When she calls him a fool he almost stiffens, almost curls his black lips, and he remembers another unicorn who had looked at him with judgement in her eyes and said his bones were hollow. Instead he smiles, easy, amiable, and does not lean away when she touches his cheek. He can feel the golden leaf, life caught up and made beautiful in death, tapping against the bone of his antler as it twists with motion, with a breath of wind.
“Impressive, considering you found me bleeding out below a tree,” he says, and his voice is as cool as moonlight on leaves in the dark heart of an explored jungle. Now they are both guarded, he thinks - maybe it is for the best, maybe she needs her walls to do what must be done.
But as she speaks to him he does not meet her eye, either, instead watching the dragon descend upon them. His bones echo the trembling of its passing even as his gaze follows Fable’s flight, and he thinks of all the heroes who were ever sent to slay a dragon. It is strange, to smell the tang of the sea here in the midst of a dry and dying land. “Good thing you have more, then. Like him.”
Something in him stutters and then flares up, a guttering candle, when she alludes to Florentine, when she tells him to go home. He had been so alive that night, a tangle of wine and nerves and need, and when he had told the golden girl of his plans she had made no move to stop him, and he had loved her more for it. The nip Isra lays on his cheek stings; now, for a moment, he does show his teeth, whether or not she sees it as she turns away.
Lysander speaks to her retreating back, the fallen sword still in his shadow, the jagged, newborn wall at his back. “Love is the reason I’m here. Is it not the same for you?” His eyes do not challenge her fire; they are cool, assessing, green as an emerald snake wound about a branch, watching the doe pass below, wondering if the girl in the garden will take and eat the fruit. If there is hurt there, if there is something more complicated yet, it is hidden in that look.
When she leaves he does not follow, and the desert sand glitters with all the scattered rainbow light from a wall of beautiful weapons. But Lysander does not go home.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Isra
