It was foolish of him to have asked, when he already knows the answer like he knows the way it feels to die. Like he knows the way a knife-blade smiles as it nestles between his ribs. Like he knows how the breath of a monster smells with her wings and mouth opened wide to receive him - of brine and of blood.
Has he always been so foolish? Or has Novus made him so, have the years with a mortal mind and a mortal heart and his mortal running blood shaped him into something soft and full of worry like a rotten trunk?
Is it love that has made him no better than a man?
Lysander comes closer, until the light from her eyes and her mouth and her nose cast a sick moon-glow on his own skin. Until he can smell her and be reminded of what the world smelled like, rising from the dirt like a seed, everything rotting and growing and swift and dead. If he struck her with one of his tines, would that light spill out the hole in place of blood? If he struck her with one of his tines (tipped in poison, for Lysander is wiser prey than he was) would she wither?
“Terribly mortal." He does not offer more; nothing of the gods on their mountain who loved to smite and vanish. He looks at her god-light and licks his teeth as jealousy curls around his heart, nestling up like a wandering dog that has been gone long and long.
Oh, how he tires of being weak.
When she continues, each word slow as a pendulum (each word the tick of a clock counting down) his smile grows like a vine. Florentine’s dagger bumps against his chest, a warning or a goad, when he reaches forward to touch her shoulder, to lay his antlers against her cheek.
“It is not my world,” he says, sweet as grapes heavy and ripe and ready for pressing, and Lysander cannot himself tell if it is a lie.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Eshek
