He knows Isra is not in the city.
Lysander knows it and yet he walks its crooked pathways, scented as they are with bonfire smoke and the dry-dust smell of dead leaves. Everywhere he casts his gaze there is a sign of her, a stretch of gold where there should be only dirt, a trail of flowers more delicate than any living thing. Her city carries its queen’s touch like a brand or a beacon and the stallion hunts each lingering sign like a bloodhound.
Of course it does not lead him to a storyteller-queen, nor to a Ghost with a starving knife. Yet when he falls in step behind a mare who leaks light like blood, whose skin is the red of firelight off burnished copper, his body goes tense as a wolf's.
Another beast of Ravos, loose on Denocte’s streets.
But Eshek is no Calliope. Lysander has not forgotten what stories he has heard of the goddess of fire, of chaos and light and ash. He had not shared her appetites there and to see her here (but more than that, to see her now, when the world is crumbling anew) makes something black turn over inside him, makes his skin shiver as beneath the feet of a fly.
It does not keep him from calling after her, from raising his head like a buck in its prime, from leaning into the wind that tousles the dark curls of his hair and tries to remind him, with its near-winter bite, what it felt like to hold all of life in the palm of his hand.
“I didn’t think I’d see you in a mortal world again.” The words are pleasant enough, dark green off his tongue and heavy with rich soil, but the smile he wears glints like a half-buried spade. Once Lysander would have wondered if she remembered him; now he does not much care. His vanity has been buried away, though it was slower to fade than his ichor and immortality.
Still he walks like the god he once was when he draws near to her, all the grace of reeds bowing before a breeze, all the strength of choking vines winding around an old dead tree. And his eyes, when he looks at her, remember the secrets of a hundred centuries. Down and down in the roots of his heart does he bury the trembling question are you still a god?
“Why have you come here, Eshek?”
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Eshek
