 A hundred blurred light-years flicker in her gaze as she watches that swinging metal blade against his heart. She can feel the magic of it it, pulsing like a second heartbeat between his bones, begging to be tasted. Another part of her is disappointed that he has a blade at all, that he hasn't already torn the world asunder with his crown of bones.
“Mortal.” Light makes the word bitter in the darkness, and it doesn't sound like a repetition but a name. Eshek wants to rip her skin open and paint the word in whorls of light across his ribs, down his back, shape it to look like tears falling from his eyes like stars from the sky. She wants to anoint him in herself, until he rises dripping ichor and gold instead of blood. Would he shed his antlers then like a season?
Her body leans into the space between them. She misses when her body could split apart like jaws, when her ribs could hug like a snake. This body carries none of her old grotesqueness and her infinity moons that took the form of organs. All this body holds is holiness: religion, light and death. A hoof scrapes elegantly across the stone, it sounds like a blade drawn across old bone.
The lift of her head is almost defiant. When he touches her shoulder it seems almost if she might impale herself upon his tines. She thinks about it, about drowning him in the holiness of her. She's dead anyway, she's eternal.
In the end she only lowers her head when he lays his crown like a kiss below her eyes. She smiles and her teeth grind like a saw between her bloody lips. “If you have not taken it, ” The words blow like a breeze across his brow and she watches the air move beneath it like she's the east wind. Her teeth are still grinding together, bone on restless, dead bone. Eshek pauses, inhales and swallows soot and the sweet tang of ivy.
She inhales him.
“I will.” The east wind says. And then, she presses her cheek hard into his tine, hard enough to cut. Light drips down him like tears of the moon, like the sorrows of every burning sun in the infinite blackness of space. Lysander is more lovely with drops of her running down his crown of bones like snakes.
Her blood makes him look like a god dripping ambrosia.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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