lysander
He sees her breath drift and dissipate like fairy-silver into the air, save for the pause when she presses a kiss to a pale and pointed tine. And Lysander smiles to himself, thinking of how dear their weapons are to one another - cold steel, cold bone. A knife for a princess and a crown for a man who was neither king or god.
Strange to think a year has passed, when he ran beneath the shadows of winter-bare trees that striped him in black and Florentine, trailing blossoms even in December, flew overhead. Strange to think of the flow of time at all, when it had been nothing but a dream in the Rift.
Lysander does not feel old - but then, until a year ago he’d never felt cold either. Or love, or wicked hate like a blackthorn branch that tore and tore at his insides. Or jealousy, or fear.
In a way Novus has made him new more than any of his hundred rebirths; it has refreshed him more than any offering of wine or of blood.
And yet, and yet.
“I would have enjoyed watching that,” he says, laughs softly into her golden hair. It catches the silver of his laugh, holds it among a garden of petals. She speaks then of looking at the stars, but the antlered stallion’s eyes are shut; stars he has seen plenty of, and most all he wishes for is here.
It is not until she speaks of next that his green eyes (near black in the fading light) blink open, leaning away so that he might meet her gaze. His throat is cool when the wind kisses it in the place it had been pressed against her skin.
It is colder yet when she presses her dagger against it.
“You are the one with worlds within you, Florentine,” he answers softly, and the muscles of his throat slide against her glistening knife. Once before it wore his blood instead of the star-shine pooling on it now, but he has no fear of that now. They are together, and so he may as well be a god once more.
“I would show you my home, someday.” His voice is soft, musing; heedless of her knife he reaches to press his nose to her cheek, then blow a breath in her slim ear. “Do you tire of Novus?” There is an evenness to his voice, a quiet curiosity; nothing that hints he might feel one way or the other. Nous had not been kind to them - but then, few worlds where when you got tangled up in them.
And he did not doubt that anywhere they went, his Anthousai would twist herself like vines - like flowers - into the bones of the place until they all bloomed together.
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