He tries not to wonder what she might have made of him, in another world, when he could water the soil with ichor and rise again unaided with the dawn. Would she have told stories of him and his - would she have joined them in their dark dreaming, their blind and frenzied seeking?
Oh, it is growing harder to think of those long nights up above the vineyards. They feel to him as last winter’s antlers - dead and left, apart from the fact of him. Lysander is no god - and here beneath her care, still hazy with dreaming and herbs, it is not so hard to wonder if he ever was.
Surely no god would be as grateful for the touch of a healer in some dim mountain hollow. But he is, he is.
“Friendship,” he echoes, remembering the feel of her lips against his, “is as new to me as bleeding. But I hope I will have a talent for that, too.”
The antlered, injured stallion does not know what her heart whispers to her as she pulls away. If he did he might tell her not to listen; if he did he might say that her rusted chain is the least part of her, a reminder only that she has escaped.
Instead he only watches as she goes, and shivers where the night-wind now reaches him, and listens darkly to the things his heart murmurs to itself.
It is well that she returns quickly, melting out of the darkness like a figure from one of her own stories. Lysander had begun once more to think of a golden girl with flowers tangled in her hair, trapped within a holy place. He might have staggered to his feet, might have made his way beneath the moonlight, heedless of what would be hunting in it (though surely the monster is as grounded as he; it is not for nothing he can still smell the iron of her blood).
Instead he smiles in the dark at her question, and blows a breath to stir the dust below him before raising his gaze to hers.
“I think my body could do anything you asked of it,” he says, and if there is something fox-sly beneath the words, some remnant of a man (a god) he was, who could blame him? High up in the mountains it is easier to remember fog rolling through columned temples, and madness in the woods, and how there was nothing to make you so full of living as nearly dying.
But whatever dark glimmer of humor lives in the deep-wood green of his eyes, it fades when he does rise, and he draws air in with a hiss as his side sings with pain. At least it is brief, and faint, and bearable - thanks to the unicorn.
It is strange to see her standing there, with birchbark curving and pale as bone, and ivy - ah, it is a different kind of ache to remember the last time his body was wound with such. “Let’s have the ending, then.” Lysander turns his gaze away from the night-birds that are only black v’s on the darkening dim of the sky, turns his thoughts away from what else might hunt there.
Lysander wonders about stories, and if their endings are chosen or made.
it's a long way down
@Isra
