lysander
Lysander watches the stranger lift the little fox with a peculiar kind of curiosity; it is not entirely detached, it is not quite jealousy, it is nothing he has a name for. Certainly he is new enough to the possibility of friendship that the kind of connection a horse shared with their bonded is well beyond his imaging, but the antlered stallion tries anyway.
Is it like sharing a piece of your soul, he wonders, and never being alone again? Is it a frightening thing, to have something so different from you tied to you so closely?
He does not think he would want such a bond – but then, loneliness is such a new feeling to him.
He flicks his ears forward at the stranger’s response, and there is nothing in the other’s tone that suggests a lie. Lysander shrugs a dark copper shoulder, and drifts a step nearer to the man and his fox.
“The mask you wear,” he answers, “and the feathers. I don’t know much of them, but I do know they have a fondness for adorning themselves similarly. They’ve only recently emerged from the deeper places of the swamp…” The once-god trails off, less interested in offering a lecture than in learning about the two before him.
When he tilts his head, it is with the frank, curious expression of a wolf, but in truth Lysander is grateful not to have been happened on by a kelpie or a gang with a knife, as on his previous solo forays. Neither did this stranger exude the kind of electric danger of Calliope –
But still he does not fully relax. Little, he has found, is safe here in Novus.
“If you are not of Terrastella, where is it you travel from, and how does it fare? My news of the other courts has been…limited, of late.”
An understatement: his days had been spent beside Florentine’s bedside, cradled in the heart of a great tree like owls in winter. Outside the rain went on and on, each day gray enough to not notice when morning slid into afternoon and then once more into night; everything was only dark and then less-dark.
But his understanding of Novus had always circled around her, held like a moon to her gravity as he is. He is not so much a fool as to pretend it isn’t a weakness.
@Kauri
