FLORENTINE
always one decision away from a totally different life
She breathes, if only to watch the way it rises to tangle like ivy in his tines. Envy watches as silver condensation presses against the curve of each branch. Florentine chases away the cold of its kiss with one of her own. Winter comes chasing, flaying the velvet of her lover’s antlers until they rise like silver birch – daggers reaching for the sky.
The Dusk girl does not even try to pull her eyes from the crown atop Lysander’s head. Idly she wonders if his coronet of vines in one godly life, had been replaced by a mightier crown of bone is this mortal one.
She draws back, her lips cool with their kiss, for oh how his antlers are cold now. She wonders when she ever came to know this as the final sign they were to drop. Maybe that is why her kiss is a ghost of vines too, twined tight against a prong. Had she known of his desires – those of poison and vengeance, would she have dared touch his antlers so? Oh but she would have! Florentine would have welcomed the embrace of death with all the willingness of Juliet.
But she does not know, and her kiss remains but a ghost on her lips and a phantom’s thing upon the curve of his bone crown. He is a cloak of warmth beside her and she wears him well, drawing him closer, tighter, to ward away the shivers that grow at winter’s insistent touch.
All is still but they, the sigh of their breath, the rustle of frigid grasses, broken at their feet. In the silence of the afternoon – all liminal shadows – he wonders of things only fate knows. Lysander voices them, and light as pixies those words hang. Ah they are mischievous, daring the lovers to wonder, daring them to question fate’s grand plan.
Florentine is silent, with smiles on her lips and secrets upon her tongue. “Maybe you would have fallen in love with a Night Queen and I come along to ruin it all and claim you as my own.
Oh how the Time girl throws memories of days spent within the lake, with her gaze set upon the stars. This is more important now. It is inevitable, she now knows, that fate would find her here, with her wing wrongly bent, stood beside her lover.
“Once I stood in the middle of a lake with a Night boy and looked at the stars with an ache of homesickness.” She confides in him with a song, a melody that feels not the dust of Time. “Now I look up and see only opportunity.” And up she gazes at the stars that come out, blinking away behind the dying of the sun. “Where should we go next? Where kings and courts will be the least of our worries… ”
She lifts her dagger in contemplation, turning it over slowly. It presses flat against the muscle of his breath, cold metal to warm, warm flesh. “I once worried about opening up a world within you.” Florentine does not ask him if he remembers, as it does not matter, because, “I need not have. I think now, that it might be the best place to be.”
@Lysander I think this might be Flora's way of claiming her man...
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
