lysander
In this light, gilded with gold and vivid as paint, the unicorn’s skin is almost the color of blood. Lysander wonders nothing of that, but he does not miss the way her smile does not reach her eyes, the way the shine there is almost a gleam of pain.
He does not want to worry for her, the storyteller-queen who looks like she has a barb in her heart. The old god was never any kind of savior, and anyway, Isra is not his to save.
Yet his chest feels tight for a moment, as though wound with strips of birch-bark, and his heartbeat stumbles as though fed foxglove. For that it is almost a blessing when the dragon lifts its head, and when Lysander looks toward it he looses a breath between his teeth and reminds himself they each have their own stories to live.
From there it is nothing to turn to the leaf. As her whisper reaches him in a voice dry as dead leaves rustling together he studies the thing she has made, and wonders what else she has already changed with a touch. “Good,” he answers softly, and meets her gaze again. “Some beautiful things should remain.” And then Lysander takes it gently in his teeth, winds it carefully into the unruly curls of his mane. It glints like the gold it is against the darkness of his hair; it flashes the colors of the sunset when he lifts his head again. The dagger swings against his chest, pressing cold silver like a palm against his heart.
For now he pays it no mind.
And then beneath the dappled shadows of the trees he closes the distance between them, and presses his lips to the thin skin above her eye. Almost he touches her horn; perhaps it is intentional that he avoids it, the way it points like an accusation. She smells the same way she did while he lay bleeding against the roots - of salt and brine, of jasmine and royal fern. He thinks of her at the festival, and in the mountains beneath the hanging moon; he thinks of her in a castle and in a cave as a storm raged outside.
“Have you ever been wholly happy, Isra?” His voice is gentle, a whisper of leaves across her back. And for the first time in all the years he has been in Novus, he wishes fiercely he possessed his magic still - that for all she has given he might have something to offer in return.
@Isra
