lysander
A false likeness, she says, and he thinks that this unicorn is as sharp as the tip of the iron weapon she wears. As the birds cry from their nests along the cliffside below, Lysnader wishes he had been more involved in the shaping of the riftlands, instead of walking them as a ghost. Then he might have known what to make of her, instead of only knowing that she had been there, too.
How new is she, he wonders. Does she still feel the hollow lack of magic?
He leans closer at the sound of her laugh, his gaze following her muzzle as she reveals her scars. “Ah,” he says, and sounds almost appreciative, studying those faint pale marks. It is easy to imagine the teeth that made them; he wonders if their bearer wears a scar as well. A puncture-mark, perhaps, from an iron horn.
“Not too close, yet.” For here she stood, no saltwater in her blood that he could tell – though he is not so good as he once was at sorting myth and monsters. Lysander makes no effort to draw away again, instead standing companionably beside her in the dark, near enough to feel the warmth of her, near enough her voice reached him effortlessly.
“There are too many paths to waste time walking the same one twice,” he replies. But he thinks, then, of Florentine, and how she might disagree with him. Surely she saw great value in winding back time, in retracing her steps until she could make just the right change.
The stranger is still visible in the dark, the after-image following a flash, or perhaps just a pale ghost on a sea-cliff. Down below, he can hear the waves crash and withdraw, heave and conspire. It’s an ancient chorus, and when she says a shame about the song at first he thinks she is talking of the one they listen to now.
In a way, perhaps she is – though for now the singers are sunken below the waves.
Lysander smiles at her question, though the shape of it is lost to the night; he knows the songs about him were all written long ago. They are not so likely now, when he seems little but a passenger to his own foray through mortality.
“I’m not sure they will, and I am not sure I mind,” he says. “I know others better-suited to rhymes.” The breeze picks up again, sweeping in with the scent of brine, tugging them inland by their hair. He inclines his head toward her, his antlers a dim halo of bone in the night. “Where are you headed, stranger? And would you mind company in the going?”
Even he is not such a fool to hunt for sirens in the dark.
@Indra <3 sorry for the slow
