[P] fallen barefoot past the treeline;

[Lysander]

 
 
 

Time slips away from him much the same way his blood does – steadily at first, then more erratically, little pieces of himself he can never put back.
 
When he escaped from the Eater it had been just after dusk, as the stars were just beginning to burn through the skin of the sky; after that, beneath the darkness of the trees, he only knows he walks until his lungs burn and muscles ache like dying. There is no time beneath the canopy, only darkness, only crickets and cicadas and the terrain beginning to climb up and up and turn rocky.
 
Fear drives him on where exhaustion would have him stop. She will not hunt him here, he thinks, not where the branches are close as secrets and the stars only a legend. Even so he keeps walking, like any wounded thing going to water.
 
Morning creeps up on him, damp as tears with silver fog, and the trees begin to turn to conifers, filling the world with their sharp clean scent of spruce and pine. Lysander isn’t sure where he is, only that he has never been here before, and that he is still not ready to leave the cover of the trees, not when he can still smell his own blood (and hers, bitter and darkened to black on his bright skin).
 
His second brush with death has altered him in a way he can’t yet untangle from the dark snarl of his thoughts. It has made him more mortal than anything yet, a hateful, fearful thing, and there is no victory for Lysander in the fact that he escaped. And oh, he is so weary – each lichen-green boulder looks a pillow, each faint breeze a whisper to sleep.
 
And so, at last, he gives in – for he is only flesh and blood, and losing the latter fast.
 
Swathed in morning mist he bends like a stag to the forest floor beneath a towering pine. The bark is rough against his back, the needles soft beneath his knees, and he cannot see the sky overhead.
 
Exhausted, still bleeding from tattered ribs, he lets the current of sleep carry him away.

and I know this is a weakness

@Isra

[Isra]

The mountains rise like towers of salvation in the moment night fully turns to day. Or at least Isra thinks of them so as she makes her way down, down, down the slopes. There is a certainly laziness to the way she moves, a grace that lingers in the shadows of her form like a story that's not yet finished. The mountains this night have brought no fires, no suffering and so she's lost to the story floating like gossamer silk across the ocean waves of her thoughts. A stars falls from the sky, a comet of fire hot enough burn to white and a hollow rock core that wants only to dream, to love. The star falls and falls and falls and it feels like her bones are an earthquake when it that star lands between the canyons of her imagination. Oh, Isra imagines the star whispering only the single word. She would blink and open her new eyes wide with shock as she  discovered that she was no longer a star, but a horse. The only one of her kind. Ahead something bright sways like a sick thing between the trees and the morning dew and Isra thinks it only a teasing game the story in her heart has decided to play. Until she walks closer, dreaming of the way the star will walk as if her legs are made of dragonfly wings, and smells the blood that brightness wavering in the early light is suddenly no grand story that she's given life to. This is no story, no adventure where two soul-mates find one another through a million trials and sufferings. This is a horror, a nightmare dredged up from her memories to make her fear the mountain-side again. “No.” She whispers a lament and her lungs feel ice cold and the air feels like not enough to fill those icy organs. Her eyes sting where she presses them together and her legs quiver to scramble back, back, back from this horse she almost knows and the way he gleams sallow with death and the air smells like iron thick enough to taste. But below her fear, her horror is the fragile butterfly beat of his heart and the way the blood running from his side still runs like a slow, muddy river. There is not a thing in these mountains Isra would see and pray to the gods to make it die. The man before her, broken and dying and as still as stone, is in her mountains where she has just buried her dead. “You will not die, not here.” The mountains are full of dead up high and she will add no more to them. Isra moves close enough to press her lips to the place where his brow meets the arch of his eyelids. It's a kiss of strength and when she leaves him she moves quickly through the mountain forest to gather up yucca and stagger-weed.   Her summer in the mountains made her fimilar with the forest and she moves swifter than any deer below the bending branches to the place where the thick treeline meets a meadow. Quickly she gathers up what she needs and on her way back she grabs a small bloom of foxglove that's held on just past its season. And when she returns she uses her teeth to turn the yucca and weed into a paste, thick and strong enough that the smell of it burns and her tongue starts to feel a little numb. She's careful when she smears it onto the tears of flesh between his ribs with her lips. In her horror she's forgotten that she has slight magic here, she only remembers that when she was a slave they only had lips and smiles and touches to heal each other. “I need you to wake up.” At her hooves the foxglove rests, purple against the green and stone, tucked into the shadows they make where she lays down beside him. A blade of light hits her horn, their bodies as if the sun has come to find them and them alone with the blazing life of it's heat. When she places her nose to his he smells like death and Isra could cry for the way she knows too well how that smell feels like a stone heavy enough to break every bone in her body. * * * * * you told me I was like the dead sea @Lysander

[Lysander]

 
 
 

Lysander does not dream at all.

His awareness is a distant thing, exhaustion dragging him far below the surface of consciousness, where light and movement were only distant impressions through fogged glass, through a fathom of dark sea. All the while his blood spilled, rich as rubies, leaving him a poor man, a weak man.

It is, perhaps, almost like death, like drowning in the black sea that had been promised in the gleam of her eye, the hot spill of her breath, the salt of her blood. The only difference is that there is pain, too, even in the below – and everyone knows there is no pain in death.

That is why, when he wakes and feels no sting, no bite, no searing song her teeth had left, he wonders –

But he blinks once, slowly, and then again as his awareness unfurls like the green frond of a fern and he inhales a scent that is more familiar than anything should be in these mountains. Her body is warm against his and the skin of her nose is soft as dreaming and he smiles, made languid and strange by the numbness of his side and the weariness that coats his bones like lead.

“You,” he says softly, as at last his green eyes focus on her. Her eyes are as he remembered, the blue-green of the sea fresh-churned by a storm, and they make him think of that long-ago home, where his skin had still been golden, his hair dark, his eyes green – but he had not been the same at all.

“It seems I’ve stumbled into your story,” he says, and it does not occur to him to worry. He knows nothing but what he learned of her at the festival – of her sadness and her tale and how what hope she might once have had seemed as rusted as the chain around her leg – but he has no choice, and he knows from the smells around him now that she has saved his life.

“Thank you,” he breathes, and oh, Lysander is grateful for dreaming girls who save foolish men.

the air was never sweet enough

@Isra

[Isra]

There is a knowing look in her eyes when he blinks back the slumbering of the suffering and meets her gaze with sleepy boldness and shock. The look in her eyes seem to whisper of empathy and she shivers before his gaze as if her body is suddenly covered with a hundred hungry flies that nip and dig at her skin. Isra knows how much that paste on him stings, how his blood tingles with the healing and how it feels like fire to live. In the survival there is pain, there is suffering and Isra imagines that they all must bleed and bleed and bleed just to remember what a thing it is to be mortal. And oh! Oh, how looking at him quickens her heart as if she can feel the blood running down her skin and the fear that must have pushed him to run and run and run from the thing that dragged its teeth down his ribs. “Isra.” She offers her name like a distraction for the way her nose turns heavy against his, a warning to stay as still as stone. The sound of her name is as breathy and fragile as her bones when the way he looks at he feels like the stare of an entire park of woodland wolves. “This seems more your story than mine.” Isra almost smiles, almost looks like something more than a skittish deer who wants to run and leave him to his healing alone. Her lips half turn and her eyes almost spark like the sun on a swell of ocean water. But a buzzing breaks the silence and she frowns to watch flies gather in the places where the paste is thin enough for the blood and gore to peek though the green. The smile dies before it can form and she moves to blow away the insects with a breath that always tastes like brine on her dark lips. “Someday you will have to tell me the end of your story. But for now...” She pauses and lifts some fallen leaves to cover the paste and keep away pollutants. It hurts her soul to cover him, to heal him and remember all the other slaves that came to her for poultices for their skin and stories for their hearts. Just to look at him and remember she's not a slave here, that they are likely all dead on the other side of the sea burns and shatters her like glass. “Now you must rest and heal and I will tell you a story to keep the pain away.” Isra turns back plucks just one bloom of the foxglove from the stem at her feet. It looks both lonely and ominous in the way it's so much brighter than the blackness of her lips. She offers the small cluster of petals with that barely there smile of hers. “This will help you.” There should be a caution there, a warning that too many will send him to a slumber than knows know end. There should be something more the way her ocean eyes turn protective and she looks more like a unicorn than she has ever seemed before. The sun rises a little higher and her skin feels like flames instead of flesh. Around them the day carries on and the birds sing a chorus of live above their heads. And on her lips a story starts with “Once there was a world and in that world there was a man who looked like the largest elk there ever was.” Her eyes flash like the stars and her skin looks like a universe where it stretches over all her bones that are filled with legends instead of marrow. Tenderly she touches his eyelids and urges them to close, close, close and she listens for the foxglove to slow the beating of his heart so that blood might not rush so quickly to the whole across his side. “And on his antlers there lived another world of flowers and ivy and spiders that made webs that could hold a universe each.” She continues and the septic sting of the paste starts to smell not like suffering but like a secret forest that holds the meaning to everything that has ever been. * * * * * our skin felt like fire @Lysander

[Lysander]

 
 
 

Pain is a hunter and he the golden hind. For a time he had fled to the thicket of sleep until her voice had flushed him out, and ah! It has caught him now.

But the storyteller has blunted its arrows, made dull its sword. It burns to live but he remembers what it was to nearly die, a shard of silver buried in his side cradled only by blood and no ichor. It is better by far to burn.

And anyway, he deserves the pain – for his foolishness, for his arrogance. He is a god no longer, to topple monuments to other deities; he is only a man, and has become like all the others, just as he’d said to the black unicorn. Men are a brotherhood of bravery and folly, thinking themselves invincible, daring the world to make them suffer.

So he suffers now, and laughs through his teeth all the while, because it is how he knows he lives.

“Isra,” he repeats, as though her name is a medicine, too. Despite her warning he drops his muzzle a fraction in the slightest of nods and his green eyes are bright with pain. “I am Lysander. And I think my tale might have ended here without you.”

At the stirring of her warm breath on his side, the blood-buzz of forest flies, he half-closes his eyes. This, strangely, is familiar; an after-image from a previous life. One of stumbling barefoot through forests and drinking enough wine it replaced all the blood in your veins and offerings made in the moon-dark, in the damp grass, and all the flies that would gather in the morning.

He shivers beneath the touch of the leaves, cool and dry as skeleton fingers. Oh, the storyteller and the listener carry such different memories.

At her words he smiles, though she does not see it as she turns away for the bell-shaped purple plant. “The first one’s always free,” he says, and thinks of the story in the meadow, of moonflowers and children and the air scented like a garden. “But if pain is the price for your stories I hope you keep your medicines always close.”

His gaze lifts from the richly pigmented petals to her sea-eyes, and so carefully he takes the flower from her mouth. It is more bitter than blood on his tongue, but Lysander does not grimace as he swallows beneath the bird-song morning, as he waits for the plant to take effect.

How much of the world, he thinks, could be both healing and hurt, depending on the measure.

In the light slanting gold her scales glitter the same as her eyes, the both of them telling of sunlight on the sea, and his heart slows to keep pace with such far-away waves. There is still a sour aftertaste in his mouth but her words are sweet and soft, and though he would prefer to watch the way the morning makes a goddess of her he obeys when she coaxes his eyes to close.

Already it seems to him that it stings less, though it might only be her words. The world smells of the cool cleanness of pine and the bitter, wet tang of crushed plants, and Lysander sighs and lays his head across his knees, his muzzle on the carpet of pine and rich soil.

And he listens and listens, and begins to forget there was ever a world other than the one caught in tines of bone and cobweb.

call me in the darkness

@Isra

[Isra]

Isra of the golden web

'God sobbed for his lonely bird and dashed himself upon the diamond sharp threads of his web to have caused such sorrow'


“And there was one spider among the many who called himself 'God' and spun webs made not of silver and dew-drops but gold. He wove many a great thing into his golden universe web. Sometimes he would weave so fast that the sharp edges of his universe would prick his belly and he would bleed.” Tenderly she brushes her lips over his eyes, upwards to were the tines of his own antlers hang empty but for a single white feather that smells of salt.

What worlds, she thinks, might that feather hold in a different universe than this one?

Isra takes a deep breath and it stings with the septic smell of the healing paste. She licks the last of the burning flavor from her lips and continues, watching still that slow throb of his lungs and heart beneath his skin. ”When he bleed the drops of him would look like rubies on his web and where he bleed there also was not empty universes as the other webs held. His gold web was filled not with universes made of dew-drop seas void of life but black mountains that teemed with flowers and trees that dripped red sap and looked like shadows on the blood-ruby's edges.”

Above them the sun curves onward and the shadows seem longer when she blinks and rises from the drowning seas of her stories. Carefully she looks at the wound beneath the leaves and breathes away the flies that have landed since the start of her story. But the story soon calls to her more than the dried blood that still clings to her like ash.

And so she continues once more, curling her head against his shoulder as if she too is settling in to dream away the last autumn heat of the day. Her horn lingers like a kiss against his cheek and she wonders if the vibrations of her voice might whisper to him like webs whisper against the bellies of the spiders that weave them.

That slow, almost thready beat of his heart soothes away her worry while the whispering syllables of her voice soothe away the sweat and fear that coated his skin. “There was on one of those bleeding, weeping trees a bird. He was the very first of his kind, the first living thing to live in a universe that lived on a web that hung between the antlers of the elk large enough to be everything.” Isra breathes and idly draws out the pattern of a web on his shoulder where she rests. Her lips paint out spirals across him, arcane symbols of a language that only story-tellers know.

“He was so lonely, that bird, floating between the trees and the mountain pyres and the ruby-red sky that echoed only his bird-song back to him over and over again until he learned to hate it. All his songs were sad and he prayed over and over again even though he had no idea what instinct is was that made him whisper prayer in the chorus of his songs.”

The shadows lengthen more and Isra and Lysander make reflections across the dirt and stone that seem to stretch out from their bellies like trees. How quickly the hours pass by her when she weaves her webs that could be made of ink and glittering flakes of green-ocean scales.

“And one day the 'God' spider moved back towards that ruby that held life on his golden web. He heard the bird-song echo and his heart broke.” She replaces her horn against his cheek with her lips and she brushes away the crusted sleep from the corners of his eyes.

“Wake up.” The words seem not like an end but a promise when she sheds her story-teller soul and becomes once more nothing but a unicorn who seems to be of the deepest parts of the sea.

[Lysander]

 
 
 

Her words are waves that pull him gently from the shore of consciousness and carry him sweetly, softly, to the sea of dreaming.

And dream he does: for the first time in a long while his sleep is not a black and empty thing but a rest populated by worlds. Like sunlight through water her voice colors his dreaming, fills it with spiders and gossamer thread, with sorrowful birds and blood like gleaming dew.

There is no shadow of pale wings that darkens the corners of the world Isra has built; there is no drip on stone of blood or seawater. In the waking world his breaths are even and slow and what breeze finds them, huddled together beneath the swaying branches of a pine, only stirs the edges of the feather that clings to his antler, tacky with dried blood.

The pain does not touch him here, either; it is only a memory, something that waits for him on the sandy shore, a dark vulture circling. In the deep he has no name. He is only the listener, whose skin twitches and whose muscles stir to her touch, but whose mind is far away. Until —

Wake up.

Ah, he is reluctant to wake. He would much rather linger here, her lips upon his cheek, his brow - more contact than he has had since he wore a different skin.

For a moment longer his eyes remain closed, lashes fluttering darkly against his cheek. As he drifts to consciousness his skin begins to forget the patterns she’d traced, words in a language he can’t speak; his body starts instead to remember pain. A lesser pain than the morning’s, but real enough to remind him of all that had passed.

With a breath deep enough to make his injured ribs sting and ache he opens his eyes, and is surprised to find he has lost a day.

“Isra,” he says, and his mouth shapes the name as if it has always known it. When you are in need, who will save you? he thinks, but oh, his dark heart already knows the answer. Any listener to her tales - man or beast or bird or regretful spider - would rush to help the storyteller.

His dark-forest eyes meet the ocean of her own and not for the first time he wishes he could stay. Here, tucked against her side like a child, lulled by her voice, carried to other worlds. He could follow her, he thinks, and worship her as they worshiped such women in the ancient days.

But someone in this world waits for him, and Lysander has never been young, not truly. And if he is hunted (and oh, he knows how such monsters love to hunt), lingering with the unicorn would only put her in danger. Even the most callous of fallen gods could not bear such a tragedy as that.

Yet he still makes no move to stand. The night is coming on; when he speaks again his words drift below a symphony of crickets and frogs and the sigh of the evening wind.

“I owe you more than thanks alone. If you are ever in need - of anything - send word to me.” He does not add that none who remembered being a god could stand to owe a debt, or how his blood already begs to pay.

But he wonders if he dreamt the press of her horn against his cheek, and what it might mean that he misses its touch.

here at the end of dreaming

@Isra

[Isra]

Isra of the fragile courage
'A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.'



Everything changes when he wakes and looks at her with lucid, forest dark eyes that remind her of the darkest seas where only moonlight and silver dares to go. She could feel glutted on that gaze and the stories, that turn with his look, from dim things of ink and words to legends of starlight that make her quiver like a harp-string. The coming night feels heavy with that look of his and all her pores hum and burn and taste metallic when she licks at the iron of his blood that still lingers between them and on their skin.

His suffering was easier to bear, his dreaming state between the cool blackness of death and the whiteness of survival that also feels like dying. Isra can understand that stallion, the hunted one who rattles out his last breaths and seems as thin and fragile as gossamer against the mountain valley.

This Lysander is harder to smile at, harder to touch and not feel like she's a spider ducking out from the looming shadows he makes under the sky lights. It's only that faint echo of pain in his gaze that makes her smile and she locks onto that darkness like it's rainwater to the desert of her courage.

“Shh,” She says, and presses her smile against his lips to stop any more words from taking their life from the power of his lungs. “you owe me nothing besides perhaps,” Her words flutter on her lips where they sting from pulling away from him. The whisper against her tongue and she feels as if she has accidentally swallowed a butterfly. It's more two blinks of her eyes before she gathers up her courage from the dark rainwater of pain still lingering in his gaze. “--friendship.”

Her smile flickers like her courage and some part of her, buried and forgotten and stained whispers; slave, slave, broken slave.

“Linger awhile.” She says as she pulls away and rises, gathering her legs beneath her so easily that she seems more deer-like than horse-like by the way she moves. Perhaps it's the way a unicorn moves, but her bones know better than her soul and they've yet to tell Isra all the secrets buried in this strange skin of hers. “Just until the moon sets and the sun rises. Linger and I'll tell you how the story ends.” The words drift like the breeze as she walks away, warm with the last of the day's heat but cool with the dark shadows of the forest that wraps around the two of them.

Isra is gone just long enough to bring back strips of supple, white birch bark and long streams of ivy that drag in whispers through the thick forest loam. “Can you stand?” She asks as she joins in the looming shadows that look almost like monsters and angels in the moonlight that has started to crest above the horizon.

Above them the new pricks of starlight seem like a million, hungry eyes watching the story-teller and the stallion (who might be an elk) beneath the canopy.

[Lysander]

 
 
 

He tries not to wonder what she might have made of him, in another world, when he could water the soil with ichor and rise again unaided with the dawn. Would she have told stories of him and his - would she have joined them in their dark dreaming, their blind and frenzied seeking?

Oh, it is growing harder to think of those long nights up above the vineyards. They feel to him as last winter’s antlers - dead and left, apart from the fact of him. Lysander is no god - and here beneath her care, still hazy with dreaming and herbs, it is not so hard to wonder if he ever was.

Surely no god would be as grateful for the touch of a healer in some dim mountain hollow. But he is, he is.

“Friendship,” he echoes, remembering the feel of her lips against his, “is as new to me as bleeding. But I hope I will have a talent for that, too.”

The antlered, injured stallion does not know what her heart whispers to her as she pulls away. If he did he might tell her not to listen; if he did he might say that her rusted chain is the least part of her, a reminder only that she has escaped.  

Instead he only watches as she goes, and shivers where the night-wind now reaches him, and listens darkly to the things his heart murmurs to itself.

It is well that she returns quickly, melting out of the darkness like a figure from one of her own stories. Lysander had begun once more to think of a golden girl with flowers tangled in her hair, trapped within a holy place. He might have staggered to his feet, might have made his way beneath the moonlight, heedless of what would be hunting in it (though surely the monster is as grounded as he; it is not for nothing he can still smell the iron of her blood).

Instead he smiles in the dark at her question, and blows a breath to stir the dust below him before raising his gaze to hers.

“I think my body could do anything you asked of it,” he says, and if there is something fox-sly beneath the words, some remnant of a man (a god) he was, who could blame him? High up in the mountains it is easier to remember fog rolling through columned temples, and madness in the woods, and how there was nothing to make you so full of living as nearly dying.

But whatever dark glimmer of humor lives in the deep-wood green of his eyes, it fades when he does rise, and he draws air in with a hiss as his side sings with pain. At least it is brief, and faint, and bearable - thanks to the unicorn.

It is strange to see her standing there, with birchbark curving and pale as bone, and ivy - ah, it is a different kind of ache to remember the last time his body was wound with such. “Let’s have the ending, then.” Lysander turns his gaze away from the night-birds that are only black v’s on the darkening dim of the sky, turns his thoughts away from what else might hunt there.

Lysander wonders about stories, and if their endings are chosen or made.

it's a long way down

@Isra

[Isra]

Isra of the infinite end
'and even the devil may cry when the night ends.'



“We can learn together then,” She says as his antlers rise up, up, up like an altar to the moonlight and his legs gather beneath him with all the grace of a soul that is so much older than flesh and bones. Older perhaps than the white birch tree that offered up its skin so that his soul might live to see a decade of constellations. “You and I.” It's easier to say the words between the weighty sighs of his lungs, between the blinks of his eyes as she watches the pain run over him like a tide over the shore of his bones.

It's easier to pretend the words don't give away another secret of Isra, another piece of the parts beneath this still new skin. It's easier to forget that when she watches each shiver of pain that runs down his spine she feels as if flies are nipping at hers.

Perhaps, she wonders as she grasps an end of iv in her mouth, this is the great secret to friendship-- this suffering. Surely the masters never felt each prick of the lash against her skin as an icy stab of winter through their own hearts. Mercy. She wonders where she learned to feel the emotion like a fire inside her marrow.

“For now I will only ask it to stay so very, very still.” The words are muffled with echoes of bitter bark and sweet ivy flesh. Isra sighs when she uses the gentle magic in her blood to lay the first strip of birch over his wound. She watches him out of the corner or her gaze and her heart feels like the flickering pulse of a star when she matches the thrum of it to the song beneath his skin. For a moment she forgets that they are two very different creatures and only blood and bark and ivy to tie them together at all.

When she lays that first strip of ivy across his spine and begins the start of the story's end (and their end), her fresh sigh sounds like the whisper of fog through the silver-toned gloam. “And one day the 'God' spider moved back towards that ruby that held life on his golden web. He heard the bird-song echo and his heart broke.” Isra picks up where she left off and where he awoke from that strange at the juxtaposition of pain and dreaming and living. “It broke into a hundred tiny drops of blood with edges that were sharper than rubies and sharper than the diamond threads of his web. The spider broke for that sorrow-song and the loneliness of the bird who lived only by the magic of spider-blood that only had such magic because of the great elk he lived upon.”

Over and over again she binds the birch bark across his wound with ivy and each pull is tighter and neater than the last. “He wrapped that jewel up in a cocoon of silk, bound it with every ounce of thread that he had left inside him. The mountains inside that jewel of the spider's blood turned dark and only specks of light shone through the sky of diamond web. And still that bird flew on the the darkness and he sang and sang in prayer and hoping.” Her voice sounds like song now, broken up with flutters of her breath on leaves of ivy that seem to turn up before her words like the mighty oak leaves turn belly up for the rain.

“Once the 'god' spider was done weaving his cocoon that was dark on the inside and a star on the outside he looked at all those sharp, diamond edges and smiled. He remembered what magic was in his blood, reminded by the bird's song that it was so much greater than his eight legs and eyes and any magic web he might dream of.” She ties the ivy off with a bow, fragile and curling with leaves that will soon wither and die so far from the soil where they lived.

When she looks at him instead of his binding her smile is less of a stoic thin. It's more of a meteor flashing like a crystal across the dark expanse of her face. “And as he smiled the spider used the sharp edges of his own knot of web to cut open the vein that carried all his blood from his heart to the rest of his mighty, magical body. His smile never faded as his web turned dark with blood and crusted with crystallized wishes of life.” Isra pulls away with a kiss to his cheek and she wonders if he can feel the blood stiff crusted on her lips.

The hours have passed far to quickly while she bound him with words and bark and ivy.

Already the sun is starting to turn the forest to golden tones instead of silver. “Inside the ruby where the bird lived above and upon the mountains something amazing happened while he still sang and sang and sang...” Isra laughs and the forest glitters with drops of dew as if it leans closer and closer and closer to hear the end of her story that lives in the pitches of her laughter.

“Come back to me someday, Lysander, and I will tell you the end.” A whisper and then she's gone, dancing through the golden-tinged woods as dark and teasing a sight as a giant elk that dances through the night-sky like an amber eyed doe. And as she dances through the woods like a dream she wonders if it's only the promise of his friendship that has made her so bold and something that might almost be fearlessness thrums wildly through her blood.

 
@Lysander