He carries with him the smell of copper and salt and red rich iron - the smell of blood.
Lysander is not a creature made for winter, and it is as if the new antlers he wears itch and bleed in lament. His love is for places where sun and salt conspire to curl his dark hair, and the vineyards grow long and languid on sleepy golden slopes. It is for the tang of summer fish and the darkly sweet smell of growing things, unfolding, loosening, opening up to heat and light.
This place has wind that bites and moans and leans, and he shivers against his will. In the Rift he might fashion himself a bower of firs - or he might simply keep walking, because nothing lingered in the rift lands for long, least of all seasons. Here there is little he can do but keep moving, seeking scant shelter among a copse of trees.
He pauses in a stand of aspen, bold bone-white and grave-black, and relieves himself with rubbing each arch of antler against a trunk. The ensuing scraping sounds and momentary relief keep him from noticing that the birds have fallen to quiet. Only when he pauses does he note their absence; he steps back, black-lined ears turning, green eyes canny.
And then, above him, a glimpse of gold among bare black limbs. The stallion tilts his head back, arching those ragged, bleeding antlers, and his dark mouth shapes a grin. It takes a second - two - of watching, but he is already sure. The last time he saw those wings, they hadn’t quite been strong enough to carry her.
Moving swiftly, now, he picks his way out from the thin scrub at the edge of the trees, loping by the time he hits the winter-brown grasses that thrust up through snow. She circles like an eagle; when the sun catches her right he can almost see the blossoms in her hair.
Lysander draws to a halt with a toss of his head, dark hooves flinging snow. Then he whistles, a high, clear note, and waits to see if this grown Florentine is as curious a creature as the girl he’d seen just a few weeks ago.
Florentine’s wings beat hard against the winds that rolled their way out toward the sea. Her amethyst eyes are riveted upon the horizon, and the Terrastellan lands that lie beyond.
The air is cool, chilled by the dark, dawn hours. It carries the scents of budding flowers and they are sweet, sweet upon her tongue. The flower girl longs to land, to explore plains that began to blossom in myriad hues. Fate calls like a bird; a whistle that flutters leaves and calls her limbs to dance.
The flower girl might have missed the antlered boy, were it not for that whistle that passed his ebony lips. Does he know of the curiosity that he makes run wild within the Dusk queen?
Caught in the compelling tines of intrigue, Flora pauses with a tip of her wings. Graceful as a lark she spins to face him. Awe has her eyes trailing his antlers as though they where the branches of an eternal oak tree.
No matter how long the girl looks at him, she feels no air of familiarity. Not even in the smile that curls his lips. It whispers for her to remember, but Florentine has been here too long, her memories fading with the days.
She remembers a man who made her dance, who turned her hums to song and sheltered in a cathedral of bones. But she does not see him now with his tattered antlers and lovely smile.
Slender feet land in the yielding, meadow mud. Through her thick lashes of sweeping gold, Florentine watches this boy. Her twilight eyes survey the bleeding bones of his antlers, the velvet that hangs in shreds from each tine. Had Florentine been paying attention to the ground before the boy called to her, then maybe she would have seen him scratching each brace upon a tree. As it was, she did not and so she chirps lightly, “You have twigs and leaves in your antlers, did you know?”
Her head tilts with avian curiosity. From beneath the golden hair and petals that fall forward, Flora continues to survey the boy and his sorrowful antlers. Her eyes trail the red that bleeds down exposed bone and into the tangle of his ebony hair. It sets dark intrigue creeping into the corners of her and lets dangerous warnings sing through her skin.
Florentine draws level with the stranger, moving past him in the direction of the Dusk Court. She ignores the dangerous temptation of this boy as it bites about her heart. “You might need to walk with me, I was on my way home and I am quite late. I shall be in trouble if I linger.”
It is everything she can do to keep her eyes fixed upon her path home. Yet an ear, rogue and insatiable, twists back to settle upon him. An image of this boy, bloodied and savage as he is, paints itself within her mind. Leaves and vines adorn him, his skin the colour of bark. This boy is an earthen creature with antlers arching like roots and standing as proud as any crown. An imp, a king, a god are the titles Florentine dare give him.
Would he do better as a king than she does as a queen?
Unbidden, her slender neck curves, her head tilting until one eye settles upon this feral boy. She cannot look away as intrigue sears her soul and fate creeps upon them. “What would you do if I gave you a crown?”
She is a wonder, he thinks as she lands - but then, she always has been.
Florentine is no longer a young girl, and it is strange for his gaze to sweep up soft golden curves, her hair long and thick, carrying still the smell of spring despite the barren world around them. Something flashes in his green eyes at the sight of her, a woman grown, but his gaze moves to the dagger she still wears and he smiles, satisfied.
Lysander had expected to see it, but he feels relieved nonetheless to find it hanging heavy against her breast.
At her voice he flicks his gaze back up to her face and tilts his antlers obligingly, an amused bow. “You must forgive me. I’m still growing accustomed to them.” He notes the lack of recognition in her words, in her eyes, but he doesn’t sorrow. Instead he’s amused; he wonders how much he’s changed, how much time has passed, for her, since they were together last.
Neither does he mind the way her amethyst gaze wanders him.
She nears and he inhales the new scents of her, things that call to his memory in other ways - rich dark wine and a skein of smoke; the slight musk of old books and the clean of cold winter. It reminds him of his own home, so different from the rift, so different from anything he thought he’d find in this body.
“Gladly,” he says, and turns to follow her, curiosity running thick as liquor in his veins. “Do you find yourself in trouble often?”
The scent of coppery blood hangs about him - quite literally - so very different than the midsummer garden she wears. His gaze drifts from her often, but finds the landscape a woeful barren thing compared to her bright lilac and gold. It is as though she’s drawn all the life of the place for herself. He’s watching her again and when her eyes find him pleasure curls low in his belly, dark and lovely. Even more so at the words that follow.
Ah, he should be careful, careful with her — but when has he ever been? There is no fun in caution. Before he answers he draws even with her, arches a brow.
“Why, have you one to squander? You have been busy since you left home.”
There is a mystery that glimmers in this boy’s eyes and hides behind his smile. She can hear the song of secrets upon those lips even when she has torn her gaze from his face – too rugged, too alluring. Florentine cannot begin to know the mysteries that lie behind those eternal eyes, nor the secrets upon his tongue. Yet the girl suspects something.
Her eyelids grow heavy, gaze narrowing as she surveys this antlered boy and his easy manner. The dusk girl wonders what put that odd glimmer in his eye and curled his lips so. She still wonders as she walks beside him, an ear attuned to his every move.
From the corner of her eye she looks again to his tattered antlers and the blood that glows ruby red. He fills her with scents of metal and flowers and magic. Her breath stutters and all at once she is keen, keen to know where he came from and what old magic it is that lingers upon his skin.
“You have not had your antlers long?” Florentine breathes and her question hides so many more. They pile upon her tongue and her lips begin to tingle for want of asking. Her fly-away heart thrums for the effort of not asking them all. It is a surprise then, when the only other thing that passes her lips is a light admonishment, “Well you aren’t doing a very good job of looking after them if they are already falling off…”
She turns from him, to lead onwards, to head home. But oh her thoughts are only with him, her skin thrumming with the need for this boy’s mysteries. He holds her attention and sends electric ripples down her slender spine. Lysander sets her skin to itch with the desire to turn back to him. Yet Florentine steps onward, driving each slender limb before the other. She knows she is a creature of fancy and this boy is so dangerously fanciful.
Do you find yourself in trouble often? Her lips curl into a guilty smile, her eyes flaring and her head nodding sagely. “I am afraid I do. I get too distracted with adventures and…” She pauses her eyes flitting over him, “…things.” A steadying breath and another stolen glance at the mystery boy she cannot fathom. “I think queens are supposed to be more focused than I am.” Her voice lowers conspiratorially, “I am not a very good one.”
A flick of her head and her thick fringe of tumbling petals falls like a veil. Beneath its protection she continues to slyly watch this curious boy and his wonderful, magical scents.
His last comment banishes her final thoughts of Terrastella. His words bring her up short and she spins to him with eyes narrowed. Her nose lifts to better peer at him from beneath her fringe. “Home… You mean Dusk…” She slowly affirms without question, for how could he mean anywhere else? But her skin begins to thrum anew, her heart fluttering, reaching for the dagger that lies outside her chest. There is a knowing no reason can fathom. Such knowing is as deep as the sea and Florentine is the tide rolling in towards the boy.
The twilight girl stands before this mystery boy. She is close, close enough to see the black of his eyelashes, the flecks of embers within his eyes, she studies every hair upon his face and the curl of his lips.
Flora looks for any part of him she knows, but there is nothing, nothing but old, wonderful magic that clings to his skin like a mist. She knows this boy from nowhere. And yet, there is a siren’s call within her. Her soul is full, for his company is too easy, his smile too warming. “Do you know me?” She asks softly, warily, and so very, very keenly.
For all she has grown – all she has evidently gained – the golden girl is much the same. She is as easy to read as a filly, emotions moving unguarded across her face like drifting clouds, and there is a part of him that wants to chastise her for it. But it is small, just a shadow of a sliver of the piece of him that would always protect his own, and besides that he is enjoying her confusion, her sharp curiosity, far too much.
He gives no hints yet. He only walks alongside her, stride easy as a cat’s, and flicks his ears at the itching of his antlers. Such a strange sensation, to have a part of him feel something when he knows they will be gone soon; a bleeding crown. The symbolism makes him grin again, and he shakes his head beneath their unfamiliar weight. “Ah, but they itch something terrible. And they’ll grow back, in the spring, with no input from me.” The last words are almost mournful in a mocking kind of way; how long, now, since he could change his appearance at will? Vanity is far from the worst of his flaws, but he suffers from it still.
Lysander bows his head against a breath of wind, lifts his eyes to swift shadows of crows that seem to twist and shiver to stay on-course. Everything here feels so still, quiet as sleepers, but surely there is magic. Surely Florentine could not linger so long in a place without it.
For a moment a strange unease shivers inside him like the crows on the wing; he exhales it into silver mist, watches it vanish in the weak sunlight.
He tells himself he’s wrong to have such thoughts, when she speaks again. Adventures and…things. His attention is rapt on her long breath; he hums as if weighing her words. “I have known a fair number of queens,” he says, “but never one so keen to give their crown to a stranger. Perhaps it’s that and not your focus that’s the trouble.”
When she whirls he stops, graceful as a dancer, and looks at her archly. “Dusk?” he repeats, but he less interested in that than in watching her eyes from beneath her fall of golden hair, waiting to see something. Recognition, or some stirring of memory – ah, but she had been so young. Or maybe it was this place; maybe she had even forgotten what her dagger was for.
She is near enough that the scent of her flowers is thick as a summer grove; he searches for a scent of desert and bones, or time unraveling, or feral magic that gave and took. He does not find it; he finds her, and woodsmoke and stone, and traces of others as light as a touch. Well, she is a queen; of course that must mean she has a people.
Perhaps even a king – perhaps even an heir, by now.
Ah, that was a thought that wounds him strangely, like the bloody itch of his antlers.
Do you know me?
“The last time we spoke, you said you might make me your husband some day,” he says, and turns his eyes so casually away. His voice is laughing, sunlight on a stream; the world forgets it is winter, for a moment, and the scent of hyacinths and salt is a ghost or a memory on the breeze. Then it is gone, and he turns his head back to her, eyes too green, too deep, for such a dull midwinter day. “That was not so long ago – for me. But I am glad you have found far better prospects.”
Snow drifts in from the weighty clouds above. Beneath her feet it has begun to whisper and Flora wonders why she never noticed it before.
Snowflakes fall like cold kisses, a million of them, to land upon her spine and her hair. Through lashes dusted with white, she eyes this strange, antlered boy.
The red of his antlers is ever stark against this new background of falling snow. She watches as flakes fall, beautiful white only to bleed red as they land upon his shedding tines. With a soft huff she looks away, unsure how the spectacle makes her feel.
“A fair number of queens, hm?” Florentine muses as she continues to peer at this boy from the corner of her gaze. She ignores the wheeling of crows for there are better things to engage her now, like snow, and tardiness, and wild boys from distant lands. “Do you enjoy your queens?” She accuses with a smile more knowing than it has ever been. There is a maturity in her humour, one she has never had before. It makes her smile grow more daring and more pleased. She once might have blushed, but now she just breathes a laugh and lifts her face toward the snow-falling skies. It felt good to be grown-up.
Her eyes close. In that moment of black, Florentine is home, in her Winter Court before it was destroyed. It had been so long since she thought of her home, so long since she felt the ache in her heart for those wild, wild lands. Why remember now? The flower girl muses. She lowers her gaze, looks to the boy and knows. She steps close, drinking the scent of him, for it is warm and familiar with its old, old magic.
Mysterious words, suggestive words, bring her back to him. She stands so close, so ready for his big reveal. He has a big reveal, does he not? Florentine waits for him to tell her of some wonderful, grand scheme – of how fate has woven itself within their lives and played its merry games. Two souls destined to unite again at fate’s own desiring.
How terribly right she was.
Florentine almost comes to doubt herself when he still has not said anything, and her eyes tumble from his, sliding down his nose to the lips that smile. She nudges his muzzle with a playful bump, ready to sigh and again acknowledge that her old time and magic still have no precedence here.
Until…
The last time we spoke And she is smiling before he finishes his sentence. He is still talking and her eyes rise, fast, keen. She finds his eyes and wonders why she does not know him, why she cannot recognize this boy who she has so obviously met before. Then, there is one word that draws her from her inner ponderings. A word, a memory he knows will banish her lack of recognition and it does. It drags her back to when she was a child in a desert full of ancient bones. They had danced, they had sung, they had sheltered from a storm within a cave of bone…
He steals the breath from her lungs and it is not often the twilight girl is lost for breath. Obviously, the moment is fleeting, and when she sighs it is happy, contented. “You remembered.” But she need not be surprised, for it was only a short time ago for him, even if it was years for her. Her smile is satisfied, playful, confident as she chirps, “If you are lucky, I still-“ But she does not finish with may. In fact, she does not finish at all. Instead, she has fallen still, an inexplicable twinge of hurt creeping into her heart.
“Oh, glad are you?” She huffs when she can no longer manage her hurt. Desperately she morphs it into playful smile and turns it into humour. For that is what they do, is it not? “I take it you are not here to take me as your bride then… I suppose it is just as well, I am not sure I am ready to be whisked away just yet.”
Florentine skitters on through the snow, her limbs flighty, her mind wrapped in sandstorms and anthousai. “When you do decide to, Lysander, I would advise a time when your antlers are not quite so… tatty. Just so you know.” Her eyes linger, a pointed look that does little to hide the petulance in her voice. “A queen expects her suitors to be ever so fancily turned out. But I suppose you already know that.” She should be ashamed, she supposed, her father would be horrified. But, to find her future husband, glad about her better prospects was quite deflating.
“You called me anthousai.” Flora murmurs softly through the veil of falling snow. “What happened to you?” And she means his antlers, his changes torso, the years between their meetings, the rift, the magic… so many things.
“I find queens to be far too solemn,” he says, and watches her tip back her head to the laden white sky. “All serious, so heavy with responsibility.” He is near enough to see her close her eyes, see a snowflake catch in her honey-gold lashes. Close enough the mist of their breath mingles when her gaze finds his and she steps nearer. She has flecks of amber in her eyes and he wonders if she always has.
Her muzzle brushes his and he lips at the satin of her nose before he speaks. She smells nothing at all like the Winter Court, nothing at all like the Rift.
And then the realization dawns, a sun rising. He settles back, satisfied.
At least until his words seem to shake her, rock her like a boat on the crest of a wave. He lets her turn around, lets her speak over her shoulder and leave a few foot-prints in the snow before he laughs and sets after her.
Perhaps he should not feel so glad she’d said nothing of a lover of her own, no king or courtesan to help carry the weight of her new crown.
“Ah, Florentine,” he says, and laughs again at her little insult, giving a shake of the tatty antlers in question. A few drops of blood stain the thin dusting of snow. “I only mean that I am no better match than I was then, and certainly a poor choice compared to a kingdom.” And then he’s silent, thoughtful, green eyes flashing darker. “I am not the one who takes,” he says, and it is other, older gods he thinks of then. “Anyhow, you told me you must be in love to get married, and that love can break your heart. Do not tell me you’ve grown less wise, in so short a time.”
He ought to leave it there, but he cannot resist the blow to his ego, however joking or framed by hurt.
“Am I so different? I was not aware I looked so dreadfully common.” His smile turns impish, and then, abruptly, it vanishes. “And I call you anthousai still. But fewer things have happened for me than for you, I think. You were not so…” he trails off, and his dark-forest eyes skirt her golden curves, her proud wings with their long golden pinions, her eyes with their power to catch and to keep. “Tall.”
For a long moment after this he’s quiet, watching the snow fall around them and imagining it starlight instead. He stretches his head back, bearing his throat to scratch a place just above his haunch with a blood-striped tine. Maybe he is a gruesome sight – a thought that brings him to other bloody things.
Things he should tell her. You’re lucky you got out, he wants to say; it rises on his tongue and nearly slips out, bitter-sweet like unripe fruit.
But Lysander is selfish, and greedy for her time, for her smile. Even for the hurt that flashed meteor-brief in her eyes and lived lightly as a bruise in her voice. He doesn’t even feel too guilty for withholding information that might make her worry, might make her leave. Things might be interesting, in this world; even if not, they are at least new.
It’s only his nature, after all.
Instead he draws again beside her, twisting a black-edged ear. “What of you, Florentine? Did you win your throne through battle? No – it must have been charm. Tell me of your people, who you abandon for adventure.”
She is tired from her outburst and tired from pushing through thick snow. Florentine stops for a moment to catch her breath and cannot escape the ghost of his lips still tingling on her muzzle.
Her hurt feels like ash in her mouth. It had burned hot and fierce, but it was flash-fast and now, only the soot remains. Adulthood, in these moments, still felt a world away from the twilight girl.
“I am sorry.” The breeze tries to freeze the words as they fall from her lips and they come out heavier, repentance making them as delicate as ice..
Flora does not feel the wandering of his gaze, where it looks upon her curves and wings and eyes. Instead, she is gazing out at the whitening landscape, as grasses fall beneath the new blanket of snow. “I did say marriage was for love and I was also right; I have seen a broken heart.” She still feels Aislinn’s tears upon her lips. “Has your heart ever been broken, Lysander? I was not scared then,” and she means when she once told him of love with her whole and innocent child’s heart. “But I am now.”
She is serious, her lashes glittering ice into the sky, as she looks to Lysander and does not look away. She thinks she might look to him until time, at last, falls still.
Florentine takes a breath, like the turning of a page on to a new chapter, “And you said when I was older, if I still chose, you would gladly marry me.” There is a smile on her lips, one that plays with him, mocks him and charms them both with its brilliance. It asks nothing of this other-world boy. “You also said if I knew you better I would not have said I will marry you.” In gold, her limbs step her closer to him, back to the place where their breaths mingle, and there, Flora tips her chin up to better gaze at him from beneath her fringe. A huff through hot, satin lips and her hair lifts, fans and resettles. An amethyst eye gazes more clearly upon him and narrows with mock suspicion. “What should I be afraid of? Are there broken hearts because of you?” But her mockery falls short, her smile falling away from her lips like water. Her lashes become heavier, falling down over her darkened eyes. “There are because of me,” words whisper their way to him as the Dusk Queen turns to look out across the unblemished snow.
Bexley, Aislinn, Reichenbach. They all drift through her mind and her heart stutters and stumbles and clenches tight upon the last because, oh Reichenbach! How could she, even in jest, be stood here talking to a boy about marriage when her heart belongs to another? The air is gone from her lungs remorse gripping her tight. Guilt has her eyes widening, “I have a boyfriend.” The confession is blurted, and more duly follows, “He’s a king. Lives next door.”
She cannot look at Lysander, so awkward is her heart.
Was there hurt in his voice, when he asked if he was so dreadfully common? Her gaze sweeps from the plain, back to him. She sees his blood in the snow, the curve of his throat as he scratches his hip with a sharp, fatiguing tine. “You have never been common, Lysander.” Flora says, chastened. His charm, and her regret, have melted her ire like butter in the sun. “You are different enough that I did not recognize you, so yes. But…” Florentine pauses, her eyes finding his when his itch is sated, “No boy with antlers could ever be described as common.”
There is a breath, a moment where the twilight girl watches him, drinks in all the ways in which he is different and the multitude in which he is just the same. If anyone has changed, in any way that matters, she thinks it may be her. “You left me short changed the last time we met.” Amethist eyes, full of faux displeasure, settle upon him. “You did not warn me about the trial and tribulations of growing up…” They have changed her and Florentine does not yet know whether it is for the better.
Laughter, surprised and earnest bubbles from her lips as he thinks of how she came to wear a crown. “No, of course not battle, I have only ever fought twice, the first time I died and the second, I got this when my brother kicked me in the face.” The tip of a wing sweeps up to point to a thin scar, barely discernable but clear once an eye knew what to see. “It was not charm either, I am sorry to disappoint... I was merely given it when the former queen abdicated. I think they have received a rather poor substitute.” There should be a smile there, self-deprecating and playful, but it is gone and a whisper comes instead, soft and plaintive. “I am made for adventures, Flower Boy.” Not Courts and courtiers…
She sighs softly, and looks to home. “We are about to have a festival. If you want to meet my people, then come dance with us.”
He says nothing to her apology, but his skin shivers as though below the whisper-touch of a fly. She owes him nothing, least of all the word sorry.
But he does her the grace of turning his eyes away, when she talks of broken hearts and of her fear, and he can feel a growing, foreign heaviness in his own heart. It is a strange feeling, and one he hasn’t felt in a very long time.
Sometimes it seems such a terrible thing, growing up. Lysander has been born and re-born, but never in the way of an adolescent stumbling messily toward adulthood. He has always felt a little messy himself about the process – sympathetic, regretful at the loss of a kind of innocent enthusiasm…and envious. A jealousy thin as brambles that twisted and withered and grew again in the shadowed places of his heart.
There were things even gods could never have – and those were the things they would always want.
His gaze tracks to her, head dipping at the sound of his name from her grown woman’s lips. “No,” he says, and maybe there is something strange in his voice – a kind of longing. Or maybe it is nothing; the snow is falling fast and thick, now, and his throat is tight with cold. “I have never had a broken heart. I’m not sure I am able.”
He is not at all surprised, as his green eyes linger on the amethyst of hers, that she has learned of such things. The questions rise in him, soft and sharp, but he closes his teeth around them for now. Instead, he smiles, too, when she echoes their long-ago-recent conversation. Where her smile is a brilliant thing, his only becomes more Cheshire-like as she once again closes the distance between them, swathing him in spring and golden sunshine, and his smile does not fade with hers.
He is not at all surprised by that, either.
“People have come to me because of broken hearts,” he says lightly as a dismissing wave of his hand, “but I would not say I have caused any. That requires an…ah, a permanence? I was not made for staying, and that is what I meant in the desert.” He says nothing of whether he still means it now – but surely she can see. Surely she feels some of it, herself.
At her confession he only laughs. It pours silver into the air between them and as it fades he reaches forward, nudging her muzzle with his own, and lips at her tangle of forelock. “You would catch a king, Flora. I hope he’s less grim than your father.” Surely he must be – and Lysander wonders then what else this king might be.
“Hmm,” he says as she soothes his pretend-wounded ego, his lips shaping a grin once again. “And does your king have antlers?” If he did, he must keep them very neat.
He tsks at her scar, and wonders of her brother – but he knows there will be time for that story, later on. When she suggests she’s a poor match for queen, he shakes his head, snowflakes bright in his dark curls. His voice, when he responds, is as soft as her own, though too low to be a whisper. “Perhaps you weren’t made for staying, either, not-so-little Anthousai.” They are alike; this he knows – but ah, she has gone places, now, that he never can.
Love – that is a changing thing, different than all the worlds he could ever walk, all the shapes he could ever wear, all the things he could coax to grow from dark soil.
When she looks away, wistful, he brushes his shoulder again her own, and starts in the direction of her gaze, casting her another glance.
“But I think we were both made for dancing. I would be delighted to attend.”
Florentine watches him, through the snow and the veil of her fringe. In this moment she feels so very young – just like the child he first met - and yet also so very grown up. Flora feels every year she has spent parted from him and smiles with pride for what she hopes she might have become. Does he think she has grown up well?
Her head tilts, wild as wind and feral as a bird. She blinks, though her golden hair clings to her lashes. “Not able?” the words are a breath as she studies him. He is a piece of art she will watch and study and always find new things upon. He has already changed his appearance once – would he again? Would she have to study his new body like she does now? Relearn the shape of him.
“Do you not love?” She sighs when she has drunk her fill of him and still it is not enough. A steady gaze settles itself upon his, it might be the safest place of him to look, and she is wrong. Eyes are never safe. A smile, a thing to ease this awkward swell of emotion, slips across her lips. “Or is it because you have no heart?” She jests lightly, an eyebrow lifting as the queen turns from him and walks slowly towards home.
Florentine keeps close to him, a ward against the cold, but when has she ever truly felt cold? She was born in perpetual winter, yet the fact does not keep her legs from straying close to him; a moon within his orbit. His words have little space to travel when they are so close and she peers up from the corner of her eye. Stealing a wondering glance at her flower-boy and his words that seem to cryptic to her. “Why did they come to you? Did you heal them of their broken hearts?” There is an innocence to her question that age and experience has not yet chased away. It is there too in the way she watches him from wide, wide lilac eyes.
He talks, then, of straying, of never keeping still. He was not made for staying and, “Neither am I.” She says softly and considers how long she has been here and how she has come to love, to stay. “But love happens so fast…” She confides, small and overwhelmed. Florentine is flotsam in an unwavering sea. Love is the tide and it carries her out, out, out. Indeed, she is never still. Rather, she is lost and thinks she might never be found.
She turns her head, as if it might clear her from her thoughts. He does not aid her when his muzzle touches hers and his lips find the tangle of her fringe. She pauses for a moment, until the touch tickles, until it feels too pleasant. Then she tilts her forehead away, but cannot stop the sudden reach of her mouth for his as her lips lip at his own.
Lysander’s words draw her gaze to his antlers, still bloody, still tattered. “No, he doesn’t have antlers.” An inhalation, a sigh and then, “He has gypsy coins and feathers and wild curls.” Her eyes trail Lysander’s own mane of endless curls. “I know another boy with wild curls.” The flower-girl adds pointedly as she turns back for the Dusk Court, studiously ignoring the lingering tingles upon her lips and forehead.
@Lysander
This styling is also nice for some non-obtrusive OOC credits, wordcount or banter. Don't forget that divider up there.
