For a moment he gives himself to her touch entire, closing his eyes until the world is black and there is only moonlight and her breath upon his skin. If his vines have wound their way through each passage of her heart and each slender rib, than she has turned each of his dreams to gold. Even as he listens to her speak his lashes are black against his cheeks and his attention (at once focused and dulled by drink into something pleasantly low and hungry) rests on places where her body meets his. Lysander’s pulse leaps beneath her touch and it reminds him with each beat that he is alive, that he is not a god, and that all living things must sometime die.
When she shudders it pulls him back, a tug on an errant kite-string searching out stormier skies. He presses his nose against her cheek, blows back a stray curl from the slope above her eye. “Sometimes,” he says, but when he breathes out onto her golden skin what he really means is always. “This is not the body I was born to.” Nor could it praise her in all the ways he wanted - ah, to have fingers to ghost along her cheekbones, to tip her chin up to his. To twine his fingers again in the dark gold of her curls and press a lock to his lips, as he did beneath that eternal night of starlight and distant movement in the black. (He remembers those shapes, remembers how he had cautioned Florentine not to speak of them, lest they answer to their names).
Always there was some evil in each world, but never has he done anything but watch.
It is easier not to think of that now, with Florentine beside him and the moonlight peering in through the windowpanes, with the wine still a song in his blood that lulls him into darker and sweeter dreams. But as she bends like a willow-bough toward other memories (their past or their future? was everything the same for her as it once was for him, or did she see time as a line drawn out and out?) Lysander is back in that dark building with walls soft with velvet and dim-bright with gold. Where secrets were poured out with the ease of one more glass of wine, and one more after that. Where it seemed like everything might be a gamble, and it was right to be so.
“They have beer here too.” He laughs softly and the laugh is caught in her hair, turned to gold and flowers. But he leans away, enough for a shadow to slip between them, before it dies entire. Only then, when there is nothing but silence around them, does he speak her name.
“Florentine,” he says, “I am going to Solterra.” When he closes his eyes he imagines again the sliver of blade nestled against his bone, eating up his muscle and drinking his blood. He should have hunted Raum a year ago, should have seen to it that every last Crow was struck down from the black sky. “I do not intend to come back until Raum is dead.”
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