The gods have trapped the regimes.
The note had been an untidy scrawl, the messenger-bird windblown and weary. But Lysander did not need the words to tell him the news; he already knew it, in the deep-dark of his heart. He’d known it since the first shudder that had rolled through the city, knocking vases from tables and rattling pictures in their frames.
He had not believed in the gods of this place. If they’d ever lived, he’d thought them long since faded to dust and bones and silent monuments.
But it seemed they were awake, and their appetites for praise were all the sharper after their long slumber. And Florentine was not made for bowing.
Nor were those gilded and guilty horses of the night court, though they were as hungry for it as the gods themselves, and Lysander did not like to think of the golden girl encaged with such a group. He did not, in fact, want to think at all –
And so instead he ran, heedless and harried through the long grasses that whispered against his legs, his sides. It was easier to run, to feel the stretch and burn of muscle and sinew and ignore the world but for the burn of his lungs and the wind in his hair.
It was easier because he knew even as he did it that he was helpless to do anything else.
When he arrives at the temple it is dusk, and the fireflies mirror the stars above, little guidelights in the gathering dark.
The building is long-abandoned, and nearly consumed by weeds. Vines trail up one side, a living wall with leaves that whisper like a secret in the breeze. Its walls, once smooth, are bleached to the color of bone and chipped and worn with time.
His hooves echo on the marble as he steps inside.
Once a place like this was a home to him, too. Now it’s with a stranger’s eye that he appraises it: a long, low offering table with withered flowers and polished stones, empty thurible with the ghost of incense drifting through the empty space.
A gleam in a dim corner catches his eye; a rough-hewn face, a horse head cut from stone with blank and staring eyes of marble. Lysander crosses to it slowly, his shadow slanting across the dusty floor, his antlers curved like scythes.
It is autumn and his antlers are once again shedding their velvet. It hangs in bloody strips, just as it had when he’d first arrived; born into blood on Novus’s soil. All the blood he’d smelled since his arrival here had been his own, salt and iron and sin.
Florentine had saved him before, but he can do nothing for her. He is not a man accustomed to feeling helpless. He is not a man accustomed to the kind of rage, of dark wrath, that unwinds within him as he stares at that impassive stone face in the near-black.
Now he leans forward, scraping first one arc of bloody bone and then the other across the statue of the god. His antlers clatter and rattle against the bust, striping it dark and wet and gruesome, and at last he steps back, grimly satisfied.
Vespera is a frightening, feral thing with her cheeks and eyes streaked red-black in the dim. Surely this is more in her image.
Men were sinners, but men could change. Gods –
He thinks of the black unicorn, then, her voice acrid and black as gunpowder. Blood is to be paid in blood. He thinks of what had been written at the bottom of the summons the bird had brought to Terrastella.
“Go in peace,” he murmurs, and then he shoves his shoulder against the bust, harder and harder until it topples off its column to splinter on the floor with a shattering crash.
The temple seems to shiver and moan, but it is nothing like when the whole of the world shook as stones from the summit crumbled in.
Afterward, there is only silence.
we wake with bright eyes now
all welcome! come share in his blasphemy or accost him over it
