lysander
“Then she will be happy, and that will be enough.” He wonders, as he says it, if it is true. It is not in most gods’ natures to be content, or to lose; they are ever jealous things, yearning for worship, for love.
Love is what she speaks of next and though he does not nod, he recognizes in her words an echo of his own, said to a small filly with flowers growing in her mane long ago in another world. “That’s what they say,” he agrees, and wonders if he’s ever seen it (such a love that saves and gives) in all his centuries. They unfurl in his mind’s eye now like a fern, a hundred dark spirals winding to the heart of him.
The storyteller’s eyes are still closed; Lysander lets his own gaze wander her then, scales and glitter and rusted chain disguised with flowers and paint. As if all wicked, sorry things could be made lovely and fangless.
Well, who is he to say they can’t be? Isn’t that what stories are for? Little lies remade to tell new truths?
Her eyes open and they touch on him with the tenderness of sea-foam; brief as a wave her gaze washes over him and away, and the deep green of his own are too slow to catch them. Lysander lets her go, and when she steps away from the tree (though the bark pulls at her, begs her to stay) he moves back, too, leaving the same space between them.
She is like a fish, like a bird – press too close and she would fly away. The antlered stallion does not want to be the cause of her going, not of such a fair and fearful thing.
Freedom, she answers him, and the boldness of that phrase surprises him into catching her gaze again. This time, when she moves nearer, he does not pull away. He watches the arc of her horn bend nearer, the shimmer of her scales in the summer sunlight; she smells of so many things. Ashes and brine and the sweet softness of flowers.
How many stories, he wonders, does she carry in her shivering skin?
“Even one freely given?” he asks, and he is genuinely curious. Mortals loved to talk of freedom, to talk of choice; they did not realize that gods and fae were bound by as many rules, a thousand customs ancient and strange.
But he reminds herself that it is her story, and her truth.
It is not the last time her words surprise him. Oh, how many questions she has opened up inside him, this sad stranger who does not see that she could be as strong as her stories. His black lips turn up in a smile and he hesitates for only a moment before touching his nose to hers, warm breath mixing with her own, a silent exchange.
Make a wish, the girl had asked him there beside a stranger sea, and as soon as he had the world had changed around them. The sea withered to sand, and bones curved skyward, bleached for years; but it was no answer to the wish he’d made.
“I already have,” he says softly, and reaches up to touch his lips to the smooth plane of skin just below of her horn. It is a kiss or a blessing or a simple gesture of thanks, and then he is stepping back once more. “You’ll find your freedom, story-teller,” he says, and wishes for her the same thing he had wished for that little girl a world ago. Only happiness, and nothing more.
And then he turns away, his cloven hooves a whisper on the grass, to go find a golden girl with flowers in her hair.
@Isra
