lysander
Lysander has been taught fear, now (one of many lessons he is sure he will learn from this mortal body, this bloody beating heart), and so it is strange that he is unconcerned with the devil at his back. Maybe he is just a fool – wasn’t that the other lesson they’d meant to teach him, with their hooves and their teeth and their knives, their breath reeking of wine and petty hate?
Not even he knows why he isn’t afraid of the unicorn, though he would never admit as much. He was not made to care much for mortal things; was it not the touch of magic, wild as a maenad, within Florentine that had first drawn him to her, that birthed his fascination?
Calliope is not so different from a maenad, either. She knows the taste of blood, the sight of it on snow or sand or new green leaves.
And so he ignores her disappointment, ignores the gaze that burns on his back in favor watching the ground along the stream as though searching for a secret. (It is something of a secret he looks for – a secret with leaves gathered in fours, and a particular pattern in pale green, and small pale blooms).
But he listens well to the rough smoke of her voice, as she talks of monsters, and he does not forget the smile she shows him.
“And which are you?” he asks softly, never questioning her knowledge (he knows she is right). As she draws up beside him he pauses, and bends his head low toward a patch of fuzzy moss pale as gossamer. A useful thing, but not what he is looking for.
When he straightens again it is to meet her eye, as her midnight tail whispers against his copper skin, and her horn is strikingly dark against his antlers of bone. “I know which they’ll call you. And that they would hunt you like a dog if you gave them a reason. Has your magic left your bones the way mine has?”
Again he starts forward, with something like a sigh as the grasses bend and shiver beneath them.
“All men are sinners, Calliope. It is what makes them men.” If she were to hunt them for it, she could not stop until she had slain them all, eradicated the courts for new owners: blood, and death. But here he pauses once more, and tilts his head toward her, and there is something darkly curious in his eyes – a keenness Florentine has never seen. “But how would you see these punished?”
@Calliope
