lysander
Here is a story for the teller –
Once upon a time Lysander was nothing at all like a man. Oh, he had the shape of one, shoulders broad and tousled hair, laughing mouth and laughing eyes – but his heart was not a man’s heart, if he had a heart at all.
What had that made him, then? Were gods just as good at being monsters? Perhaps he was one, depending on the side of the story you looked at. Certainly on those true-dark nights when the only light was the flames, and those were fed higher and higher until they burned and ate at the bottom of the stars, he must have been a terrifying thing. Not on his own, merry and sly, but because of the creatures around him. In daylight they were women but on those nights, oh, they were so much more, feral and bloody-handed.
At the beginning it was not so different than this – there was music, there was wine, there were voices weaving spells of stories long into the night. And then (he can remember it still, and it quickens his blood, hot hot hot with memory) the night became a thing no longer for mortals.
Would she have fit in there? Would she have let herself become more? Lysander wonders. Maybe the both of them are less, here. Certainly he is, skin like paper and brittle-boned.
So they stand together, the girl who wears a weapon she forgets and the man who forfeited his power for his own curiosity. (They are alike in this way, too: he also forgets what it means to be real). He watches her step back into the rough embrace of the bark, and wonders what she might do if he were to close the space she opened between them.
Instead he shifts his weight, stands hip-cocked and considering. His gaze had been on the chain, caught like any curious thing by the sound of its ringing, but when she speaks he lifts it back to her.
Her story had had the pull of a tide and her words now catch him like a wave, rocking over him. He is more chained to the mortal realm than any man.
“Maybe he loves it,” he says, but he sounds more unsure than he ever has. “Maybe it’s what he wanted all along. He still has power, and her love.”
In the end, he thinks, it is only the ocean; it is only the moon. It is only a story.
Lysander shakes his head at her next words, for he can see the beauty of her – even bare branches have beauty as they stand against the winter cold. Even dried stalks bloom again come the rains. And she has her horn, and that whisper of glimmering scales, and her voice like a river.
He wants to ask her if she knows any happy endings, and if she would tell them if she did. Instead, softly, he asks the girl with her eyes pressed closed: “If one of those children were to bring you a moon-flower tonight, and if your story were true, what is it you would wish for?”
The once-god finds he would very much like to remember what it is, to grant wishes. Even if his own had always been paid for in blood.
@Isra
