Lysander knows that wars are not an ending.
For a god they are only trivialities, a competition for praise and honor and a thousand offerings of smoke and grain and blood. For man - ah, for man, he thinks that war must be glory. It is a name shouted down the generations, passed on to babies with honor and with hope. It is a reminder of the fragility of life, of even kingdoms. War teaches the survivors to hold their loved ones a little tighter, to be grateful for the fields they plow and sow and reap, for every small comfort of home.
The antlered stallion still cares little for Novus’s citizens, a thousand faces with names he’ll never learn. He takes a gods’ view of them, and they are nothing but chaff to him, for all that he belongs among them. But for Isra - for Florentine - for even himself -
It would be a lie to say that Lysander is not eager to learn a new perspective of bloodshed.
He is not sorry for giving her the ending she hadn’t wanted; it would have been an easy enough promise to keep, when he was supposed to be a world away beneath a wine-sweet summer sun with the ocean a blue jewel before him. Instead they stand between red walls, and a fragile golden leaf taps and spins in the breeze against the bare bone of his antler, and the wind is still whistling though his own voice has died.
Lysander is not sure he believes in endings at all (not knowing Florentine, not with her time-thirsty dagger around his own neck). And the unicorn who has already been reborn beneath the waves must know that they are nothing.
Oh, he has always been too curious; once again his interest leads him forward, closing up the distance she would not until they are only a breath apart. The rock blooms into color, a winter desert garden, all improbable, and there is a line of laughter curled across Lysander’s dark mouth. “You’re giving us away,” he says softly, but there is something sharper than humor in the green glint of his eyes, bolder and softer and stranger than the emeralds born of clay. He wonders if the bit of gold wound around his tine misses being a living leaf, and whether the unicorn misses the world before she was a queen.
He has yet to see the use in regret.
Still he does not touch her, instead bending away from her new creations with a breath of a laugh still on his lips. “I’ve yet to find your magic terrible.” The curl of his dark hair, the gleam of his burnished coat, the fern-green of his eyes: all of them wonder what, oh what, she would make of them. What transformation would she give to a mortal god, a man still learning how near death he walks? Someday, someday, he might yet ask.
Today he only regards her, a brow arched, noting for the first time how the color of her eyes so reflects the blue of his childhood sea. How far he has come, he thinks; how many bones will he see bleached in this desert, as he witnessed in the riftlands when all the sand ate up the water and he sheltered in a cage of whale-ribs with Flora?
“One man’s death does not make a war.” Steady, steady is his gaze on her, knowing the magic that runs like a live wire beneath her skin the way that violence lives now beneath his own. “And one man’s death is all I need.”
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Isra
