![[Image: lothaire_by_destrierdesigns-dbelvo5.png]](http://orig10.deviantart.net/a7f1/f/2017/181/7/8/lothaire_by_destrierdesigns-dbelvo5.png)
"You have seen me before."
The lilt of her voice is saturated with a feeling he cannot quite place, unsurprisingly. From an age earlier than he cared to remember Lothaire had distanced himself from the lapping tide of sentiment; pushing inward, turning his cheek. Perhaps it was an amalgamation of incapability and lack of heart — no, there lay no truth in that. The strings of his red organ might have been tenuous, gossamer and laden with dust, but they existed still in his cavernous ribcage. Beaten by his mother's scathing eyes; her hatred hanging like a noose around his young neck, her ancient grief systematically crushing the feeble germination of joy in his head. So, to the purple of night he had retreated from her burning anguish where it was safe, where it was cold. And there he had grown: abstract, sober, dispassionate.
Florentine was a study he had not yet conducted. Not the first Terrastellian he had met, mind; for the memory of the Dusk queen drifted idly in the dark of his thought, like the petals floating indiscriminately between he and Flora. Upon first impressions, at least, this girl before him appeared quite unlike Rannveig — two women; one pragmatic, one whimsical. But Lothaire knew better than to take said first impressions as gospel; everyone he had ever met had been as vast and as ceaseless as the constellations decorating the sky, and he no reason to believe Florentine was any different. Eyes carved from the skin of space itself stared right back, placidly indulging her musing gaze. She reminded him of the dandelions that had adorned his garden as a boy, with her wild ethereal beauty. So nymph like, he wondered if she too might grant him a wish if he blew gently enough against her untamed skin.
"I would not be so thoughtless as to send a being back to where they do not belong." A bold statement, testing, probing. In the everlong dark, he waited.
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