Lysander hears the ocean there in her words.
It is not the shoreline sea, that soft susurrus like a lullaby, a thing that soothes. No; this is the truth of the waves, the deep-dark beneath and beneath that, where the light doesn’t reach. Where things are born and live and die without ever being seen because there is nothing but darkness, nothing but devour and be devoured. What waits below that word, he thinks –
Nothing but teeth and blackness.
Her laughter is nothing at all like Florentine’s. It is not a bell that rings high and clear or a brook that leaps and glints with light. It is like the crumble of the god-statue behind him, like a slick vine that wants to pull him in. He will remember that laugh tonight when he closes his eyes (if, the mortal part of his mind insists, but Lysander is still an arrogant thing in his heart-of-hearts, and he pushes the thought away).
Like a statue himself he stands, neck still arched and antlers a neat cage, still smeared bloody. They scent the air with iron like a spell against the salt of her, but he knows this is no fairytale. Later he might think of Indra, of the scars on her neck and her wry words - sometimes too close.
Now he doesn’t think at all. If there wasn’t that black rage running hot in his blood, a new bloom of heat with each beat of his heart, he might have tried to reason with her – the once-god had always enjoyed such a challenge with monsters and with men.
But he is wrathful and she is ravenous. And there is no gleam in her eye, not when she blots out the light, and Lysander’s breathing is too loud in the echoing stillness.
Yet he smiles at her promise, and scrapes a cloven hoof against the marble just to hear it ring out beneath him like a sword being drawn.
“I’ve been to that kind of rite before.” His words are rich dark earth, all fearless and full. The kind of soil where anything might grow.
Blackness falls across him as she lifts her terrible wings, and the bars of sky behind her are cut away by the veil of them. Maybe it is a blessing that he does not see her teeth.
When she steps forward he does too, and it is something like a ritual in that desecrated, holy place. Her wings blot out the autumn breeze and all he smells is rot and brine. It is easy to imagine what his bones might look like once she is finished with them: half-covered in silt, crawling with barnacles, a heathens’ kind of art. Would his bones still be holy with him no longer a god? Would they remember being cradled in ichor, not in blood?
They are so close, now, he can smell the sour sweetness of her breath. He can smell the tide on her scales, and yet he still smiles.
“It’s never as fun as it sounds,” he says, and Lysander leaps forward.
He had never been a man made for fighting, but he is tired of bleeding his own blood – here where it is so limited, so precious. Like a stag he leaps, not toward her fearsome center and waiting jaws but for the endless sail of her left wing. He will tear a hole in it if he must, with his antlers so new-sharp they are still smeared with red – even now he tosses his head for the stretch of her feathers and prays to feel the catch and pull.
With his hooves, too, he lashes out, a rear that becomes a lunge. If he had thoughts at all, they would be praying for an opening, for a split moment of daylight he might flee too – there from the plains back into the relative safety of the woods, if only he can be swift enough.
Maybe this is why men loved violence so –
Maybe their bodies craved it, remembering when there was no other option to survive.
we wake with bright eyes now
@Wormlust
