There is a stag in the woods with spider-drawn webs…
At the beginning of the story a smile winds itself like ivy across his dark lips, and only grows as she continues. When he closes his eyes he might not be in a pool in a cave in the black mountains at all, but beneath a fir tree with a stone as a pillow and the pain from a kelpie’s teeth fading from his side.
Lysander is perfectly content, then, with everything forgotten but the Storyteller and the tale she weaves. (Though he wonders, not for the first time, if she is the stag or the spider or the blood or each of them, weaving and weaving. Most of all he hopes she is not the corpse.)
She finishes too soon, he thinks - but of course all time is lost, there in the dark and the water and the storm. He lifts his muzzle, dripping with a sound like copper bowls ringing, from where he had been tracing it on the water’s surface, lost to the rhythm of her words.
The antlered stallion says nothing, but he lifts a brow at her, as if to say you would leave us here, Isra? But there is no anger in him, no frustration in that grin. “So it seems,” he says, and makes no mention of but, of an impression of huge wings in the near-darkness, of a presence waiting above the clouds, beyond the lightning.
If the storm has passed, the monster likely has, too.
He follows the unicorn up out of the water and shakes himself, boy-like, dog-like, spraying dark droplets against the cool dripping walls of the cavern. Lysander only cuts his gaze once more toward Katniss, and there is little readable in his green eyes before he turns away again.
For a moment, at the mouth of the cavern, he watches Isra go - but without a word of good-bye he turns back toward the Dusk Court, and lets his thoughts drift from spiders and butterflies to larger, more tangled webs.
we wake with bright eyes now
ours is a white lies town
closing this swp thread up to make room for more swp threads :p
