lysander
Amidst all the destruction, all the pain of a world undergoing change (but are they growing-pains or dying-pains?) winter has come at last to Novus.
What strange storms have circled the summits of the Arma Mountains have finally wrung out their fury, and left softer cloudbanks in their wake, and a dusting of snow. It is not so easy, now, to tell the burned-places from the ones that are simply bare for the season, with all of them coated in white.
Lysander is a bright spot against a mute day, burnished copper against the white and brown and evergreen. He is hunting, but his prey, mistletoe, is proving an evasive thing. Still he is in no true hurry; his days are as idle as they’ve ever been, unconcerned as he is with court politics. There are no more rescues to be made, no more floods to flee from, no more bedsides to sit beside and spin out stories until he feels something like numbness.
He spots the fox first, small and tawny and far more out of place than he is, here at the foot of the mountains. It is a curious thing, and he pauses to watch it pass by – and is not wholly surprised to see the figure not far behind it, emerging from a copse of aspen, as striped as birch-bark.
As for himself, Lysander is impossible to miss where he stands amid the briar and leaf-litter and snow, and he inclines his angular head when the stallion’s gaze finds him.
“If you’re one of the Ilati, you’re some ways from home,” he says easily, but if it is true the stranger could hardly be blamed – Tinea was still barely habitable, and a flooded swamp in winter sounded like a terrible place to be.
And anyway, anyone familiar with him would know Lysander is far from home, too.
@Kauri
