Hearing those words from a man so large and dark and obviously capable of carrying them out ought to have been comforting.
It is not.
Lysander has met the gaze of a hundred heroes, a thousand madmen, a host of disciples drunk on wine and blood. If he had not, this stranger’s would have chilled him. Instead he only wonders what it is the black bull is seeing, with his eyes so far away, down and down an empty well without so much as an echo of noise.
An itch crawls over his shoulder, and he twitches his skin though there is no fly. Maybe some part of him knows this night is far from over, knows that around another corner, down another alley, he will meet a god he hasn’t seen for worlds, a god for whom madness is a blinding light.
But the antlered stallion has never been prescient in any body, in any life. He is turning his head away, jaw angled back toward the bonfires and the noise of the crowds, when his companion speaks. The smile that crawls up his dark lips then mirrors the shape of the scar along his side.
“I do.” Now his gaze is sharp again, but though he once more faces the soldier (the minotaur) it is not the stranger all that dark violence is aimed for. Lysander remembers a midnight forest of black spruce, the starlight buzz of wine in his veins, a silent fall of snow. “He almost killed me. I was ambushed, four on one - odds you could take,” he says, and his teeth glint in a grin, “but not so much myself. A piece of his dagger was lodged between my ribs.” Almost without thought, he bends to touch his lips to another knife, the one that hangs even now around his neck, the one that saved his life.
Lysander is grateful for it, and moreso for its owner - but he hopes it is still willing to drink blood. All the other Crows have flown (or died), save for the last. This time he will not wait for someone else to clear the dark.
It is how he knows he can no longer claim to be anything but a man.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@
