lysander
“I know the feeling,” he answers her, “though I wonder if that isn’t the nature of things. After passing through enough worlds, they all start resembling one another, do they not?” But even as he says it, he thinks he could refute it: wasn’t the wonder of all the worlds that they each carried something so specific? Surely the riftlands were unique in the universe, an accident with shining teeth. It was why he’d found them so interesting, but oh –
Lysander wonders for the first time if he is growing weary of all these wonders. If that is why even his own near-death had stirred only fleeting passion.
The thought makes him more uneasy than he cares to admit, even to himself, and he angles his face away, toward the sea. He listens to the hush of her voice over the steady rush of the waves, and despite his disquiet a smile snares the corner of his mouth.
He may have tired of worlds, but he will always carry a fascination for beautiful, ruinous things.
“That is a wise lesson that you learned from them. Was it always the singing that gave them away?” Lysander feels the warm gold of her eyes back on him, the keen gaze of a hunting eagle, and he meets it again slowly. The breeze sweeps around them, setting everything to movement save for their reaching shadows.
At her mention that he knows what he’s looking for he only dips his dark muzzle. Five minutes ago he might have agreed, but now – ah, he hadn’t anticipated searching himself on this cliffside stroll.
Dangers, though – for that, he smiles again, and flicks an ear lazily. “More than I had expected,” he says, “though I got no pretty songs out of it. I’d forgotten there were places where the most dangerous things were men, but Novus reminded me.”
Perhaps he should be thankful; perhaps it should shake him awake. The other unicorn would certainly expect as much.
But the other unicorn would never have spoken so poetically of monsters.
@Indra
