lysander
Up and up spread the stranger’s wings and each feather holds a world. Each little shaft of light that breaks through the space between them is a new star, and he is nothing but a traveler, here to witness a thousand new beginnings, here to taste the wine of the air and leave a story behind with each drop of blood he sheds.
Lysander has seen worlds, and he will see more. The only secret ever truly kept from him is death.
So he wants to laugh at the gilded man’s answer, even as each of his words burns on the air and leaves a dare behind it. Lysander can hear the chorus, too - or maybe it is only the songbirds, oblivious to the worlds folding and unfolding below them.
“Yes,” he agrees, grinning. Lysander is not ashamed to admit it, or to think of lines of gold and a spill of lilac flowers as he does; he is not ashamed of anything. “It was boring when it wasn’t so. And I hate boring.” Had he once thought otherwise, when he was a god and the world was his to bend? Had he not spent his days searching for more, helping his followers out of their minds, looking for a way to be freed from his own?
And now, ah, and now - he could die at any moment. Twice he’s come close. And that feeling, adrenaline rush and blood-fade - oh, he has found it more addictive than any offering, any ambrosia.
At last he draws back again, with the sunlight washing over him, trying its best to chase away every darkness. But the stallion lowers his antlers, rubs one tine and another absently against his knee, remembers the catch-and-tear they had made in the kelpie’s ancient, ragged sail-cloth wings.
He does not think this man’s would feel the same - but he wonders. Lysander is always wondering.
And some of that curiosity is there in his laughing green eye when he glances like a jay into the hot gold iris of the stranger. There is only a little space between them; Veer’s scent and his own are still the strongest things he can smell. Around them the sky spins, dizzy, a kaleidoscope of leaves; he knows if he looked up it would instead feel like falling.
Easy enough to avoid - he doesn’t look up.
“Aren’t you bored? If there is nothing dear, then there is nothing to lose, and if there is nothing to lose then life is not a game at all.”
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