Lysander has no love for the desert.
He is not made for it; he is a thing of brambles and twisting vines, of thick dark loam and the shadows beneath each curl of leaf. He is a god of the forest and the vineyard and his salt is not that of sweat but the sea. He has always worshipped things reborn, things green and growing, and the pleasures that they give.
But desert is not rich or giving. It is a kind of sacrifice, vast and empty and endless. Each dry expanse cries out for water and Lysander knows they would each be sated with blood.
It is winter, and so he does not wilt beneath the baleful eye of the sun. A cold wind follows him out of the foothills of the Arma mountains, chases him into the deep red clefts of the canyon. There the shadows overtake him, and turn his burnished gold to something darker, nearly the color of the rock. The walls rise sharp and steep around him, a maze that reminds him of the riftlands - but he knows the monster that waits at the heart of this place, that he is only a thing of flesh and blood (like himself). The wind sings through the canyon spires and it is a mournful sound.
Yet the darkness in his heart is not born of sorrow or of fear. There is an eagerness in the once-god that has washed its hands in rage, that has clothed itself in retribution. When he closes his eyes in the cool shadow of the rock, he might be in a forest trail with the birds fallen silent around him, listening to a unicorn tell him of revenge.
Lysander understands, now. Perhaps it means there is no ichor left in him, only blood to salt the ground.
Florentine’s dagger still rests around his neck, a cold silver fist above his heart. Each time it falls against his chest he remembers the touch of her lips, the brush of her feathers, the way they reached for one another with hunger, with desperation. He is glad she hadn’t protested his leaving, hadn’t asked to come, though her acquiescence was unlike her.
He wonders if he will use it. He wonders what worlds it might cut, what universes it might open within the silver skin of a Ghost. Lysander wonders if his golden, laughing Anthousai would love him any less if he used her knife to serve Death, not Time.
As sunset turns the rock and sky and shadows themselves to blood around him, he begins, softly, to sing.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Isra
