There is a soft storm rolling in across the island and Lysander almost feels at home. 

Thunder ripples gently through the cool springtime air, and the patter of rain on the leaves is a lulling sound (like the heartbeat of a thousand scarlet berries). Carefully he ambles through the undergrowth with the grace of a buck, the grace of a man with hair burnished golden by sunlight. There are curling vines he must be careful not to snare his antlers on, and the sense of being watched crawls like flies along his skin. 

The last time he had felt so many eyes on him, it was a midwinter night and his blood had stained the snow. He had almost died, then, a sensation new to him in his centuries of existence. Now as then, a smile curls his dark mouth and his eyes shine like all the things that wait in the soft dark. Around his neck he wears the dagger that had saved his life, but it is not the reason for his casual calm. 

Lysander has been reborn. 

He is no god. But he is not quite a man - and the dark-haired stallion is not sure where it leaves him, but he is willing to find out. Once more his blood feels a little like ichor - a little like the pool that shines through the leaves ahead of him. Around him birds sing the way they do in dreams: thickly, long hands treading through deep water. 

In the dim it shines like treasure, but it is not the gold he seeks. Yet soft, soft he steps, his green eyes bright, drawing his gaze up from that calm surface to a brighter color, honey-gold. Now his smile grows; he thinks wistfully of running fingers through her hair. One day, perhaps, he will again. 

Only when he glances down at the ink-black flowers with their jewel-dark eyes does he think of Isra, and how this island seems like a thing she might have dreamt, before her dreams turned black and sharp as blades. 

Lysander steps forward bold as a stag, and a golden leaf rings softly against the tine it is bound to. His hair curls darkly at his throat and his winter coat is shedding away, revealing the copper dapples along his shoulders. Not until he reaches her does he stop, and then he presses his muzzle into the juncture of her shoulder and throat and inhales deeply of her. It isn’t until it slows at the smell of hyacinths does he realize how quickly his heart had been racing. 

When he withdraws he doesn’t wonder whether she knows something has changed in him; he is too busy realizing the change in her. Surprise is not an emotion often worn in his green eyes - they make him look young and bright as spring. Lightning writes a bright arc above the trees, and in the brief illumination of it she could be a goddess. The pool lies beyond them, forgotten. 

“I wondered if I’d meet you here,” he says, and when he grins it feels brand new. "I knew you could never stay away."






@Florentine

Her lungs are full of metallic air. And there is no sound more bolder, brighter than the chiming patter of rain upon obsidian flowers. The sky grumbles, uneasy and restless. The lightning splits the sky, limning in blue-bright light a stag that presses its soaked tines amidst the island’s flowers.
 
This stag is god-forged and ichor is gold within his veins. The lightning paints him other, beneath its sudden brush he is transcendent. Mortality does not cling to him like the roots and vines that hang from his crown of tines. Mortality does not even touch him. He has shed it like a winter skin.
 
Within her eyes he is a serpent, a creature changed by immortality and yet, so utterly him. Ah, he is a creature to be watched. He is a beast with earthen eyes, soil brown and brilliantly emerald. In his eyes is a cathedral of bark and leaves, an endless wood where rocks are altars and trees the pillars that hold up the sky. The curls of his mane are the tangle of shrubs. They curl down his crest, wild roots, wicked thorns. To touch them, she thinks, might be to draw blood. Yet she would, again and again…
 
He is a wild wood and Florentine watches his unearthly grace. Mortality is no longer a stain upon him and fate smiles just a little wider. Yet no smile can match the gleam in the lavender of his lover’s eyes (though her lips are a line – straight as a gash, curved as the ebb and swell of pain).
 
He moves to her and she to him: as they always have and as they always will. But her steps are slow and her grace no longer elven. The dance of her limbs is jaunty the swell of her stomach a blight where once she was so slim. Ah, the weight of pregnancy. She might hide herself before him, if her worry outweighed her joy. Yet Lysander is alive! And so her joy is more than her pain, more than an untold truth that grows and swells and fills every inch of her stomach.
 
But for a moment, all can be forgotten, when his muzzle presses against her throat. The touch of his breath is a caress she knows. Her eyes close tight, her own muzzle pressing into him. Where is the night? Where is the haze of dusk? Upon him is sand and sun and arid air. But oh she drinks him in as if she is starved.
 
He is pulling away and it is too soon, too soon. Her muzzle follows, reaches, into the air that grows cold where he once was. Yet he is still close and her wild wood boy is bright eyed – new young shoots and so he knows, so he has seen that they are both changed.
 
A river of questions gather behind the dam of her lips. Have you slayed a king, my love? Are you hurt? Are you angry with me? Are you ready to look out for our child for eternity?
 
Each one is unspoken. Each one plays upon her tongue and presses their words against her teeth. Each one sounds in her ears like a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy.
 
Each one falls to nothing as she smiles bright and wide with his words. Ah in her blood is ancient magic stirring. It is a magic that knows its kin and draws her to this island as a moth unto a flame.
 
She presses into him. Lips upon his artery, feeling how his heart runs like hers. Florentine laughs like the gilded leaf that chimes against his twisted, brown crown. “And I knew you’d find me here, of course.” As if it could have ever been any other way.
 
“So much has changed, Lysander.” She whispers across his skin, hot breath that evolves into a kiss, into a press of skin; tight and tight and tighter still she holds him as sweat blooms, turning her skin into liquid gold with its sheen. “And you have been gone too long for things show no sign of stopping yet.”
 
Such a clenching it is that pulls are her abdomen then. But stoic is the smile upon the lips of a girl with magic in her veins and her lover in her eyes.

 
 
 

 
 

“Things are always changing, love,” he says with laughter in his voice, and presses a kiss to the golden hollow just above her eye. He welcomes the heat of her skin against his, wonders at what moves within her - a kind of magic that not even a god could understand or possess, a secret kind of mystery. Too long has his body been separate from hers; it begs for her warmth the way it had never thirsted for the sun in the desert. For her he exposes his throat, closes his eyes at the touch of her lips against the blood that runs so trembling-close.

There is a ripple in her belly, then, that he feels against himself - the kick of a hoof, the clench of her muscles? Oh, motherhood is not a thing he has ever understood, a thing for other gods - all he has birthed in his countless turn of years are vines and madness. This, to him, is stranger by far. Worry and wonder crease his face, and when he steps away it is to let the rain-cooled air take his place, planting cool kisses all along the gold of her.

Almost he regrets leaving Denocte, wine still in his veins and the smell of her across his skin like a brand. But they have never played at apologies, and if he had remained, he might never have found his immortality in the desert. Perhaps it is a trade of fate - his own life instead of the death of a king and a ghost. Lysander no longer feels like he will have both - but the deal seems fair.

He is no hero, anyway. Nobody ever expected a god to slay a monster. That is not the way that stories work.

Yet fatherhood - oh! All he can think now is love, and want, and wonder. As raindrops roll like sweat or tears down his cheek and back and shoulders, as the golden pool bathes them in god-light, he slips his lover’s knife from around his own neck, lifting it carefully over the sharp branches of his antlers.

“I wanted to return this to you,” he says, low, and slips it over her golden curls with the solemnity of a knighting (though of course it was always hers, with he the false bearer). “Though I would advise against using it at the moment. Unless…” and Lysander trails off, himself unsure of what he was going to say.

Unless she wished to begin their family elsewhere. The rift is in his mind, with her parents and all its wild magic, a thousand universes brushing fingertips just beyond reach (but not her reach, his mate who mastered time).

“What can I do?” he breathes, and it is such a strange question for him to speak - it makes him feel so young, so new - that it makes him laugh, a rush of unsteady breath.



@Florentine

 Her eyes close as his lips press upon the arch above her eye. She takes a breath though it stumbles in her throat as a wave of pain slips like lightning through her abdomen. It pushed her breath out in a hiss through her clenched teeth, yet she leans into him, desperate to further close the space between them, keen to hold on to him. He lifts his chin, further exposing the column of his throat. The flow of his blood is steady, steady. A gentle throb to ease the staccato of her own.

Her heart is a bird within its cage of bone. It is wings fluttering against pale white bars. Flighty thing, she muses as she trembles and peers up at her flower boy beneath her heavy fringe of tangled hair and wilting flowers. All of her is striving, though she stands beside him as still as the moon within the sky. But oh, like the moon, all of her is running, running, running. 

 Things are always changing, he had said. Those words dance to the ache of her body. They hum with her blood and speak truth into her soul. Changing, changing…. His laughter echoes between them – how easily he is taking this revelation of hers! Through heavy lashes, weighed low with love and awe and the rising tide of pain, she watches him. Desire, joy swell within her, flooding the rising pain. They compel her forwards and her lips touch his, fierce, consuming, elated, desperate.

 As she draws back, too soon – always too soon, he is following her. The cold of her dagger, placed back about her throat is the cool of summer rain. Into the chill of the metal, into the wash of blissful magic she sinks. Florentine breathes, deeply, joyfully. The dagger sings against her breast, it gleams and her magic rises, wild and bright and begging. The child kicks, as if awoken, as if stirred from where it moves, slowly, slowly toward life. Regret is ocean deep within the gilded girl though a smile curls her lips. She had kissed him too soon and she is reaching for him again, her lips millimeters from his, their breaths touching, warming. Lysander’s caution had stopped her and her eyes drink in this boy and his curls that snarl in her heart as vines.
 
The Rift hangs, unspoken, but present between them. It presses its magic through the pores of Novus’ skin and oh Florentine shivers with its presence. Her eyes are wide, wide, keen, yearning. Her dagger knows! It is burning, wanting, desiring like she, like him, like…

 Agony clenches in her abdomen. It spasms in endless ripples and she cries out, broken, shocked. Pain is suddenly there, it fills every part of her, pushing and pushing her out, out until it is her. Oh this strange, strange labour with its days of muted pain and sudden, lightning fast, advance. It ebbed and flowed, carrying her through rapids and tranquil waters but now it is a rapid that propels her faster, faster toward the waterfall edge of birth.

 ------------

 He comes in moments, their boy of bright gold eyes and gilded wings. Blood is a shadow upon the dark bark of his skin. His wings press tight against his sides and his ribs heave as cold life fills them once, twice, three times. 

Florentine stares, at her gold upon his feathers, his skin (dapples that glow upon him as falling sunlight), his hair, his eyes… She swims in the dark of him, forest deep as his father. He lies for a moment, as if shocked by the speed of his arrival. For days he had made her labour, speeding up his coming in fits and starts only to ebb as if calmed, as if staunched and slowed, until at last his fervor won and he arrived in scant moments.
 
What can I do? Lysander’s question was barely spoken before his son came.  His son looks to him from where he lies, his eyes are the bright of the sun that gazes down upon his flesh. They are the dark of the liquid gold that coats his dam. He looks from one to the other before his long limbs unfold. They unfurl spidery and elegant but oh he is not graceful upon them. He staggers as he tries to stand, earlier than he should. Florentine watches, from where she lies, from where her body still aches with the shock of her son’s arrival. When had she lain down? Shock slips like morphine through her veins, yet instinct is pushing her up, up, up. She rises, more elegant than the boy that stumbles and rises, falls, and rises, staggers and rises and at last stands.

 Too fast.

 Too fast.

 Too fast.

 Oh it was all too fast. Her son moves to her, his eyes hungry, his steps wavering but too, too stable for a boy only moments old. Florentine side steps him, too pained, too shocked to let him feed – not yet, not yet. She bumps into Lysander as she moves. She leans into him, clinging to him as she watches their son walk toward them. Each moment has his strides longer, his slender frame more stable. He stands, days old, not seconds old and reaches out for his dam, his sire.

 Low, low Florentine whispers as awe blooms with her words: “Did you swap him?” Humour runs beneath her words for when would Lysander have swapped him? She saw this boy born, this boy rise and stand and walk seconds later. 

The dagger is warm upon her heart and unused. There is magic upon her tongue, its taste is metal and ancient, new and wild. It is nothing like hers and yet so similar.

 Her lips reach for her child’s forelock, black as pitch and dusted with gold. Once she touches, feels the warm of him, the scent of him, she cannot stop. Over his face, his neck, his back, his limbs, Flora touches, learns, knows. Her lips linger upon the boy’s cheeks as he bleats, hungry, demanding. 

What can I do? Lysander had asked. She pauses, her breath washing like a kiss across newborn skin. “Name him.” She murmurs with a smile, at last pulling her gaze away from their sun – his gold, his wings – so much her, so much him, to press a kiss upon Lysander’s chest.

 And her joy is enough to almost miss the slow, slow clench of her abdomen once again.

 Almost.

 
 
 

 
 

Time has never had much meaning for the two of them, but here it ceases completely; there is a hush in the forest, no sound but the sigh of raindrops on leaves as the storm dies away and the way Florentine breathes, in pain, through her teeth.

Lysander forgets that he once meant to hunt a king as though he were nothing more than a silver hind. He forgets that they are on a magic-made island, populated by creatures that should not be, off the coast of a world both of them arrived in by accident. There is only the shudder of her skin, the ripple of her muscles, the touch of their mouths as they tell each other I’m here, I’m here. There are no ferns and fertile soil in the dark, hollow places of an old god’s heart - there is just wonder, and waiting, and a worry more foreign to him than anything.

When she cries out like a struck animal he is there, nose against her golden cheek, her damp curve of neck, his dappled shoulder against her own. The stallion is murmuring something but not even he knows the words, but he knows - oh he knows! - that this is older than language, as old as time itself. New life, the first miracle of creation.


Yet it is over as soon as he can stand back, as soon as Florentine lies in a bed of cool dark grass. His eyes are wide with wonder and his jaw tight with concern. It surprises him, how steady his heart still is, a slower beat than the throb of crimson berries. Before he can think to himself how strange it is, all the things he has made, and how none are as vital as this -

there is their son.

It smells like blood and life and rain on soil. The storm has died away, and all the gold of gilded clouds has gathered here, in the eyes of the boy in the grass. Lysander makes a soft sound (still there are no words) and before it dies the boy is rising, rocking on unsteady legs, even as his Anthousai rises too. Her shoulder against his is slick comfort; the way he leans his chin over the arch of her neck is habit. His tongue has still gone silent; when she speaks he can only shake his head, mute against her sweet-smelling garden of golden hair.

Name him, she says, and he knows better than to question her though he wants to. Instead he watches through secret-green eyes as she touches the colt, as she marks him as her own, as she ghosts her lips across each perfect, tiny part. There is gold there, and rich dappled brown, and the fold of wings that hide more brilliant treasure. When those brand-new golden eyes meet him, liquid-bright and steady, Lysander’s breath stops in his throat. Here is eternity, and the beginning. Here is where time has condensed to the point of losing meaning.

“Leonidas,” he says, and thinks of a lion with those same golden eyes.

He reaches out to touch his son, a kiss upon his slick wet brow, and misses the ripple that shudders across Florentine.



@Florentine

She has always thought of her own birth as the most traumatic. But as she stands now, pressed slick against the comfort of Lysander’s shoulder, she comes to know that all births are traumatic, and vital.
 
Their boy moves as if he swallows time. He stands upon limbs bolstered by days and not mere moments. The summer-sweet grass, damp with rain and effort should still be a nest to cradle him as he gasps his first breaths into freshly opened lungs…
 
But he steps, each moment more sure. He looks, each moment more clearly. He breathes, every breath more even. His hair grows like a wild wood. It tangles in roots and vines about his face and throat. Leonidas. The name gilds the ends of his mane in sunlight, the underside of his wings in ichor. Oh the boy who watches them is leonine and bright.
 
“That’s quite long.” She breathes (through a rippling ache) and does not know of which she speaks: her son’s new mane or the name that stalks perfectly across his skin.
 
“I like it.” She sighs, sleepy slow, watching as Lysander’s kiss rests upon their lion boy’s brow and how the child nips, with useless gums, at his father’s cheek. “I am no expert…” Florentine muses softly, each word laborious upon her tongue, “but I think newborns are supposed to be slower than this.” Then lower, a whisper, “Is he going to be an overachiever?”
 
That small twitch of her lips, that bubble of laughter blossoming at quite how they managed to make such a child, are gone as fast as they come. They fade like mist before the sun for there is nothing urgent in her body now. There is a new wave that moves through her stomach with the quiet calm of a river carving through its valley floor. 
 
“I – I think I might lie down for a bit.” Florentine sighs, sleepy, depleted, “and wait for the contractions to ease.” For they should, be it not for another child.
 
Hour passes into hour and the contractions do not cease, but swell like a wave. It is not clear at what point Florentine realizes that she is to bear, not one child, but two. Yet, sunlight fades, idly bleeding into twilight and soon moonlight gleams across the ivory skin of a filly foal. With eyes limned in silver, Florentine turn to Lysander. “TWO?!” She hisses, dismayed. “This is your fault. My family don’t have twins!” Yet keen are her eyes as she turns back to gaze in wonder at the twins that lie curled together, yin and yang, in dark and light. Gold paints their points identically, dappling across their skin.
 
“Lie with me?” The words rise like a prayer as her lips reach up to touch Lysander’s shoulder. The grasses sigh, as if content with the day’s effort, and brush idly along Flora’s skin. “I once thought myself an only child because my father never told me I had a brother.” Slowly, thoughtfully, her lips trail, over her daughter’s face. Carefully she follows along the lines that sleep draws and softens, smudging into soft shadows.  “Finding him changed everything.” Her eyes are dark when her gaze returns to Lysander. Worlds ache within her for their discovery and to look at Lysander is to know he feels them too; how many times had he asked her to leave with him? She presses a kiss, an apology to brand itself into his cheek and, deeper yet, his soul.
 
“Her skin is light starlight.” And now she surely knows what it is like to touch the stars. “Can we call her Aster, after Asterion?” Slowly she shifts, her gaze trailing over the curls of her flower boy’s mane and she reaches forward, the taste of his immortality upon her tongue, sparking like magic might. “I also think it is a flower. So you can have two, flower girls. Aren’t you lucky.”
 
Florentine’s smile, as she presses a daisy into her daughter’s mane is wide, wide, for how could she ever have thought that she was to have just one child?

 
 
 

 
 

For a moment Lysander wonders if his magic has returned to him - if it was not just his immortality he found in the desert that day. Because like a thousand trembling roots he has turned to blooming vines, like a sapling growing up into a red cedar higher than any temple of marble and prayer, his son is growing before his eyes.

In seconds he is on his feet, whisking his tail at the strange dragonflies that hover like gnats with their silver-veined wings trembling. That tail curls dark and gold grows like wheat at the end, a shock of sunlight as another peal of thunder groans overhead. And all this time Lysander has had the same held breath.

He spills it in a laugh now, feeling as shaky as his son (maybe more, given how steady those feet already are). He sprouts feathers like Icarus.

“He’ll grow into it,” he says, too surprised to be wry - but there is a grin curling his bronze cheek. Only when he looks over at Florentine does his heart stutter with worry - but it recovers with each word she speaks. They have been through more dire than this. “Well,” he says, turning toward her, grazing his muzzle across her cheek, “I was never a newborn, but he is your son, an answer in itself.” And it is her son - their son - he watches as his golden mate makes a bed of cool ferns.

Only when both mother and son lie together does Lysander slip away into the twilight. The storm has passed, and the last of the clouds are limned with gold; all the world feels wrung clean. Insects buzz and hum, and fireflies meander between the trees. The antlered stallion never strays out of eyesight, and a dark ear is always turned to the pair. But his search is fruitless: he knows none of the plants of the island, recognizes nothing enough to be safe to give to Florentine and Leonidas. Mint, or elm, or comfrey - any time he thinks he finds something he knows, the wind shivers and the leaves tremble and he sees that there is something different. Something strange.

In the end he doesn’t risk it. In the end he returns as the breeze blows cool kisses against his shoulder and sides and the only light is the softly golden water and the rising moon. There he stays with her, keeping watchful guard, until the moon crests the sky and Flora gives them a daughter pale and perfect as snowdrops. Once again he is staring, as though he might drink up the picture of her and hold it within him forever. When Flora hisses like an indignant swan he only smiles to himself and says “Don’t they?” as he presses his mouth to the nape of her neck.

She need hardly as him to lie with her; he does it gladly, their bodies warm in the cooling night. If there was ever danger in the forest he doesn’t feel it now; there is only the four of them (a wondrous number) bedded down in the long grasses at the edge of an amber pool, wild and new. He listens to Florentine as she talks about her broth with his chin laid across her back, and he listens to the crickets and the nighthawks and the sigh of wind in the leaves, but his eyes are still holding only the twins.

“She is beautiful,” he murmurs. “They both are.” Only her gaze on him draws him away from the sight of those two twined around each other as though they still sleep inside the belly of the world. When she reaches for him he tugs on one of her long, long curls and he inhales the soft smell of hyacinths and thinks of home. “Aster is perfect.” Lysander’s mouth shapes a smile, thinking of a retinue of Anthousai - how close to his beginning it sounds, and how far away. “I’m extraordinarily lucky. But feel free to keep reminding me how much.”



@Florentine  

It is strange, she thinks, the feeling that floods her as she watches Lysander step away from her and their son and away into the woodland. It makes her heart skip and stumble before falling into a nervous gallop. It flutters against her breastbone and she finds a call pressing itself upon her lips. It holds the words to call him back, to not leave them, not leave their son..
 
Ah, and that was it. That was the first time Florentine felt the full gravity of motherhood sink into her chest and into the pool of her gut. Her jaw lowers across her son, protectively as she watches Lysander disappear into the dark.
 
She knows why he goes, she is grateful for his leaving, but she longs for him to hurry and return. When he does, she reaches for him like the birds reach for the sky. He is safety and love and she rejoices in his return.
 
Their daughter comes soon after. And this time she would not have let Lysander go, even if he asked. Her pain was not enough to warrant his leaving, not when it was so easily outweighed by the joy of their familial completeness.
 
She leans into him as he lies down beside her. She closes her eyes to sink into and feel more clearly his every touch upon her skin. She does not just feel him, but the moving of her children and instantly misses how she felt them move within her womb. They tangle themselves in sleep as they did unborn. And Florentine cannot stop herself from touching them in awe and love and wonder.
 
Lysander’s comments bring a smile to her lips and she laughs, burying that smile into the secret space between her lips and his neck. She drinks in the smell of his woodland skin. He is magic and earth, everything she can be lost and then grounded within. “I shall remind you how lucky you are every day.” She whispers into his ear and means every day for every eternity that they shall see – eternal, timeless creatures that they are.
 
Suddenly Florentine is wickedly and selfishly glad, joyful that he chose her above others, that his eternity is hers and his family, hers also. She settles back against him, claiming him as hers. And she will continue to, over and over, every day for eternity, with the very same breath that she will use remind him just how lucky he is, every day.
 
And Lysander has no choice in the matter.
 
Florentine’s eyes close and sleep descends full of forest gods and children of soil and sea, earth and pearl, each run through with glittering gold.

[FIN] <3