[P] ain't it a gentle sound, the rolling in the graves?

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
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Her lungs are full of metallic air. And there is no sound more bolder, brighter than the chiming patter of rain upon obsidian flowers. The sky grumbles, uneasy and restless. The lightning splits the sky, limning in blue-bright light a stag that presses its soaked tines amidst the island’s flowers.
 
This stag is god-forged and ichor is gold within his veins. The lightning paints him other, beneath its sudden brush he is transcendent. Mortality does not cling to him like the roots and vines that hang from his crown of tines. Mortality does not even touch him. He has shed it like a winter skin.
 
Within her eyes he is a serpent, a creature changed by immortality and yet, so utterly him. Ah, he is a creature to be watched. He is a beast with earthen eyes, soil brown and brilliantly emerald. In his eyes is a cathedral of bark and leaves, an endless wood where rocks are altars and trees the pillars that hold up the sky. The curls of his mane are the tangle of shrubs. They curl down his crest, wild roots, wicked thorns. To touch them, she thinks, might be to draw blood. Yet she would, again and again…
 
He is a wild wood and Florentine watches his unearthly grace. Mortality is no longer a stain upon him and fate smiles just a little wider. Yet no smile can match the gleam in the lavender of his lover’s eyes (though her lips are a line – straight as a gash, curved as the ebb and swell of pain).
 
He moves to her and she to him: as they always have and as they always will. But her steps are slow and her grace no longer elven. The dance of her limbs is jaunty the swell of her stomach a blight where once she was so slim. Ah, the weight of pregnancy. She might hide herself before him, if her worry outweighed her joy. Yet Lysander is alive! And so her joy is more than her pain, more than an untold truth that grows and swells and fills every inch of her stomach.
 
But for a moment, all can be forgotten, when his muzzle presses against her throat. The touch of his breath is a caress she knows. Her eyes close tight, her own muzzle pressing into him. Where is the night? Where is the haze of dusk? Upon him is sand and sun and arid air. But oh she drinks him in as if she is starved.
 
He is pulling away and it is too soon, too soon. Her muzzle follows, reaches, into the air that grows cold where he once was. Yet he is still close and her wild wood boy is bright eyed – new young shoots and so he knows, so he has seen that they are both changed.
 
A river of questions gather behind the dam of her lips. Have you slayed a king, my love? Are you hurt? Are you angry with me? Are you ready to look out for our child for eternity?
 
Each one is unspoken. Each one plays upon her tongue and presses their words against her teeth. Each one sounds in her ears like a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy.
 
Each one falls to nothing as she smiles bright and wide with his words. Ah in her blood is ancient magic stirring. It is a magic that knows its kin and draws her to this island as a moth unto a flame.
 
She presses into him. Lips upon his artery, feeling how his heart runs like hers. Florentine laughs like the gilded leaf that chimes against his twisted, brown crown. “And I knew you’d find me here, of course.” As if it could have ever been any other way.
 
“So much has changed, Lysander.” She whispers across his skin, hot breath that evolves into a kiss, into a press of skin; tight and tight and tighter still she holds him as sweat blooms, turning her skin into liquid gold with its sheen. “And you have been gone too long for things show no sign of stopping yet.”
 
Such a clenching it is that pulls are her abdomen then. But stoic is the smile upon the lips of a girl with magic in her veins and her lover in her eyes.

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world