Lysander wishes this city didn’t remind him so of home.
Oh, not of Terrastella, or the ever-changing riftlands before, but the home that had been his as a god. Grapes and laurel, white terraced cities and the sunshine gleaming off the sea; he had been so close to returning.
He sees, now, why Florentine had been so drawn to Denocte. It beguiled, it seduced, it was proudly itself - it was a dark queen with a dusting of bright scales and magic in her veins, it was a gypsy king with dark curls and a wicked smile. It was not safe - but then, it didn’t pretend to be anything else.
And yet with Isra gone (Isra dead?) it is all wrong, the shadows too long and the whites of everyone’s eyes showing in the scant and wavering light of the bonfires. Lysander doesn’t miss the eyes on him, or the ones that won’t meet his own - until the girl. It begins with the bump of a shoulder in the crowded market, a flash of green eyes brighter than his, a smile like a sickle moon - and the card. You’re looking for something, she says, and maybe you’ll find it here - and then she is gone before he can speak, a vanishing act a magician would envy.
For the first time that evening Lysander smiles, and examines the card. It bears the image of a scarab, and a brief inscription, and he considers it for a long moment in the wavering darkness before he looks up to scan the buildings that lean crooked as broken teeth in a grinning bruised mouth. And then he starts forward again, dark from shadow to shadow save for the bright curve of his antlers, searching for signs of a girl or a beetle.
She hadn’t been wrong. He is looking for something - but what man isn’t?
It takes him some time to find it. But the Night Court is nothing if not true to its name - the constellations have hardly turned, dim as they are above the wreath of bonfire smoke and open cooking-grates. The darkness stretches on and on, particularly here in the death of autumn, when the dead leaves rattle like bones along the cobblestones and morning is always a long way off.
But Lysander does not feel cold at all as at last the door yawns open to admit him, and far below the spires he steps from the shadows without to those within.
At once he is swallowed up by silence and warmth; Lysander does not move as his eyes adjust to the candlelight above, and he breathes deeply of incense, of wine. If Denocte is a foggy dream of home, this is like waking from it to his own bed and it is a sweet kind of pain, the kiss of a silver knife. He sighs into the darkness -
and finds he is not alone.
Lysander is not altogether surprised to find the girl again, and his grin is returning as she drops into a curtsy. You found us, she says, and takes the card he offers.
There are many eyes on him as he travels rich carpets in and in. He can feel them like trailing vines, and pays them as much heed (Lysander knows the rules of this kind of place; he has followed them and broken them himself throughout a dozen centuries). As he goes he drinks it in, the tables with the spotless dealers, the ornate walls that seem to flicker and change in the candlelight - and the patrons. Some begged to be seen, some went to meticulous length to be overlooked, but all of them had a shark’s appetite in their gleaming eyes. The once-god understands; he is hungry, too.
But thirst is an easier thing to attend to, and at last (he could spend a dozen hours, wandering these rooms, discovering secrets like the gilded patterns on the walls) he finds the Lounge. A blue-swathed server settles him at the edge of the room, with glimpses of the gambling floor below, and incense and tobacco smoke curls up like an offering to the pin-pricks of the candlelight stars.
Lysander asks for wine, and leans back into the shadows, and lets his eyes fall closed like autumn’s last leaf drifting down from a dead limb. For just a moment he allows himself to breathe in, and imagine himself home.
It is hard to forget there is no ichor in his veins - but tonight, wine would do just as well.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Toulouse feel free to disregard all the establishing scene text xD but I am excited for this!
