There is wine in his blood and it does not feel like starlight but like soil - rich and dark and dead but growing, oh, growing.
The meeting with Eshek had planted a seed (and what rotten fruit might it yet bear?), but it is what the golden man had said that stirs his thoughts now, as he returns to the castle with the rough whisper and scrape of autumn leaves stirring around him. Evening has been swallowed up by night and the scent smoke and incense clings to the dark curl of his hair, but it is the desert Lysander thinks of - golden sand, golden ichor, and a silver Ghost on a bloody throne.
It is hard to keep his tangled thoughts from revenge as he crosses the threshold into Isra’s keep, and sees her magic illuminated by each flickering candle. Gold twines among the marble like vines of ivy across temple walls, veils of dark fabric with diamonds caught like dew in a spider’s gossamer web fall across each doorway. And yet the eyes of each passing page and kitchen-maid are hollow, hollow, hollow.
So he does not think of Isra, but of the White Scarab and how it had made him think of home. The trickle of wine poured into a crystal-cut goblet, the soft sounds of dice on a velvet table, the susurrus of voices that spoke only in murmurs, bargaining secrets like gambling chips. The shadows curl across his skin like soft ferns and he feels heavy and slow and satisfied as god drunk on worship.
But there is a new sound that comes to him when he reaches their hall. It is the sound of bare feet upon the floor, the sound of feathers stirring still night air. Lysander leans forward (and the world tilts with him, heavy-slow, dark red as wine) to listen, not yet taking the corner, letting instead his eyes fall closed. A silver dagger bumps against his chest and below it his heart beats slow and sure, and on his mouth a smile blooms.
When he rounds that corner he does it as softly as only a forest-god can, and his green eyes swallow her down. For all he drank he finds he is thirsty still -
So Lysander fills himself with the sight of her, drinks her in with each drawn breath. He forgets all thoughts of gods and men in favor of the girl before him, who is golden, who is smiling, who traces patterns with her feet and her wings (no matter how bent, it does not pang his heart tonight).
A hundred priestesses have danced at his altar, a thousand nymphs within his deep wood; but none, oh none, have ever stirred him like the slender girl in the moonlight before him.
And she is his.
Only now does he announce himself, though he does not yet step from the shadows he wears. “Keep dancing,” he says, low, and it is command and prayer and plea.
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