lysander
He sees.
Lysander watches as her magic works behind her, as she becomes the girl in the story. He wonders if she intends it - wonders if she’d known she could do it at all. He had thought her magic did not deal with living cells, and the leaf of gold flutters against his neck, bright against the dark fall of his hair.
He smiles as she comes to him like Persephone through the gates and down from spring, but he does not feel like Death. There is life around them, coursing in them both, like a hare too quick for any fox or hawk to hope to catch. In a way her magic is the same strange kind as Florentine’s: she can always undo what she must.
It is the kind of a gift a once-god might be jealous of.
But there is no jealousy in him as she bends down toward him, her hollow spiraling horn lowering as though she might touch it to his shoulder and proclaim him hers (oh, and is there not a part of him that wishes she would?)
Instead she gives him half a kiss, and his breath catches in his throat not so differently as it had when a kelpie’s jaws had caught his side - not so differently as when a crow’s blade caught him, too. He does not understand why his heart aches then, not when they are both so close to happy.
When he breathes again it is to inhale her words, as if he could swallow them and carry their memory close to his heart. But he does not agree - not when there is sorrow hanging in her eyes like the last of his words hang with the story-girl sorry and weeping. Yet Lysander only lets her go, still folded like a fawn in the evening grass, and oh she does not look back at him (she is wiser than Orpheus; what might he tell her, if she turned?) but his gaze is a cool press against her.
“She saves them all,” he says as she fades like a story, but it is soft, maybe too soft to carry - tender as the wind that stirs the nightshade.
But even if she doesn’t hear, Lysander prays she knows. She is a storyteller, after all, and her heart keeps every ending.
@Isra <3
