lysander
It has been a thousand years since Lysander was a young man, one who listened to the blood and ichor in his veins and did the things it requested of him - consumed, destroyed, rebuilt. He only just remembers what it was like; he has learned so many things since then (most of them taught by a girl with flowers in her hair, and by a unicorn once saved by the sea, and a handful of other mortal creatures with their lives like mayflies against the long unbroken line of his).
But he recognizes the look in the stranger’s eyes, however drugged they both are, however lazily they glance at each other. The gold-and-dark man is a lion, but Lysander is a fox, and he knows what runs through the minds and hearts and rushing blood of men.
So he is not bothered by the pity in the gaze that holds him then, the slow liquid of molten gold. Lysander is too old for jealousy, too content to feel threatened by the way the man assures him what he does and does not know.
He is near enough that if he wished, he could reach out and run a pale tine along each flight-feather on the stallion’s wings. He could strike him the way he was once struck, hunted like a stag in a midwinter forest, one bold blow against his poll. He thinks of the scar running along his side, thin silver, and the other ones that have joined it since that night. Oh, he knows how much living and dying have to do with one another.
At last he leans back, shakes his head and shoulders like a wolf beneath the filtered sunlight. “I’ve found there is a thin line between bravery and foolishness,” he says, and does not add which side he falls on (so often both). “But I do so love to learn.”
With a last grin, curling like a new fern and wicked as a blade of bone, Lysander turns away. Galaxies still spin around him, and the sounds of the forest are a quilt of noise, and the leaves whisper as he passes through, and when he is gone there is no sign he was ever there.
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