One of the great marvels of mortality is this:
The way a moment can stretch out into an eternity, a single heartbeat pulled into a great black sea with no beginning and no end.
Lysander is in such a moment now. This is why men could laugh at the gods: their whole worlds, their very existence, compacted down to the ragged pull of one breath into warm lungs. Each movement, each red wash of blood through a canyon of veins, mattered more than anything.
It seems impossible that this monster, too, might be a living thing – but cradled in the dark shadow of her wing, there below the smell of brine and the tang of salt thick on his tongue, there is a smell of iron, of blood not his own. He clings to that scent over the gnash of her teeth and the dread flood of her words, the rustle of her wings like a hundred carrion birds on a whale carcass.
Lysander needs, too.
He needs her blood to live as much as she needs his. Her wing drops down over him even as he rises to meet it, and her blood is hot hot hot where it speckles his skin like holy water. Each breath he pulls in tastes like a shipwreck, like an alien beach at low tide.
She drops her wing.
It covers him like a shroud as he tries to tear away; it threatens to bow his copper neck, to buckle his dark knees. It is a killing embrace and he feels her begin to curl in to press teeth to skin, a kiss he will not recover from.
Lysander wonders if the gods must be laughing and his fury swallows his fear.
There had been no struggle when the Night King came for him, when he was surrounded by men with laughing mouths and glinting knives. There had been no time to fight back. Now the stallion makes up for that inaction: he is teeth and hooves and antlers, black rage and bright blood and panting breath between dark lips.
And nothing is coming of it. Closer come her jaws, until he can feel her hot breath on his side; at last Lysander stops struggling beneath the weight of her wings and drops his head as if vanquished. There is a hint of dusky light against the marble floor, filtering through the tips of her feathers; he sucks in a breath of autumn night and kicks out with his hind feet.
He is too close, too wrapped in her wing, to be sure of the angle. If he is lucky, a hoof will catch her in the chest, in the neck, along her curving cheek. If he is lucky it will be enough for her to withdraw, just for a moment, just long enough for him to tear himself from her wing and flee like a stag, like the hunted thing he is, carrying a few feathers and the suffocating smell of her.
If he is unlucky –
But he is a man now, and there is no room in this eternal moment to consider such an outcome.
we wake with bright eyes now
@Wormlust
