Her words are waves that pull him gently from the shore of consciousness and carry him sweetly, softly, to the sea of dreaming.
And dream he does: for the first time in a long while his sleep is not a black and empty thing but a rest populated by worlds. Like sunlight through water her voice colors his dreaming, fills it with spiders and gossamer thread, with sorrowful birds and blood like gleaming dew.
There is no shadow of pale wings that darkens the corners of the world Isra has built; there is no drip on stone of blood or seawater. In the waking world his breaths are even and slow and what breeze finds them, huddled together beneath the swaying branches of a pine, only stirs the edges of the feather that clings to his antler, tacky with dried blood.
The pain does not touch him here, either; it is only a memory, something that waits for him on the sandy shore, a dark vulture circling. In the deep he has no name. He is only the listener, whose skin twitches and whose muscles stir to her touch, but whose mind is far away. Until —
Wake up.
Ah, he is reluctant to wake. He would much rather linger here, her lips upon his cheek, his brow - more contact than he has had since he wore a different skin.
For a moment longer his eyes remain closed, lashes fluttering darkly against his cheek. As he drifts to consciousness his skin begins to forget the patterns she’d traced, words in a language he can’t speak; his body starts instead to remember pain. A lesser pain than the morning’s, but real enough to remind him of all that had passed.
With a breath deep enough to make his injured ribs sting and ache he opens his eyes, and is surprised to find he has lost a day.
“Isra,” he says, and his mouth shapes the name as if it has always known it. When you are in need, who will save you? he thinks, but oh, his dark heart already knows the answer. Any listener to her tales - man or beast or bird or regretful spider - would rush to help the storyteller.
His dark-forest eyes meet the ocean of her own and not for the first time he wishes he could stay. Here, tucked against her side like a child, lulled by her voice, carried to other worlds. He could follow her, he thinks, and worship her as they worshiped such women in the ancient days.
But someone in this world waits for him, and Lysander has never been young, not truly. And if he is hunted (and oh, he knows how such monsters love to hunt), lingering with the unicorn would only put her in danger. Even the most callous of fallen gods could not bear such a tragedy as that.
Yet he still makes no move to stand. The night is coming on; when he speaks again his words drift below a symphony of crickets and frogs and the sigh of the evening wind.
“I owe you more than thanks alone. If you are ever in need - of anything - send word to me.” He does not add that none who remembered being a god could stand to owe a debt, or how his blood already begs to pay.
But he wonders if he dreamt the press of her horn against his cheek, and what it might mean that he misses its touch.
here at the end of dreaming
@Isra
