lysander
Lysander is unmoved before her anger, a rock amidst the breakers. It is not uncommon, for him, but tonight he is helped along – made heavy by wine, lulled by stories and by song, curved edges further smoothed by the sweet dulling of cannabis. Even his gaze is sleepier, darker, a midnight thing – old vines crawling up a gravestone worn smooth by time.
Little could rouse him, in such a state. Certainly not anger that he had earned and expected.
But something twists in him like roots uneasy beneath the soil, drawing water to a rotting trunk, to see the hurt in her eyes. He has never before considered that the things he says, the way he feels (or doesn’t feel, of late), might be wrong. A god could only ever be themselves, and what was the use of questioning?—
Sometimes he forgets, even with his beating heart and running blood and adrenaline that can turn so sharply, so neatly to fear, that he is only mortal. No god at all but a man, and men change all the time, slipping into new skins quick as feelings.
When the story-teller had stepped back from him, he had not pressed her, had not closed up the space as neatly as a stitch. But when Florentine does, when her eyes flash even in the darkness, he draws nearer.
“Never,” he answers, and the night hums around them, all black save for the fires that spit sparks like stars.
It is a truth, and oh, he is relieved to have spoken it at last. It is an answer to a question he had not known he was asking himself, again and again, as he let himself drift through Novus like nothing more real than smoke.
He begins to extend his muzzle toward hers, drawn as any crooked thing to her bright spun gold, but he stops at her following question. At the sorrow in it, so young, so unlike the child he had met.
“When should I have?” he asks her, and his eyes gleam like a fox’s in the light thrown up from bonfires. “When you were telling me of being queen, of the people you inherited? When I accompanied you to the midwinter party, and we found your lover and your regent? When first we met, when only weeks ago you had been a little girl?”
He does not say When I was dying?, for he knows how the word would catch in his throat, would cut up his tongue with the rich copper of blood.
“Your parents have spent their lifetimes taking care of themselves, while you weave in and out of time. Now you know – and yet here you stand. Will you leave Novus tonight to save them?” His voice is quiet, a wind that weaves through a midnight wood – but it is a late-autumn wind, with winter behind it. “I followed you here. But why did you come to Novus, Florentine? Surely you knew how the riftlands would end. You are the only one who could know.”
There is nothing accusatory in his tone, and still he stands, neck half-extended, near enough to touch. But he only waits, and thinks of how she is the nearest thing to a god he knows.
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