lysander
Once, he’d thought of mortals lives as little more than footsteps on the shore – an imprint to some, to leave or to follow, but each washed away in the end by the hungry tide. Some gods might have thought that left them the ocean (certainly there were those that ate and took) but Lysander was always more of a stone, deep-set in the shore, immovable and mostly unchanged.
Sometimes, now that his heart is a softer, stranger thing, all muscle and blood, he wonders if he had ever been lonely.
The thought unsettles him, like rubbing a finger absently against an old wound and finding it stings; he is glad for the excuse to turn away from it when she speaks again.
The stallion matches her smile in the dark, and turns away from the sea. “To the Dusk Court, then,” he says, “where the monsters are less pretty, with duller teeth.” They walk, for a moment, in companionable silence, and if she is watching the moon caught between his antlers he is allowing himself the fanciful thought of her piercing it with her iron horn.
He remembers then the storyteller from the festival, her sad tale of love and woe, where the moon was a woman who loved the sea. Indeed, the water trailed silver beneath her, a path that could never be walked, a make-believe bridge that connected nothing.
As if she were party to his thoughts, the stranger asks him for a story. His head dips, an ear twisting toward her, his gaze still straying out to sea. Her threat makes his smile twist, dark and wry. “And then you shall ask me for another, and another, with a new if each night?” His laugh is like the moon-shine on the water, silver and rippling and insubstantial. “Very well. Long ago, in a world much like this one, of kingdoms and courtesans, there was a prince…”
Like the sea his voice rolled on, until the two strangers were gone from the high jut of the cliffs, leaving not even a trace of footsteps among the stone and sighing grass.
@Indra <3 thank you for the thread! I cheated on the story xD
