It is an autumn night in name only, there on the cusp of winter, and every breath of wind has teeth.
As Lysander walks the now-familiar streets of Denocte he thinks of thunderbirds. He thinks of black gods who soften themselves with starlight on their skin, who speak softly and smile and pretend to be anything other than what they are. He hates these gods.
Neither does he care for their people, the way they stand and shiver and wait for the next foul thing to befall them. Perhaps he should not blame them but Lysander finds he has enough blame in his mortal heart for so many - and chief among them a Ghost, a king, a madman, a murderer.
It is not like him to keep to the city, not when the mountains beckon with laurel and pine, not when the sea winks like a siren as the moon passes from cloud to cloud. Normally when he is caught up by too-mortal a feeling (his rage and hate and helplessness) it is the wilds that soothe it, that remind him that time is nothing but a circle beaten flat and stretched long and everything that has come will come again. That he still has ichor beneath the blood in his veins and this world is nothing at all to him but the most recent name on a list of them.
Tonight he does not want reminding. Tonight he is wild and reckless as a young Greek and he makes himself forget that he was not made a hero. He is glad Florentine is not here to see him, nor Isra - they might not care for the salt-rimed curl of his dark hair, or the shadows in the woods-green of his eyes. Flora’s dagger swings against his chest with each step, another heartbeat.
He is not sure what he is looking for, except that his eyes pass over each stall and its merchant, each cinder-spitting bonfire. There are still stones missing from Caligo’s emblem and this Lysander does notice, and hopes they are gone as dead stars.
The street he walks dog-legs into darkness and there he meets the minotaur.
How could he be anything else? He is more myth than Lysander, who was a god; he is a black mountain in the darkness with gold glinting darkly from his horns. With no other option the bay stallion stops, and when he drops his head so that his arch of antlers dip it is not only a greeting they speak.
But Lysander is not yet so foolish as to pick a fight with a stranger for nothing more than the shape of his shoulders or the glint of dark eyes. He takes a step back, cocks his head like an invitation. “My,” he says, “I bet nobody fucks with you on a night like this.”
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@
