Lysander does not dream at all.
His awareness is a distant thing, exhaustion dragging him far below the surface of consciousness, where light and movement were only distant impressions through fogged glass, through a fathom of dark sea. All the while his blood spilled, rich as rubies, leaving him a poor man, a weak man.
It is, perhaps, almost like death, like drowning in the black sea that had been promised in the gleam of her eye, the hot spill of her breath, the salt of her blood. The only difference is that there is pain, too, even in the below – and everyone knows there is no pain in death.
That is why, when he wakes and feels no sting, no bite, no searing song her teeth had left, he wonders –
But he blinks once, slowly, and then again as his awareness unfurls like the green frond of a fern and he inhales a scent that is more familiar than anything should be in these mountains. Her body is warm against his and the skin of her nose is soft as dreaming and he smiles, made languid and strange by the numbness of his side and the weariness that coats his bones like lead.
“You,” he says softly, as at last his green eyes focus on her. Her eyes are as he remembered, the blue-green of the sea fresh-churned by a storm, and they make him think of that long-ago home, where his skin had still been golden, his hair dark, his eyes green – but he had not been the same at all.
“It seems I’ve stumbled into your story,” he says, and it does not occur to him to worry. He knows nothing but what he learned of her at the festival – of her sadness and her tale and how what hope she might once have had seemed as rusted as the chain around her leg – but he has no choice, and he knows from the smells around him now that she has saved his life.
“Thank you,” he breathes, and oh, Lysander is grateful for dreaming girls who save foolish men.
the air was never sweet enough
@Isra
