Later, when he is alone (though he feels more alone than he ever has, standing with his head beside her heart and her blood on his lips) Lysander will search himself to see whether he misses feeling like the birthing-place of the universe. He will think of her, the night-dark of her skin with the stars shining through, wrong wrong wrong, and test himself for jealousy, or regret.
For now there is only the entropy that comes from standing near her, a wasps-whir buzzing that spills out from where her heart should beat. What, oh what, lies between her gaping ribs? No organs but nebulae, no muscle but the mold that grows out from the dead.
Only when he pulls away can he breathe and remember where he stands - in a city, in a court of starlight and smoke, where there are mortal men to be hunted. The further he leans from her, the less it feels like the world is unknitting itself, unmaking and unmaking. Lysander looks at the foaming blood between their feet just as she does, studies it like a scatter of bones, and only shifts his gaze up when he finds nothing he can read.
To be too near her is to walk the edge of chaos. There is no room for him in the universe of her - and Lysander is not ready to be swallowed up by madness. Not yet, not in this world where his heart has become a fragile thing, brushed with golden feathers and turquoise scales.
When he grins at her it is as a coyote grins to a wolf, a wary licking of teeth. He does not meet those mad corpse-light eyes, which make him wonder whether it is darkness or light that waits at the end of existence, and which is worse. “Then I wish you a willing foe.” Lysander nods to her, a tilt of his antlers still crowned with her not-blood and not-ichor, and walks away.
He heads first for a bonfire, and the laughter and noise of the markets, for the night is all at once very dark, and very cold.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Eshek
