LYSANDER
There is nothing much to it at all.
He had, in the first moments that he’d seen their shadows rising from the edges of his vision, considered whether he might fight – but in the end there is no chance to act on the decision he had made. The silver mist from his final words was still fading when the gypsy king rose, and before Lysander could even flinch (this mortal body tried what it could to keep itself whole), before the smile could even vanish from his dark mouth, the blows landed like clubs.
On instinct his eyes closed, so he could only hear and feel the first sickening snap as one of the bay’s hooves broke a tine from one of his antlers. Before he could process this fully, he felt the slice of a hoof down his cheek, and then the other landed like a bludgeon on his poll and he was down, on his knees in the snow with a low grunt of pain and the sweet-bitter smell of his own blood in his nostrils.
Oh, he has smelled his own blood before; has been beaten down and killed and drowned. But always he has risen; his immortality kept him returning and returning like a seed below the soil waiting always for spring. Death was nothing to a god.
But he is not a god.
Lysander might have been curious – has pondered the idea of his mortal death before – if not for the pain. It is blinding, it is ringing, it is a hundred adjectives he has never considered before, and even so he licks blood from his teeth and wants to laugh at how meaningless it is, his potential death here. For what? A king’s pride and a regent’s treason?
Still the blows rain down and his body gives way before each as he kneels – until comes the knife. Only then does he cry out, as the blade that had gone in swift as lightning shatters against a rib, a bright star of pain that only grows. Within a moment, within a heartbeat, it becomes a supernova, and then it is a universe, and then it swallows him whole.
With his blood steaming on the snow around him and his breathing silent and shallow as a secret, Lysander is taken by merciful darkness.
@Reichenbach @Raum @Lavinia
