lysander
He has only been at the outskirts of Denocte, a hunter and a victim both in his time beneath the boughs of the Arma forests. Lysander had thought, once, about slipping into the city itself with poison on his tines, and hunting for a more dangerous prey than leaves and roots.
It was for Florentine that he had not. And it is for Florentine that he is here now, iodine and cedarsmoke sweet and thick in his nostrils.
They had slipped away from the city, the former god and his girl with the bandaged wing. What dim lanterns and bright bonfires the citadel possessed could never hope to reach as far as the lake, and darkness came early this time of year. But for now it is light enough, though muted with snow clouds thick over the mountains, a sweep of pewter and gray. It seems the first time in days that they are alone, and Lysander matches his pace to the girl of flowers and gold, and feels the loss of every petal that falls at her feet.
The regime is gone, he knows, and most of the flock of Crows with it - but Raymond still remains. He has yet to see the red man; this is almost certainly for the best. He has grown weary of weakness; the next time he wears blood it will be because he chose to, and it will not be his own.
There are no fireflies, this time of year; the only thing that rests over the surface of the lake is silence. There are thin crusts of ice like slivers of frosted glass around the edges of the water, and the pebbles of the shoreline are smooth and dark and gleaming in the dim afternoon. Idly he wonders if it, too, had flooded when the gods turned their wills to deadlier things.
“I wonder,” he says softly, and rests his chin atop the slope of her shoulders, “what would have happened if one of us arrived here instead.”
Surely she knows as well as he that each of them could have lived beneath a court of starlight - perhaps better than one of dusk.
Even so he already knows the answer, at least for himself; there is no where she could go he would not follow.
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