Something seizes in his chest to see her eyes flick and feast upon Florentine’s dagger. Oh! He would rather Eshek study his own heart than that finely-carved blade of silver and steel and hungry magic. It feels like a filthy sin for such a one as her to see it, and some ragged ghost within him wants to whisper mine.
It is a different word she speaks, and Lysander is grateful for it. Even when she says it like a curse, and anoints him with it like a new name. But he does not deny it, only continues to study her like a fox studies a wolf, each of them hungry, each licking their teeth.
There are few around them, now. Perhaps the people sense something in the way they look at one another, and are afraid; perhaps there is something instinctual in them still, the same thing that bid them hide when they lived in caves and a storm swept in from over the fathomless sea. Perhaps there is still the shadow of a god somewhere between Lysander’s bruised ribs - but maybe it is only Eshek, who could be nothing but a hound amid the hares.
Lysander does not feel like prey, even when her teeth grind like gravestones in his ears. He wonders how her god-light looks, reflecting off the smooth bone of his antlers or the green-shadow shine of his eyes. The night no longer smells like bonfire smoke and the dead-leaf dust of autumn; it smells like the ruin of cities fallen a thousand years ago, it smells like the wind that blows between the stars, it smells like the deep rot when even the body has dissolved away. He could choke on that scent; he could get drunk on it like wine pressed below a priestess’s feet a hundred years before.
When she says I will it is not like a promise but like something already written, a book closed. But he has no time to answer, not with that pressure against his tine, not when she has opened herself like a flood to him. Lysander thinks of the poison on the points of his antlers and knows to her it is nothing.
Her blood is hot and bright; it paints him in phosphorescence. It is like he has dipped his antlers in gold, it is like a nest of fireflies have settled on his skin. Nausea twists his stomach but that is the mortal part of him, the part that understands what she is the way any man does. But he does not lean away - now he lays his tine against her throat, now he licks her shining blood where a drop of it has landed, hot and foamy, on his lips.
He had never wanted to swallow the world. He was not that kind of god.
“There are other gods here,” he says, and tilts his head just a little bit more. He thinks of them, fled even from their mountain after committing their crimes, and sighs to envision his antlers piercing flesh. “They might not appreciate the competition. But if you hunt them, let me help you.” His voice is black and ravenous, and (almost unwillingly) Lysander pulls away.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Eshek
