always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
You taught me the courage of stars before you left.
If she closed her eyes, the sound of her broken wing upon the floor was not feather over wood at all, but a brush across a painted canvas. Such a thought, of vibrant colour and graceful lines, made something beautiful from a wing so terribly twisted. Could she dance? Move as if her body were the artist and her wing the brush and the wooden floor the canvas? Could she?
She does not know, so she tries. The girl moves to a rhythm of twilight and the chime of evening stars blinking awake to watch a girl move like a comet. Florentine twirls across the floor – and watch how her wing swirls too! Dust lifts from the floor where gilded feathers drift. The lazy grey clouds twine with her dancing feet and rises like up, up, up as glittering stardust. No gravity could pull it down, not when the girl’s good wing reaches, reaches, as if ready to pluck the moon out from the sky.
Florentine still has not opened her eyes, for to open them is to see the way her wing does not straighten. To open her eyes is to see the way it hangs, twisted and wrong, like the fall leaves upon the tree. Does her wing also wait to fall like a leaf from the bough of her shoulder? She prays she might keep it.
Ah! She presses her eyes tighter still and dances, dances, dances. She begs for a queen who can make anything from nothing. Might then her falling petals (cascading like tears from her mane – for Flora’s eyes have already shed too many tears) turn to glitter and stars? Might they be filled with something other than grief and pain and worry? Might her wing turn straight and right again?
There is a music that fills her ears and it is the sound of hooves, the sound of laughter, the sound brushes and trees and twilight winds. The music draws a smile upon her gilded lips and on she dances, through the moonbeams falling from great lattice windows. The dust follows her like a veil and still Flora does not dare open her eyes. Down the hall, down the hall the slender girl dances listening to the walls that sing of her song and whisper of a wing upon wood.
There is wine in his blood and it does not feel like starlight but like soil - rich and dark and dead but growing, oh, growing.
The meeting with Eshek had planted a seed (and what rotten fruit might it yet bear?), but it is what the golden man had said that stirs his thoughts now, as he returns to the castle with the rough whisper and scrape of autumn leaves stirring around him. Evening has been swallowed up by night and the scent smoke and incense clings to the dark curl of his hair, but it is the desert Lysander thinks of - golden sand, golden ichor, and a silver Ghost on a bloody throne.
It is hard to keep his tangled thoughts from revenge as he crosses the threshold into Isra’s keep, and sees her magic illuminated by each flickering candle. Gold twines among the marble like vines of ivy across temple walls, veils of dark fabric with diamonds caught like dew in a spider’s gossamer web fall across each doorway. And yet the eyes of each passing page and kitchen-maid are hollow, hollow, hollow.
So he does not think of Isra, but of the White Scarab and how it had made him think of home. The trickle of wine poured into a crystal-cut goblet, the soft sounds of dice on a velvet table, the susurrus of voices that spoke only in murmurs, bargaining secrets like gambling chips. The shadows curl across his skin like soft ferns and he feels heavy and slow and satisfied as god drunk on worship.
But there is a new sound that comes to him when he reaches their hall. It is the sound of bare feet upon the floor, the sound of feathers stirring still night air. Lysander leans forward (and the world tilts with him, heavy-slow, dark red as wine) to listen, not yet taking the corner, letting instead his eyes fall closed. A silver dagger bumps against his chest and below it his heart beats slow and sure, and on his mouth a smile blooms.
When he rounds that corner he does it as softly as only a forest-god can, and his green eyes swallow her down. For all he drank he finds he is thirsty still -
So Lysander fills himself with the sight of her, drinks her in with each drawn breath. He forgets all thoughts of gods and men in favor of the girl before him, who is golden, who is smiling, who traces patterns with her feet and her wings (no matter how bent, it does not pang his heart tonight).
A hundred priestesses have danced at his altar, a thousand nymphs within his deep wood; but none, oh none, have ever stirred him like the slender girl in the moonlight before him.
And she is his.
Only now does he announce himself, though he does not yet step from the shadows he wears. “Keep dancing,” he says, low, and it is command and prayer and plea.
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
You taught me the courage of stars before you left.
There are swirls through the dust. Great sweeping patterns of polished wood furl and unfurl in silent grace down the length of the hall.
The tip of her wing is dark with dust and its gold is turned to copper in the light. Her other wing still extends up, up. It is an arm beneath which she dances, a wing outstretched to catch the sigh of midnight air. The wind does stir through open lattice windows and it might draw her into the sky and ease her mind to forgive her other wing, the one that has forgetten how to fly.
But the only flight the girl makes is across the floor. She is fleet of foot and full of song. What rhythm is it that her feet find? She is slow as a lament and then fast as a polca. Her heart spins in her chest for the song, it joins with the moving of her feet and soon the girl is one with the dustmotes as she swirls and dances a waltz along the moonlight hall. Florentine’s amethyst eyes open to watch the particles drift by her through silver light. Oh they are grace and beauty and together they dance, the girl and dust, endless and time-struck.
The gyspsy might have laughed then, if she did not smell a scent of pine and flowers. Her steps slow, as if ivy creeps from the ground to capture her limbs. Slower, slower the girl dances and, though she longs to, her eyes do not lift from the dust motes swirling about her.
Slower and slower she waltzes, waiting, waiting and then there is green upon her. There is ivy in her heart and ferns framing her soul. He has inspired a forest within her. Florentine is a wild wood, grown just for him. There is no part of her he has not reached and her steps slow, slow. She can feel grasses brushing against her knees, hear her sounds of his breath like a breeze through the forest boughs. Her lashes are the silk of a golden spider’s web hung between branches and her mane the waterfall of a weeping willow.
All at once he steals her away, as he should have, once. But war came knocking for Lysander.
Keep dancing, his prayer implores her. It is a command that creeps along her spine, each word a fingertip pressing, brushing. Obediently, Florentine does not stop even as her dance slows. The dust motes watch the forest god, a boy kept from his magic, kept from his divinity. They veil their partner, as if she might need protection. But…
“Do you remember when we danced barefoot?” The flower-girl hums, thoughtful and soft, “Upon the black glass and beneath a sky full of stars…” and things that swirled in the night. Florentine slows again, until she falls still all momentum lost to her dreams, her memories. Her chin is tipped up, up, up. She hears the call of the stars, feels the warm of obsidian glass beneath her feet. Ah, eternity lay beneath that glass floor and she was not afraid for it to tumble through.
“Will you come and dance with me again?” And Florentine looks to her boy of revelry and liquor, and smiles with the gold of sunlight dawning through a temple of trees.
There is no music but the drum-beat of her feet and the whisper-rustle of her wings and the sound of both their breathing: hers quick and slow by turns, matching her feet, and his own quiet and even and slow, the way a deep-forest fern might breath if given lungs instead of leaves.
They might not be in a palace in Denocte, build up by dreams and by war, but in a temple in the wilderness far from any city. Somewhere the sunlight could reach it and fill it with gold, somewhere only goat-paths go, somewhere with the forest thick and full and still growing up and up.
Somewhere offerings were made, and blessings given.
And then she slows and he leans forward, eyes intent, more watchful and wanting than any forest-beast who crept the undergrowth. But his smile is the smile of a man.
It curls wider when she speaks - his Florentine, whose voice was a golden bell never stilled. “Of course,” he says, low, and when he blinks his eyes closed they are there again, in bodies graceful and bare and just as fragile as these, with a glass-ballroom floor and mysteries in the shadows between the stars.
One world of many - and how many yet to come? He breathes out, out, through his teeth and in the heaviness of wine reminds himself that Novus is no more to them than any of those other worlds. Oh, he has been too long a man; he will forget soon how to be a god.
If he is not careful.
Dance with me again, she says, and her eyes fall upon his, capture his gaze in the amethyst of hers. “Of course,” he repeats, and crosses to her, patterned with shadows from the moonlight and lattice.
Close he comes to her, presses his hip alongside her own, buries his muzzle in the tangled spun gold of her mane. He closes his eyes when he feels the brush of her feathers against his silver-scarred side; he inhales the scent long-familiar of the flowers bound up in her mane, which grew no where else. “If I recall you made me cast off my shoes,” he says, and there is only enough of his voice to stir the hair around her ear. “But we have nothing to take off here.”
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
You taught me the courage of stars before you left.
Lysander steps toward her and shadows fall away. He walks like a god, commanding shadow and light and Florentine wonders if it was only darkness he shed like a cloak and not his mortality.
In light he is the brown of bark growing deep, deep in a bracken wood. In light his ivy is as green as poison and Florentine does not dare to think how easily she would taste any poison he might give her. If only he looked at her with his wildwood eyes she would succumb, so utterly bewitched.
She is still as he comes to her, her words enough to draw him from darkness. Oh, that darkness he passes through like sin. He comes close and the dust motes drift from him and then back to dance through the light that halos his crown of tines. With him here the air is moss and peat and wicked flowers. The air is ivy that chokes and twines and Florentine knows there is ivy in her bones, her heart, her soul. She might never be free of them and she begs them now to twine about her wing and hold it up, up. Those vines would bandage her wing tighter than tight.
His hip touches hers, his muzzle pressed into the tangle of her mane. His breath is warm across her nape and sets her skin ablaze. Florentine yields, for what else can she do when he holds her heart with his wildwood magic? Her body curls about his, her lips finding the curve of his throat, the junction of his shoulder and neck. She smiles and drinks him in a liquor. Ah, he smells of liquor now but not smoke. She once drew back to look at him yet she is content in the tangle of their bodies, the weaving of their skin.
“I did.” She sings like stars and eternity. I laid my ear against your chest just to hear your heart beat. She does not speak of all the memories that stir the pool of her mind, but smiles and laughs and remembers, “And I told you off for smoking.”
The flower-girl’s laughter is bright, brighter than the moonlight filtering down upon them, brighter than the promise of dawn upon the hours. “We do not.” She agrees and thinks of the skirt she wore and its memory whispers about her ankles still. “Never have I been so bold in my nakedness.” She chirps and remembers when a goddess fell, only to rise in human form, naked and bold, her unicorn horn clasped tight within her fist. A shudder rocks through Florentine’s body and her lips tip into a smile. “Do you miss being human?” She asks thoughtful, curious. “I miss my hands, it was nice to tuck them into your coat.” And she trails off there, a little shy, a little warm.
For a moment he gives himself to her touch entire, closing his eyes until the world is black and there is only moonlight and her breath upon his skin. If his vines have wound their way through each passage of her heart and each slender rib, than she has turned each of his dreams to gold. Even as he listens to her speak his lashes are black against his cheeks and his attention (at once focused and dulled by drink into something pleasantly low and hungry) rests on places where her body meets his. Lysander’s pulse leaps beneath her touch and it reminds him with each beat that he is alive, that he is not a god, and that all living things must sometime die.
When she shudders it pulls him back, a tug on an errant kite-string searching out stormier skies. He presses his nose against her cheek, blows back a stray curl from the slope above her eye. “Sometimes,” he says, but when he breathes out onto her golden skin what he really means is always.“This is not the body I was born to.” Nor could it praise her in all the ways he wanted - ah, to have fingers to ghost along her cheekbones, to tip her chin up to his. To twine his fingers again in the dark gold of her curls and press a lock to his lips, as he did beneath that eternal night of starlight and distant movement in the black. (He remembers those shapes, remembers how he had cautioned Florentine not to speak of them, lest they answer to their names).
Always there was some evil in each world, but never has he done anything but watch.
It is easier not to think of that now, with Florentine beside him and the moonlight peering in through the windowpanes, with the wine still a song in his blood that lulls him into darker and sweeter dreams. But as she bends like a willow-bough toward other memories (their past or their future? was everything the same for her as it once was for him, or did she see time as a line drawn out and out?) Lysander is back in that dark building with walls soft with velvet and dim-bright with gold. Where secrets were poured out with the ease of one more glass of wine, and one more after that. Where it seemed like everything might be a gamble, and it was right to be so.
“They have beer here too.” He laughs softly and the laugh is caught in her hair, turned to gold and flowers. But he leans away, enough for a shadow to slip between them, before it dies entire. Only then, when there is nothing but silence around them, does he speak her name.
“Florentine,” he says, “I am going to Solterra.” When he closes his eyes he imagines again the sliver of blade nestled against his bone, eating up his muscle and drinking his blood. He should have hunted Raum a year ago, should have seen to it that every last Crow was struck down from the black sky. “I do not intend to come back until Raum is dead.”
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
You taught me the courage of stars before you left.
Her wing hangs, heavy and dust adorned between them. She thinks of it, of the patterns it drew upon the floor as she danced. Then she thinks of what it would be to have a hand instead. Would it be broken too? Would her fingers be unable to flex? Never has the flower-girl given much thought to missing her human life, not when Lysander was here too. How small her existence is becoming, that worlds seem less tempting just because they are without Lysander. Can she hear her dagger keening?
If Florentine let herself think about it, if she dared entertain the thought of how deep beneath her skin he was, how his vines were everywhere within her, she might despair. But the girl does not. Rather, she closes her eyes and lets shadows draw smiles upon her lips. She lets herself sink into her boy of flowers and forests. He is her wild; the part of her that always grows. His roots will reach her, his roots have founded her and they will not let her go. She will not be without him but-
I am going to Solterra. And all else he has said before this is forgotten. Flora is not surprised. They stayed after all, for him, for her, for the war Denocte fights. Her heart is a drum in her chest. Her ears ring and her blood surges like the sea beneath the tolling bells.
Raum.
He lies like a phantom between a girl and her lover. He dogs a fire-girl left to guard a kingdom. He has sent a Night queen into hiding and he brought Lysander near to his death – over Flora. Her lips are dry, her tongue the barren desert. How empty his words make her and yet how utterly full she is. Florentine is bursting with terror, with wild rage, with clawing hatred and gnawing despair. Florentine bends into him more, she presses against his skin, his body, until they could be one, because, for a day or maybe a year or more, they will be separated. And now will do, for now might be all that they have.
I.
There was no we. He does not ask her to come. But upon her lips is the declaration that begs to follow. I will go too. The words scream within her, they burn her lips, her tongue. They scold her heart, yet still Flora does not speak. Her eyes close and she kisses her god like fire, she lets her good wing drift along his skin, along the curve of his shoulder, the muscle that ripples strong and thick. Her touch drifts, in static, in friction, until it reaches skin, that is not chocolate but silver. She moves until his flesh is not smooth but puckered, broken and re-healed. It is a scar she knows as well as her own.
Florentine bore Lysander’s blood once. Her dagger drank it deep as it sought the bullet from his flesh and brought it screaming out. That scar is hers, it is Raum’s, it is Lysander’s and she lays a prayer upon it, a curse upon it and then seals it with a kiss.
Unwanted, her jests creep back to haunt her. How many times had she joked that her lover kept nearly dying? How much truth there is in her claims too! Her breath stalls in her lungs, he steals it from her with his declaration: I am leaving. Would he return? Would he return alive? Would battle change him? She turns her amethyst eyes upon her god, the only one she would bruise her knees for and knows the eternities Lysander has seen. Time does not touch them, it never did. But never has Lysander been mortal, never has death been so real. It was always she who died, not him.
Selfish girl, she aches with the horror of loss. If he died she would find him again. Of course, this is how they were, from one life into the next they would find each other. But now she has him, can she bear the loss of him? Reichenbach cleaved her heart, it was ruined tatters, little more than ash to blow in the wind. But Lysander, he would surely ruin her heart body and soul. Existence would be ruinous.
But Florentine will not follow her love to Solterra. This was not her fight and he does not ask her to come.
Her teeth find the groove of his throat in anger, oh white rage ebbs into despair. A tear blossoms at the corner of an eye, and it falls with a blink of her gilded lashes. Yet she kisses him where her teeth graze (clawing to keep him) and remembers him and finally pulls away, incomplete, a piece of her already missing. That space aches, but it is filled with trees and vines and his idle liquor smiles.
“Well, then.” Flora begins, reaching for her chain about his throat. Her dagger warms with her proximity, glimmering upon his breast. It begs to cut a window for her, for him, but Florentine ignores it for her blood is singing in her veins. She thinks she might be starlight then, she thinks that Time may split her apart, that magic may mold her very bones. Her wing hangs heavy between them but not even it will come between their parting.
“If you plan to leave me, Lysander, you had better take me to bed.” And she tugs her to him, pressing her lips again to the shadow of his jaw, to where his heart thrums, mortal fast and mortal strong. There is no joy in her kiss. There is no delight. Her eyes close tight, her lips fierce upon his skin, ah that she would never let go of him. But she does, and her lips are cold where they no longer touch his. Her breath shatters in her lungs but she turns and leads him to bed with rattling bones and an unspooling heart.
If Lysander were thinking, in those moments between telling her and her answer (in touch, in words, in the glide of her feathers over his skin, each one turning him back to a god) then he would ask her to take her dagger back. To wear it again over her heart, the talisman that is her right, but not only for her own protection. With the dagger there is no death he need fear (never mind that each change to the fabric of time makes a new cut somewhere else, unintended). With the dagger she can save him, as she has already done once.
But her touch is fire sinking into his skin, mingling there with the wine that has made his blood sweet-slow and heavy. His senses have replaced his thoughts; having drunk his fill of soft gold Lysander closes his eyes until their breathing is a tide that pulls them deeper, tugs them out to unknown waters that taste of salt like sweat or tears. Lysander trembles beneath her touch and welcomes each shiver her breath raises on his dark skin; her dancing feet are replaced by the drumbeat of both their hearts, a new tempo.
When her teeth go to his throat he opens it to her, arching his neck back until his antlers brush his shoulders. What does she make of the pulse leaping there, so alive and thus so vulnerable? He thinks of the enemies that have tasted his blood - Raum’s dagger, the monster in the temple - and almost begs her to close her teeth, to drink of him and tell him if his blood tastes of salt or iron or ichor.
It is cold when she draws away.
Her voice opens his eyes to her face and he sees the tear-track darkening her cheek, with another drop of silver at the corner of her eye. Without a thought he kisses it away, his touch tender, his breath ragged. When she tugs on the chain for a moment he thinks she might open a world - almost her begs her to, almost he asks one more time to go home-
But her words, low and sure, stop him. His gaze finds hers and both are far steadier than rough breathing or racing hearts; he says nothing but feels the smile that blooms on his lips like a vine. There is joy in him, and fierce hunger, when he returns her kisses, when he closes his teeth just behind her ear and at the nape of her neck, when he buries her muzzle in the wildflower-field of her mane.
She turns away before he can see the grief in her - or perhaps it is only that he refuses to.
When he follows her down the hall it is not war he thinks of, or blood, or revenge. It is amethyst, it is gold, it is love and aching want. It is a girl with flowers in her hair who has found him in each world, who has made him more than a ghost, more than a god.
After they are gone darkness and silence eases again over the hall, save for the moonlight slanting in the windows that turns each settling dust-mote to a fraction of a star.
