Once he might have been more fascinated than anything. Once when he was fresh in a new skin, no more ichor in his veins, no matter how well he knew this golden woman he would be swallowed up with curiosity.
Gods were strangers to pain – even him, with his dying-and-rising, his born-again from soil and seed, from wine and blood so deeply red and rich they could not be told apart. Even more than death it was a mystery to him, and Lysander loved his mysteries.
But oh, he has learned since then.
So many things he knows better now, so many feelings have begun to fill up his hollow heart like alter-gifts. They will smoke out the last of the ichor and nectar from his veins like burning out a lightning-struck stump. They will leave him a man, only a man – and nothing is more evidence of it than the way he thinks But when has she ever needed a god?
Now, he supposes. But the gods, wherever they have gone, are not here to give aid to a queen.
He can feel her heartbeat quicken, the way it runs like a stream just under the gold of her skin. He can sense the agony of the sigh that follows after she says his name, a green roll of syllables that still sounded sweet on her tongue, no matter the pain. He thinks of being cradled in the wings of the monster, her teeth in his blood and her tongue on his skin – would he have stayed there, to spare Florentine from pain? No god would have such a thought – that kind of witless fantasy is born only of mortal minds.
Ah, Lysander is being washed away. What new thing lives in him now, sees with his eyes, smiles with his dark mouth?
“We are both given to foolishness, now and again.”
Her eyes fall on the flowers but his linger on her face – each note of pain, each pitch of feeling, written as clearly as ink on a page. But there is no recognition yet, and both mourning and relief lap at him like black waves. Not the kind that wash shores clean, but the kind that leave strange things littered on the beach, sharp objects from dark depths.
He watches her smile crumple like a dove struck from the sky and wishes her pain was a thing he could hunt. He might look around the dim, warm room for a poultice or a medicine but he is too caught by the blood pooled like a ruby on her golden lips.
“A monster.” He sighs, a dark wind blowing through an old and twisted forest. “I did not think this was a world for monsters, but it seems I’m growing quite accomplished at being wrong.”
How like her, to ask about flowers when she is a garden cut down. Slowly he lifts them, slowly he lays them like a garland on the pillow beside her. It is like placing a wreath at the alter of a bronzed monument, a gravestone.
He wants to touch her again, but he is only a stranger. Only the dim shadow of a god.
“I did. Flowers for an anthousai. Do you remember that word, Florentine? I brought them as an apology, but I have been spared your terrible wrath. Lucky me.” His voice is soft, his smile softer yet – but oh, what a terrible light lives in his eyes!
oh, we'll brace for it
and conquer everything
@
