[P] we are brave, we are bruised

[Florentine]

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Darkness fell silent and thick. It might have been the first time she didn’t watch the sky as day tumbled into night with a sky full of bruises.
 
Flora’s heart is a slow, slow beat within her chest. The music pushes her and pulls. It drifts, light and enchanting, from the stage and slips through the crowds that press and sway together like grasses in a meadow.
 
Children run by her, sticky sweet and breathless with joy. Florentine watches them go. A part of her timeless soul, the part not yet fully grown, is tugged and pulled loose by their smiles. It is a flag upon a pole, pulled by the winds of childish abandon.
 
Florentine thinks of Raymond, of Calliope who have found their way from the Riftlands to here. It was only ever supposed to be Florentine’s mistake, but the Rift magic was a wily thing. It heeded Fate not at all. It had no need for Gods. Rift was its own master and a chaotic blend of magic and time.
 
Their presence here was warming and yet to look at them was to feel a blade in her heart. A part of her has waited, has woken each morning waiting, wondering if her parents too might find their way from the Rift… But they don’t.
 
The Riftlands are ending.
 
Lysander, Lysander.
 
All at once, Florentine is no longer a slow, serene stream meandering through the crowds. Instead she turns into the rush of a river approaching rapids. She weaves faster through the crowds with eyes that search and look and peer beyond the crowds.
 
She said he would tell her more and he told her he would, if she kept him alive. Florentine had, with blood upon her skin and a jagged piece of a dagger pulled from behind his ribs. She had tied that boy more firmly to the earth, to mortality.
 
Anger bubbles within her, it urges her steady heart to beat faster, faster. She pushed through the crowds like water through rapids and stops only when she sees a glint of antlers.
 
She breaks from the masses like an electron from an atom. There is no part of her that does not stalk. Those eyes of amethyst and tiger orange do not stray from him. Of course she would find him here, upon the fringes of the festival, watching. Always watching.
 
Every time Florentine turns to him, he is watching, from the edges, the corners. Always he is relaxed, drinking in the world as though it is whiskey from a crystal glass.
 
Florentine might have been hesitant in her approach had she known the gods of Ravos her brother told her of, included Lysander. Maybe she would have stood and regarded him, wondering where the darkness lay in him, like a pot of ink waiting to be dipped. Ah, but wasn’t Florentine just as likely to be the girl to hold the feathered quill and draw carelessly upon her skin with that black, black ink?
 
For once she does not go to him, does not start their encounter with a touch. It feels strange to stand away from him, but she does, for this moment. “You owe me, Lysander.” His anthousai breathes. But it is not his life she wants payback for, it would never be that. His life was a gift she would forever give him, if she could. Florentine is not selfish, but she is about losing her flower boy.
 
“Why did you come to Novus?” The fae girl asks and steps towards him. There is more than one answer that might please her, but many, many more that would leave her unsatisfied. Yet, above all, she simply wants to know. It is her time to know.

@Lysander

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world