[P] and I know this is a weakness;

[Lysander]

 
 
 


Nothing is the same when Lysander returns from the mountains.
 
In the time since the regimes were swallowed up by the god in the summit, summer has broken; the wind has a bite to it now that there was not before, and it won’t be long before each dawn sees a cloak of frost like leftover starlight on the green grass.
 
It has only been a few days, he thinks (though he isn’t sure how many hours he lost track of, staggering through the forest at night, sleeping in the silver fog, being healed by the storyteller) but now he bears new scabs across his ribcage, near-twins to the knife-wound that has long since turned to a silver scar.
 
There is a thin misty rain falling when he reaches the capitol, and he is bemused to find himself almost grateful for the jut of dark gray walls. Around his antlers is a blue ring of forget-me-nots, a suitor’s gift, and Lysander feels almost foolish for carrying it – but if Florentine has returned (and oh, he cannot bear to think that she might still be atop that mountain) he knows he must begin to make amends for nearly dying yet again.
 
For once he forgets his pride and asks the first passer-by he sees where Florentine is. The swamp, comes the response, and the once-god does not linger to see the way the stranger’s expression twists and turns more mournful than the silver sky.
 
He forces himself not to look skyward as he passes over the open fields, but he is careful not to make his path near the ivy-covered temple. It is shameful, his ugly fear, but he will examine it later – now he lopes (though each stride strains the injuries still pink with healing) for the humid mouth of Tinea.
 
At first he sees nothing when he enters it, each footfall soft on the damp and spongy ground. It is still gray-green here, not yet turning red with autumn, and rain-damp petals drift from his foolish crown like a blue bread-crumb trail through the swamp. Lysander pays no mind to the first lily, but by the time he sees the third he knows what they must mean. It has been some time since he was a god, but he remembers the tricks of them, the games they play and paths they lay, and he feels almost shameful (thinking back to his black words, the scrape of blood antlers on stone, the push and shatter) as he follows the trail that Vespera left her people.
 
How to describe his curiosity, almost wonder, when he finds the first staircase, carved from oak and disguised with leaves and twisting vines? Oh, he could linger here, and dream of naiads and all the strange creatures he had long since left behind, for this feels a nearer echo to those myths than anything he has yet seen. But as he climbs each knotted step, dark thoughts gather like shadows beneath boughs.
 
There are a thousand reasons the queen of Terrastella might be here, but it is the worst of them he fears. His brush with the kelpie did far more to teach him how fragile his meager life is than any blow from the Night King and his thugs.
 
At last a silent, solemn-faced mare directs him to the belly of a great tree, one whose width could house a ballroom. Lysander inhales a last rich-green, rain-dark breath and steps inside to warm darkness, where there is only the glint of gold in the dim like scattered straw.
 
The scent of blood and sharp-smelling poultices strikes him at once, so near to his own recent misadventures, and Lysander’s feet beg him to step again into the clean damp air. Oh, but his heart weighs him down, an anchor sinking for the sea-bed, and as his green eyes adjust to the semidark he bows his arch of antlers and the foolish crown of forget-me-nots drops to the whorled wooden floor beneath him.
 
“Florentine,” he says, and though his voice is bedrock below the silken soil it is more desperate, more fearful, than it ever was when it was he in a hospital bed.
 

you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night

@Florentine I am sorry for this monster, it got a little out of hand

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

Florentine.
 
That name stirs something within her. It whispers in and down through the black waters beneath which she lies. With desperate hands it pulls her up, up, up.
 
Consciousness ascends, as awareness peels back and her pain sets in, sharp and deep and unremitting. Such pain it is that steals the breath from her lungs, that remembers how her body broke like tinder before a monster. Flames have made Florentine their own. Her wounds burn, hot as fire. Her traumatised skin glows, embers in the aftermath of an inferno.
 
Florentine is always slim. She has always been delicate and slender, elven; the fae queen they call her but, in this bed of cushions, she appears more fragile still. Even with her wing spread limply at her side, this girl is dwarfed by the healer’s plush cushions.
 
Sleep beckons to her and it is as welcoming as it had been that moment upon the mountainside. Willingly she succumbs, drifting upon the midnight current. But the smell of forget-me-nots has her stirring. Inhale, exhale, ah, she knows those breaths as though they were her own. That breathing pulls upon her shattered mind and slowly, awareness dawns within her. Familiarity heats her chest and her smile is a slow lazy thing, drunk on herbs and too much pain. “Oh,” Flora whispers, coarse as sand, soft as silk. “I am still alive then. What a turn up for the books.”
 
Slowly those amethyst eyes open. They are hazy and unfocussed as they gaze curiously at the figure beside her. Moments bleed into the next, but slowly her smile grows as the figure beside her sharpens into focus. Her gaze trails over bloodied antlers and down their sharp tines to eyes, verdant as leaves. “Gosh,” She hums, musical and bright. “What did I do to deserve a handsome boy at my bedside?”
 
What a distraction he is from the searing ache of her hind limb (and she dare not look for it does not move when she asks it to).   “What is your name then?” The flower queen asks with a tilt of her gilded head and a gleam in her eye.

@Lysander - I am not sure I can write wounded Flora easily... xDD 

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Lysander]

 
 
 


Is this what she had felt, watching him wake from that deep-below, that drowning depth? Had her heart perched in her throat, a treed pheasant with the dogs slavering below? Had she felt as though she were the one dying, so still, so snared in bandages and blood?

It was never supposed to be like this. In how many worlds, in how many bodies have they met and re-met, untangling their long story ever further? If anyone should forget it should be he, bound to a timeline as he is, more mortal now than she –

But Lysander smiles nonetheless, and draws near to her across the heart of the tree, until the shadow of his antlers slants across the golden spill of her hair. Surely it is his imagination that has her flowers wilting, limp and pale. His dark smile never reaches his eyes, and those slide to the dagger at her bedside. The scabbard has been carefully cleaned of blood, but some is still black on the links that make up the silver chain. Left much longer and it would rust there.

Only a moment later his gaze falls back to her, eyes the color of hyacinths made dull by medicine. Her smile is not her smile; the gleam in her eye is not the one she shares only for him.

“Once you named me husband,” he says softly, and touches the velvet of his nose to the smooth plane of her cheek. “We have called each other many things. But I am Lysander.”

Oh, he does not want to pull away; if he could he would stay with his muzzle to her throat forever, inhaling flowers and sunlight on gold, and never pull back to see her body so broken. But with a sigh he does, forcing himself steady as his dark gaze catalogues every injury, from the bruises that bloom beneath her skin to the way her wing and leg is so tightly bound, seeping blood making terrible rosettes against the white.

Careful, he thinks, but there is wrath in him still, all the blacker to find her here like this. Was it gods or men who left her so? He thinks of Calliope, trailing him like a predator in the forest to the north, and what she had said of revenge. Never has he wanted it for himself – it had seemed less important than anything.

Now he understands. Now he would slay a dozen men to find the one that had left her broken; now he would paint the bone-pale tines of his antlers with their blood. Man or god or monster, it mattered not which – for Florentine, Lysander would carve out his retribution.

All this passes in the dim green of his eyes, yet still he wears that easy smile. It should frighten him, the way his heart churns black and blacker still, the way he feels so calm on the outside.

”Can you tell me, Florentine,” he says, as idly, as gently, as though asking her the time, “how you came to be in this sickbed?”

babe, there's something wretched about this
something so precious about this

@Florentine

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

She does not know, but she should begin to guess at the shadows that hide behind his green, green eyes. Trauma makes Florentine ignorant, turns her blind to the desires of her silent, troubled heart. It has too much to do now and it fights on, beating, beating, beating. Blood slips in her veins but it is thin, it is weak.
 
These lovers wear smiles, bright and beautiful, but his is more a lie.
 
Florentine lies because she does not know better, because her memories are shocked, kept away, kept hidden, as concussion seeps itself into her mind. With the deft hands of a pickpocket, it steals her memories away and with them the part of her heart that might still remember, were it not too tired to make its desires known.
 
But Lysander’s smile… oh that is a terrible lie and Florentine does not know better that to trust it. His touch is a balm upon her cheek. Hot breath and a touch that steals the pain from her body, if only for a moment. It makes her heart beat a little stronger; butterfly wings that turn into a hummingbird – still so small, fluttering fast. In the darkness behind her eyelids (for they are closed now, better to relish the touch he shares) she thinks she feels a flutter of familiarity, a veil that lifts in a casual breeze. But oh it falls back and keeps her from knowing. It hides all she knows once again.
 
“Lysander.” Florentine tries the name upon her tongue and would say it over and over if she did not linger too upon his other words. Her tongue still tingles with its memory when her mind begins to stray:
 
Once you named me husband. The girl takes a breath into lungs that wheeze and ribs that agonize. Ah! Shallower she sighs, chastened by pain, her smile a flickering shadow of the anguish her body paints upon the pillows.
 
“If only once then who was the fool? You or I?” The girl asks when her breath is again restored, when her pain goes back to being just a monster that prowls, no longer biting or raking its claws along her ribs. If pain were music, well, Florentine thinks that she would be the perfect instrument.
 
He thinks her flowers wilt, she does not know, for her eyes (that have trailed him curious and keen) have fallen upon the crown at his feet. The flowers there are rich where hers are indeed wilting, deprived of water, deprived of life. Such an irony it is, to see those flowers there, when her mind has, so terribly, forgotten her Flower Boy standing before her.
 
In her presence, in the shadow of his ominous words, Lysander turns black as pitch. His tines, casting dark across her face, turn her brilliant gold to shadow and ruin.
 
In his presence, even beneath that silhouette of wicked tines and violent desire, the girl glows brighter still. She frowns, at his questioning, for she does not know how the tables have turned. Florentine does not know how she stood before his sickbed and wore his blood as she pierced his skin. Neither does she know how anger seized her strong and wicked and drove her into Night to take her vengeance. If she knew, she would understand that shadow he casts over her, and how still he stands, ominous in his fury.
 
Still she smiles for she does not think she can do anything else before this boy of autumn and rain.  Even when he cuts a darkened picture above her she gazes at him and wonders what it would be to call him ‘husband’ again. Florentine would reach for him, would sink into his embrace, if only her pain would let her move.
 
“I do not know.” She breathes and sighs and aches. Her smile is stolen by a wince, a broken bone shifting, shearing. She swallows down a cry, and draws a smile redder and than red. A new droplet rests upon her gilded lips to honour the blood they both have shed.
 
Her skull tilts up, even as her body sinks into the cushions, weak and vulnerable. She does not think to be scared, not when she is alive! (For Florentine was not accustomed to slipping from death’s grasp).
 
“The nurses were whispering though. I think it might have something to do with a monster that struck me?” She returns to his question at last, but her eyes are on the floor once again, at the discarded flowers lying there.
 
“Did you bring those for me, Lysander?”

@Lysander

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Lysander]

 
 
 


Once he might have been more fascinated than anything. Once when he was fresh in a new skin, no more ichor in his veins, no matter how well he knew this golden woman he would be swallowed up with curiosity.

Gods were strangers to pain – even him, with his dying-and-rising, his born-again from soil and seed, from wine and blood so deeply red and rich they could not be told apart. Even more than death it was a mystery to him, and Lysander loved his mysteries.

But oh, he has learned since then.

So many things he knows better now, so many feelings have begun to fill up his hollow heart like alter-gifts. They will smoke out the last of the ichor and nectar from his veins like burning out a lightning-struck stump. They will leave him a man, only a man – and nothing is more evidence of it than the way he thinks But when has she ever needed a god?

Now, he supposes. But the gods, wherever they have gone, are not here to give aid to a queen.

He can feel her heartbeat quicken, the way it runs like a stream just under the gold of her skin. He can sense the agony of the sigh that follows after she says his name, a green roll of syllables that still sounded sweet on her tongue, no matter the pain. He thinks of being cradled in the wings of the monster, her teeth in his blood and her tongue on his skin – would he have stayed there, to spare Florentine from pain? No god would have such a thought – that kind of witless fantasy is born only of mortal minds.

Ah, Lysander is being washed away. What new thing lives in him now, sees with his eyes, smiles with his dark mouth?

“We are both given to foolishness, now and again.”

Her eyes fall on the flowers but his linger on her face – each note of pain, each pitch of feeling, written as clearly as ink on a page. But there is no recognition yet, and both mourning and relief lap at him like black waves. Not the kind that wash shores clean, but the kind that leave strange things littered on the beach, sharp objects from dark depths.

He watches her smile crumple like a dove struck from the sky and wishes her pain was a thing he could hunt. He might look around the dim, warm room for a poultice or a medicine but he is too caught by the blood pooled like a ruby on her golden lips.

“A monster.” He sighs, a dark wind blowing through an old and twisted forest. “I did not think this was a world for monsters, but it seems I’m growing quite accomplished at being wrong.”

How like her, to ask about flowers when she is a garden cut down. Slowly he lifts them, slowly he lays them like a garland on the pillow beside her. It is like placing a wreath at the alter of a bronzed monument, a gravestone.

He wants to touch her again, but he is only a stranger. Only the dim shadow of a god.

“I did. Flowers for an anthousai. Do you remember that word, Florentine? I brought them as an apology, but I have been spared your terrible wrath. Lucky me.” His voice is soft, his smile softer yet – but oh, what a terrible light lives in his eyes!

oh, we'll brace for it
and conquer everything

@Florentine

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

He talks of gods and monsters with eyes as dark as crypts, full of dangerous secrets. Pain makes her move upon her bed, water that ever flows ever pushes her body into motion. Ah to be a current and flow away from the pain of her wounds.
 
Yet this boy makes her run dry, has sand drying up the wet of her lips, her tongue. Her words fall dry like dunes and her veins become naught but tunnels of air. What secrets he hides, what secrets she yearns for. She leans closer, reaching from her pillows like the moon toward the earth. Florentine is empty of history, empty of words and names that made her whole. She thinks he might know everything, behind those dark and cryptic eyes.
 
She pushes sand from her lips with a laugh and tastes the red of blood. Oh it bubbles in her throat like a brook, happy and yet so wrong. Oh she is a garden cut low, with wilting flowers and blood upon the ash of the earth. But every inch of her is fertile now, a space to grow; a new garden she will be an echo of her old, a painting remade.
 
But not just yet.
 
He smiles darker than his eyes, darker than the shadows that yawn within her empty mind. Danger lingers upon those lips, curling wicked and wild at their corners. Empty of memories but full of her, Florentine leans closer still.
 
“We are.” She says, as if she knows they are both fools, forever and always.
 
A monster, he sighs with a dark wind that rattles not only branches, but her bones, and her soul. “Are you accomplished at being wrong?” The flower girl asks as she lets her gaze fall to the wreath upon her pillow.
 
Anthousai.
 
Worlds twist and turn and beg her to remember. Time presses sharp as her dagger upon her skin, as the arches of her mind. Her eyes close, as if her memories of gods and nymphs are just a reach away. Yet when her eyes open, there is no recognition there, just solemn lips and solemn eyes that fear who she might have been. “Do I have a wrath to be so feared?” Her head tilts, dark wonder seeping like ink, like eels in her veins. Her lips pull down but her heart begins to skip and her eyes fall round as the silver moon.
 
He is a shadow before her, with lamp light lit behind him. Antlers are dark promises, snagging like barbs within her sight, she feels their pain within her stranger’s heart. “Tell me how have you wronged me?” She hums a shadow, hot like fire, black like devilry. But in gold she lifts from her pillow to better look for the secrets he hides within those verdant eyes.
 
“I do not remember that word.” She breathes but her lips remember anyway and say, “You call me that.” Discord reigns within her, memories creating a truth she does not know, cannot pinpoint.
 
“I think I am the lucky one if I cannot remember how you have wronged me.” Her lips curl down, worry and warning creeping along her nerves like static before a storm. “I fear it is too easy to like you, Lysander.” Slowly she lowers back upon the bed, though she cannot temper the desire to feel his touch again.

@Lysander

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Lysander]

 
 
 


Lysander out to tell her to lie back among her piled blankets, to not reach for him, not ever – but of course he does not. He may be learning many mortal things (of pain, of love, of friendship, and the awful braiding of the three) but he is still as selfish as any god.

We are, she says, and for the first time in this little room within a hollow tree he smiles truly. It is like a fern uncurling, green and promising and oh, so young and so ancient all at once.  We Are, he thinks, and isn’t it true? In every world she has found him, named him, known him. It is as inevitable as breathing, inevitable as death.

Even her next question, so quick on the heels of that simple phrase, cannot dim the hope that pools in his heart like water, like light.

“If I were wise I’d tell you no,” he says, and bends close enough for his shadow to fall once more across her. “That I am always right, and very wise.” Oh, he wants to press his lips to her cheek, her throat. To beg her blood to stay where it belongs and fix her, fix her, fix her.

But the healers have already done what they can – bandages of cloth, splints of wood, poultices that smell sweet-sharp and bitter, so bitter – and there is nothing anyone can do for her memories. Do ghosts walk those halls in the dark within her mind, or are they altogether empty?

“Your wrath is famous,” he says, but his smile, the softness of his voice, belies the falsity of the words. “Known across four kingdoms. Evil kings and their courtiers flee before it.” Little lies, little truths.

Tell me how you have wronged me, she says, and Lysander pauses. His smile – that rare true one – is gone like a passing shadow beneath boughs of birch and cedar. In its place is a little remnant, a crook at the corner of his mouth. “I am not so big a fool as that,” he says, “but ask me again. When you are well.”

He considers her then, the way she does and does-not remember. He considers the way she reaches for him, though she does not remember him, and the way he hovers just out of her reach. Her hair lies like spun gold, carelessly discarded, across her pillow. “They are the flower-nymphs,” he says softly, “and once I knew them well.” Lysander says nothing at her last words, only feels his heart beat like fists against his ribcage, a warning or a wanting. When she at last lies back he is grateful, but he watches the downturn of her lips, the worry in her face.

Once, lifetimes ago, forgetting was a gift he gave to many. Strange that now he sees it only as a curse.

“Close your eyes,” he says softly, and thinks of a few nights ago, when he lay cradled by root and rock, helpless at the feet of the storyteller. “And I will tell you a story. I’ve learned a few from a friend of mine.”

but it's not late
it's only dark

@Florentine

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

If I were wise I’d tell you no. He moves closer, the shadow of him falling across her – a cloud over an autumn moon. The gold of her darkens at its touch, her skin colder for the loss of light. Yet never has she been warmer (in pain, in fanciful adoration).
 
Through the waves of pain he pulls her up, up, up. Rising from her bed like a ship from the ocean floor. She might rest for a thousand years, fall apart within the sculpted shell of this mahogany tree. But he does not let her rest, not when his shadow looms close and like the sun he pulls her in.
 
“Then I am glad you are not wise.” She says with a laugh that hurts, that softens with the agony of her lungs. It ends as a breath, but it does not change her smile. It glows, warm and bright, berry red at its corners. “And I would not have believed you, even if you had told me you were always right and very wise.” And oh her smile grows like wild flowers, bright and dangerous, bright and beautiful. “It is boys like you who lead girls like me astray.”
 
In silence she studies him. In silence she thinks he should be art upon a wall, something to be adored, worshipped. Oh yes, he would lead her so terribly astray – if he had not already…
 
Her smile is gone, but for a secret one that lingers like a phantom over her lips. It is thin as gauze, fragile but thin as glass. IF he look closely he might find the whole of her laid out behind it. Her one wing, unbroken, still able to call for the wind, lifts to follow her gaze and reach for the curve of an antler.
 
Their desire is mutual, their resistance strong.
 
Her wing falls away, her feathers never knowing the velvet of an antler. In weariness it falls heavily beside her and she might have sighed, she might have grimaced with the effort of existing in pain another moment. Yet she does not, not when his lies taste like candy upon her tongue. “Liar.” She names him like a song, like a bell chime caught in a breeze.
 
“Who are you, Lysander, that you might dare to mock your queen? Brave or foolish, friend or lover… I cannot tell which, but maybe you are all of them?” From the bed of blankets and ornate pillows she regards him with quiet contemplation. In silence she lifts the wreath of flowers. “Forget-me-nots.” She says softly, but closes her eyes as he asks her to, obedient. She dares not wonder but smiles all the same, “It is a shame I have forgotten you, Lysander. But you are here and you friend is not so tell me something about you. Make it something I have never known, so that we might begin anew. ” Then, as if Time itself reaches out to press the words upon her lips, she adds, “Like always.”

@Lysander - mooooz

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Lysander]

 
 
 


He feels that this should not be so familiar – that the pattern of her words should not echo the kinds of things they always say to one another. Always she has named him with her words, claimed him, told him what he is – dangerous, foolish, mine.

She claims not to believe him, but none of those things are wrong – she knows more than she thinks, wherever her memories have fled. Florentine always has had a way of seeing things as they are, no matter how many think her too blind by whimsy, by fanciful dreams.

Lysander watches the slow lift of her wing, the dust motes that are set to drifting in the wake of its motion. He watches it reach for him, and almost he reaches back – but he swallows the desire.

If she touched him he is sure he would crumble, and he has never been a fragile thing.

Liar, she names him, and Lysander smiles. He says nothing to her questions, chimed off from her tongue like a riddle or a child’s rhyme. But in his mind he ticks them off - brave, foolish, friend, lover, and he knows which he is, and which he is not yet, and which he has never been.

His smile still lingers as she continues, and his gaze lingers too, on her, not even straying to the pale blue wreath of flowers when she lifts them. He does not wish to see how fragile they look beside her. “I am glad your injuries have not changed you so much. Still so talkative, and so demanding.” He lets that smile stay until at last she obeys, until he is released from the clear amethyst of her gaze.

It is easier to study her when her eyes are closed – to trace each line of gold, each wisp of hair, each shadow on her cheek cast by a curved eyelash. To consider the truths that have passed between them, over the years and worlds – and the ones that have not.

Tell me something about you. Make it something I have never known.

Lysander pulls in a long breath. It tastes of rich old wood, and bitter herbs ground to healing paste, and of flowers ever-growing.

“I was born a god,” he says.

Outside it begins to rain.

I can play the fool you need
make me make it up to you

@Florentine

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

“Oh now that is intriguing.” The flower girl hums, her chin tilting, her smile growing. Florentine keeps her eyes closed, lost in a world so other, so different. It is Lysander’s world and one in which he is a god. It has no name, but it is mysterious and wonderful, his voice draws each detailed landscape, even with the small five words he affords her. “I knew that your own story would be far more interesting.”
 
She longs to peer at him, now she knows why she finds him so fascinating. Is his godliness some part of him that he kept hidden? If she looked again, would he glow like the morning sun? Would his eyes blaze like hot coals? Would the earth tremble at his feet. Would she remember him or anything at all?
 
Her golden skin tingles with anticipation, she feels the touch of air upon her skin and ah, it is no different now to how it usually feels. She is disappointed, but she smiles a secret smile nonetheless. “You say that as if you are no longer a god.” Her words fade away, for the temptation to open her eyes, to drink in this boy of earth and life, has become too much.
 
Florentine longs to name him, like he has her: Anthousai. She called him friend, lover, foolish and wise but Lysander claimed none of them. Intrigue and longing pull at the threads of her, like a needle picking at the threads of her.
 
Though she still longs to look at him, she does not. Her eyelids tremble with the effort, joining her body that trembles yet more with pain. Flora’s smile turns fragile, as delicate as a fledgling’s wing. It is effort to smile, when all her body burns with healing and pain and much spilled blood.
 
“Tell me how a god loses his divinity, Lysander.” Then an eye cracks open, weary and full of pain, but laced through with a mirth she will not let slip by her. The Dusk girl holds it tight, like day clings to the fading light. In that gaze she holds him, fierce like a too-tight grasp, soft like a caress. “Did you commit some terrible deed? Or were you careless and somehow lost it?”
 
In silence she drinks him in: his eyes, verdant as ivy, as bright as an emerald still hidden below the ground, the arches of his tines, cruel like thorns, graceful like the limbs of an ancient tree. “Are you a wicked god?” She asks in a whisper so soft one might be deceived into thinking her heart beats a little faster in fear. But no fear has never seized Florentine when stood before a god. Though her mind does not remember, her soul does, and intrigue seeps through her slender torso and settles like electricity deep, deep in her breast.
 
“Even the most beautiful gods can be terrible indeed.”

And slowly she rises, like a flower from the earth, fragile and slender. Her wing hangs in gold distress at her side, disjointed, wrong. She is a downed bird, a flower crumpled, adorned in her wilted petals. Her crown of forget-me-nots lies upon her head. She presses weight through her wounded limb, its scar stark and ugly where Florentine has never been ugly before.
 
Her crown of forget-me-nots lay upon her head. “I am not a queen,” Florentine says, thought this is the first time she has ever worn a crown. “And you are not a god, so what does that leave us as now?”



@Lysander 

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world