“Things are always changing, love,” he says with laughter in his voice, and presses a kiss to the golden hollow just above her eye. He welcomes the heat of her skin against his, wonders at what moves within her - a kind of magic that not even a god could understand or possess, a secret kind of mystery. Too long has his body been separate from hers; it begs for her warmth the way it had never thirsted for the sun in the desert. For her he exposes his throat, closes his eyes at the touch of her lips against the blood that runs so trembling-close.
There is a ripple in her belly, then, that he feels against himself - the kick of a hoof, the clench of her muscles? Oh, motherhood is not a thing he has ever understood, a thing for other gods - all he has birthed in his countless turn of years are vines and madness. This, to him, is stranger by far. Worry and wonder crease his face, and when he steps away it is to let the rain-cooled air take his place, planting cool kisses all along the gold of her.
Almost he regrets leaving Denocte, wine still in his veins and the smell of her across his skin like a brand. But they have never played at apologies, and if he had remained, he might never have found his immortality in the desert. Perhaps it is a trade of fate - his own life instead of the death of a king and a ghost. Lysander no longer feels like he will have both - but the deal seems fair.
He is no hero, anyway. Nobody ever expected a god to slay a monster. That is not the way that stories work.
Yet fatherhood - oh! All he can think now is love, and want, and wonder. As raindrops roll like sweat or tears down his cheek and back and shoulders, as the golden pool bathes them in god-light, he slips his lover’s knife from around his own neck, lifting it carefully over the sharp branches of his antlers.
“I wanted to return this to you,” he says, low, and slips it over her golden curls with the solemnity of a knighting (though of course it was always hers, with he the false bearer). “Though I would advise against using it at the moment. Unless…” and Lysander trails off, himself unsure of what he was going to say.
Unless she wished to begin their family elsewhere. The rift is in his mind, with her parents and all its wild magic, a thousand universes brushing fingertips just beyond reach (but not her reach, his mate who mastered time).
“What can I do?” he breathes, and it is such a strange question for him to speak - it makes him feel so young, so new - that it makes him laugh, a rush of unsteady breath.
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