to not notice when morning slid into afternoon and then once more into night; everything was only dark and then less-dark.

But his understanding of Novus had always circled around her, held like a moon to her gravity as he is. He is not so much a fool as to pretend it isn’t a weakness.



@Kauri

 


A dark-edged ear twists at the sound of that hum, the little sound of thinking he’d heard from few others. Florentine hummed like that, when she was pleased or preoccupied, and somehow this warms him to the stranger. Still, he says nothing to fill the brief silence, and only watches as the striped man’s gaze turns up and away.

Oh, but he recognizes something of the worry that twists his mouth, then, the distance in his gaze – but what of that? Such an expression was not uncommon in Novus, especially here at the apparent end of days.

Whatever place the stranger is thinking of, Lysander had never expected the answer to be anything good.

Even so he is still surprised at the report, and feels his heart darken further toward the gods of this place. Whatever cruel games they played, he wanted no place in them – but he’d long since lost his choice in such matters.

Grimly he nods, in agreement with the clear ill feelings of the other. “I wonder if they are causing it, or allowing it to happen, or incapable of ending it.” His words are low, dark as tangled undergrowth, and he knows regardless of which truth it is the gods would find little forgiveness for their vanishing. These disasters may well be the breaking of an already beaten people.

He is surprised again when the stranger draws nearer – more bold than he had initially supposed. Lysander examines the stallion in kind, passing an equally curios gaze once more over the fox until he is caught by the vivid purple of the man’s eyes. When the other looks away, the antlered stallion does not.

“A little of both,” he says – vaguely if not untruthfully – and smiles when the little fox extends its narrow nose. “And to see what useful things might be left in the mountains. Terrastella is low on herbs and remedies – the past months have taken their toll in every conceivable way.” Of course he says nothing of mistletoe, or any other poison he sought – such intentions were something he would hardly share with friends, much less a stranger whose face he could hardly make out beneath their mask.

Almost he asks of the stallion’s business – Lysander had not missed the way he said this court, and some ways from home, and how he did not seem to count himself a member of any place yet named. Instead, he tilts his head once more toward the fox. “How long have you two traveled together?”



@Kauri   random side note, I love all your art of him! I keep seeing it around DA and it's all gorgeous!