He has only been at the outskirts of Denocte, a hunter and a victim both in his time beneath the boughs of the Arma forests. Lysander had thought, once, about slipping into the city itself with poison on his tines, and hunting for a more dangerous prey than leaves and roots.
It was for Florentine that he had not. And it is for Florentine that he is here now, iodine and cedarsmoke sweet and thick in his nostrils.
They had slipped away from the city, the former god and his girl with the bandaged wing. What dim lanterns and bright bonfires the citadel possessed could never hope to reach as far as the lake, and darkness came early this time of year. But for now it is light enough, though muted with snow clouds thick over the mountains, a sweep of pewter and gray. It seems the first time in days that they are alone, and Lysander matches his pace to the girl of flowers and gold, and feels the loss of every petal that falls at her feet.
The regime is gone, he knows, and most of the flock of Crows with it - but Raymond still remains. He has yet to see the red man; this is almost certainly for the best. He has grown weary of weakness; the next time he wears blood it will be because he chose to, and it will not be his own.
There are no fireflies, this time of year; the only thing that rests over the surface of the lake is silence. There are thin crusts of ice like slivers of frosted glass around the edges of the water, and the pebbles of the shoreline are smooth and dark and gleaming in the dim afternoon. Idly he wonders if it, too, had flooded when the gods turned their wills to deadlier things.
“I wonder,” he says softly, and rests his chin atop the slope of her shoulders, “what would have happened if one of us arrived here instead.”
Surely she knows as well as he that each of them could have lived beneath a court of starlight - perhaps better than one of dusk.
Even so he already knows the answer, at least for himself; there is no where she could go he would not follow.
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
She breathes, if only to watch the way it rises to tangle like ivy in his tines. Envy watches as silver condensation presses against the curve of each branch. Florentine chases away the cold of its kiss with one of her own. Winter comes chasing, flaying the velvet of her lover’s antlers until they rise like silver birch – daggers reaching for the sky.
The Dusk girl does not even try to pull her eyes from the crown atop Lysander’s head. Idly she wonders if his coronet of vines in one godly life, had been replaced by a mightier crown of bone is this mortal one.
She draws back, her lips cool with their kiss, for oh how his antlers are cold now. She wonders when she ever came to know this as the final sign they were to drop. Maybe that is why her kiss is a ghost of vines too, twined tight against a prong. Had she known of his desires – those of poison and vengeance, would she have dared touch his antlers so? Oh but she would have! Florentine would have welcomed the embrace of death with all the willingness of Juliet.
But she does not know, and her kiss remains but a ghost on her lips and a phantom’s thing upon the curve of his bone crown. He is a cloak of warmth beside her and she wears him well, drawing him closer, tighter, to ward away the shivers that grow at winter’s insistent touch.
All is still but they, the sigh of their breath, the rustle of frigid grasses, broken at their feet. In the silence of the afternoon – all liminal shadows – he wonders of things only fate knows. Lysander voices them, and light as pixies those words hang. Ah they are mischievous, daring the lovers to wonder, daring them to question fate’s grand plan.
Florentine is silent, with smiles on her lips and secrets upon her tongue. “Maybe you would have fallen in love with a Night Queen and I come along to ruin it all and claim you as my own.
Oh how the Time girl throws memories of days spent within the lake, with her gaze set upon the stars. This is more important now. It is inevitable, she now knows, that fate would find her here, with her wing wrongly bent, stood beside her lover.
“Once I stood in the middle of a lake with a Night boy and looked at the stars with an ache of homesickness.” She confides in him with a song, a melody that feels not the dust of Time. “Now I look up and see only opportunity.” And up she gazes at the stars that come out, blinking away behind the dying of the sun. “Where should we go next? Where kings and courts will be the least of our worries… ”
She lifts her dagger in contemplation, turning it over slowly. It presses flat against the muscle of his breath, cold metal to warm, warm flesh. “I once worried about opening up a world within you.” Florentine does not ask him if he remembers, as it does not matter, because, “I need not have. I think now, that it might be the best place to be.”
@Lysander I think this might be Flora's way of claiming her man...
He sees her breath drift and dissipate like fairy-silver into the air, save for the pause when she presses a kiss to a pale and pointed tine. And Lysander smiles to himself, thinking of how dear their weapons are to one another - cold steel, cold bone. A knife for a princess and a crown for a man who was neither king or god.
Strange to think a year has passed, when he ran beneath the shadows of winter-bare trees that striped him in black and Florentine, trailing blossoms even in December, flew overhead. Strange to think of the flow of time at all, when it had been nothing but a dream in the Rift.
Lysander does not feel old - but then, until a year ago he’d never felt cold either. Or love, or wicked hate like a blackthorn branch that tore and tore at his insides. Or jealousy, or fear.
In a way Novus has made him new more than any of his hundred rebirths; it has refreshed him more than any offering of wine or of blood.
And yet, and yet.
“I would have enjoyed watching that,” he says, laughs softly into her golden hair. It catches the silver of his laugh, holds it among a garden of petals. She speaks then of looking at the stars, but the antlered stallion’s eyes are shut; stars he has seen plenty of, and most all he wishes for is here.
It is not until she speaks of next that his green eyes (near black in the fading light) blink open, leaning away so that he might meet her gaze. His throat is cool when the wind kisses it in the place it had been pressed against her skin.
It is colder yet when she presses her dagger against it.
“You are the one with worlds within you, Florentine,” he answers softly, and the muscles of his throat slide against her glistening knife. Once before it wore his blood instead of the star-shine pooling on it now, but he has no fear of that now. They are together, and so he may as well be a god once more.
“I would show you my home, someday.” His voice is soft, musing; heedless of her knife he reaches to press his nose to her cheek, then blow a breath in her slim ear. “Do you tire of Novus?” There is an evenness to his voice, a quiet curiosity; nothing that hints he might feel one way or the other. Nous had not been kind to them - but then, few worlds where when you got tangled up in them.
And he did not doubt that anywhere they went, his Anthousai would twist herself like vines - like flowers - into the bones of the place until they all bloomed together.
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
Lysander’s breath upon her hair is a mist of frost creeping through a garden of vines. It tangles between threads of gold and petals soft as bruises. Florentine feels nothing of the bite of winter – for where was cold when she was here, adorned in love and blood that runs, hot, hot, hot?
Everywhere his warm breath touches, her skin shivers. Florentine turns to him, a flower turning towards its sun, and, just for a moment worries for his mortality. Her own mortality is a dress she has worn for so long. She knows it well, feels its weight. But his, oh, his is new; does it itch him still? She wonders. Does it rub him raw? She fears. For her, mortality is a comfortable fit, lycra to stretch and be forgiving of all the mysteries of Time. But upon Lysander, it seems an ill fit.
Oh the stars hide their fires behind clouds that wander aimlessly by. Only when the final one blinks its last does she lower her gaze to find her flower boy’s eyes closed. Florentine is lost in the thick of his lashes for they are a dark woodland brushing against the curve of his cheek.
Where, oh where would she go and what would she do for all eternity if not to find her god of earth? The flower girl smiles with him, despite her worries.
Everywhere within Denocte is a memory, bittersweet. It is the taste of blood upon her tongue. It is a bruise pressed upon, worried, harassed. To be here, after all that has gone before seems like a sin. To be here now breeds within her anger, frustration and hurt. Each are terrible aches within her stomach. To be here at all feels like blasphemy, to be here with Lysander is worse.
So oh, what it is to step closer to Lysander then. Beneath the silent roar of a million stars, her lilac eyes lift up to his and beg them open. With her dagger pressed between them, warming with the heat of his throat, singing with the hum of his blood (blood it knows more intimately than any), Florentine muses lightly, “Do I?” She is quiet contemplation, golden lips held tight together before his lips find her cheek. “I only have worlds so long as my dagger finds them.”
The traveller pulls dagger’s chain free from her throat, only to fix it about her lover’s. “Now I only have those worlds, so long as I have you.” The dagger hangs over the curve of his breast, the clutch of bones and muscles hiding the thump of his heart. It is two beats before she peers up at him again, her nose crinkled, “Too cheesy?”
Florentine pulls away from him then, a smile adorning her lips, laughter bubbling in her throat. “I do tire of Novus, Lysander. But,” her eyes drift over him, her dagger hanging about his throat. ”I think it has just become interesting.”
She makes for the water, petals brushing a final embrace across his skin before trailing in her wake. The girl unfurls her disfigured wing, relishing the ache of it. “Come, we may as well take advantage of the hospitality of the locals. I fancy skinny dipping for tonight – until you are ready to show me your home and let me meet the anthousai...”
Lysander thinks nothing of blasphemy. He thinks instead of what she’d said earlier - maybe you would have fallen in love with a Night Queen, and I come along to ruin it all and claim you as my own. In a way it is exactly what had happened, the roles only reversed, and it makes a smile bloom secret and satisfied across his dark lips, a strange fern unfurling.
His heart, then, pressed into the shape even without the shine of a god’s, does not sorrow for her bittersweet memories. Regret and remorse are not things he is yet mortal enough for; he might never be, and if so he will not be sorry for it.
It is not that he has won, as though Florentine was a prize to be fought for like Helen. It is that he is happy, because she is with him, and how can he worry when he is so content? They are not finished with worlds yet; Novus is still nothing more to Lysander than a resting-place, a visit to a foreign court.
And not one without its charms. There beneath the moonlight her skin is limned silver from the reflection of the lake and though he desires to see her in a thousand worlds, for the moment this one is still enough.
He knows it is because of the dagger that he feels this way. And when she names it his green eyes finds hers as she places it around him, careful over the crown of his antlers. It feels warm from being next to her heart; the bite of the new spring night does not touch it. The weight of it feels no stranger than when he stepped into this world and found himself with antlers.
Lysander raises a brow at her, at the promise she is making. He does not ask her if she is sure.
“They will have to improve it for the songs,” he says only, and his eyes follow her when she pulls away.
It is not until she continues that his smile is revealed again, as sure as if it had been waiting, a carved rune with the leaves blown away. “Our near deaths were not enough?” There is a laugh in his voice like a riptide beneath the surface of the sea. Oh, how the shine in her eye makes him feel alive, a god reborn.
Even the sight of her wing, fragile in the starlight with the way the shadows cradled its bent angles, cannot make his grin fade. He follows her toward the water’s edge, the soft lap of it a sigh between her words.
“Not when there is such a tempting alternative,” he answers, nipping at the nape of her neck as he passes by, and plunges before her into the water.
It is cold enough to make him set his teeth, but it makes his heart beat all the fiercer beneath that silver dagger.
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
Her neck, her throat feels so exposed without their chain and dagger hanging there. Her eyes lower to rest where it glints, all at once familiar and strange, at her lover’s chest. Florentine misses it the moment it is gone. Yet her loss is not enough to out weigh the sliver of excitement that pours in sparks through her blood.
Her heart beats a little faster, her blood runs hotter and her chin at last lifts her eyes up and to the sky. She drinks it in, the sunset blues and the stars that glimmer like eyes awakening from sleep. Her breath is the wash of a silver river, rolling out to meet the sea. It disperses and is gone, carrying the vestiges of her anxiety upon its tide.
When Florentine returns her gaze to Lysander once more, there is no regret to be found. There is only intrigue, for the future was such a curious thing. Her stomach twists for the stories it might tell of her and her lover still.
“Songs?” Flora muses, golden lips tipping up like the edge of a gilt ring; it was a forever smile. “What songs are these?” And his Anthousai thinks of forest nymphs singing songs of woodland fare. But her eyes remain within this world, despite the wanderings of her soul. Her laughter is a bubble, a stream skipping over pebbles and rocks. “Have we reached the point of being great enough for songs to be sung about us then?”
Florentine shakes and the world slips from her in a cloud of dust and feathers and petals. She steps closer to Lysander, the boy of lost divinity and mortal dances. “Though I suppose you already have many songs about you, oh fallen god of mine.” The girl spins away from him, reaching out only to nip at his hip as he nipped at her. It is a wicked smile that Flora wears upon her lips as she questions mischievously, “Are all the songs about you tasteful, Lysander?” And she hums a song she knows of Novus gods, a thing of jest and silliness. “I am sure I could make a terrible one if not… something about how you snore in your sleep would be a good start.”
And she arches away from him as he nips her neck and chases him into the water. Her breath is stolen by the lake’s cold and she gasps when her voice is found. Florentine reaches for him, grappling him down beneath the water, her laughter rising above the discordant waves they make. “I am sure we can come up with far more entertaining things to do than near death experiences.” The girl whispers huskily, her voice lowering yet more, “I fear we have done those to death.”
A golden knee finds his shoulder as she presses into him, laying a wet kiss upon his cheek. “Maybe we could do children next? I hear that is akin to losing one’s life forever.” Florentine whispers jokingly though her eyes are dark and wide in the moonlight. She lowers her face beneath the water shyly until just her eyes and ears remain above. Water bubbles pop as she blows childishly through her nose.
“I’m sure they’re already singing lays of you in worlds you have left,” he says, “and if not yet, then it is only because you haven’t gotten there yet.” To anyone else his words might be madness; but Florentine knows the way time is not linear at all but a circle, a wheel, a great flat expanse of glass with stars and monsters above.
At her own comment (at his own songs), Lysander presses his lips together as though he is keeping his smile within. I will show you one day, his gaze tells her, when it presses on hers with its dark and verdant green.
But she draws a laugh out of him yet, and he shakes his head, his curls dark and errant as a boy’s. “Careful, Anthousai. I have plenty I could say about the girl who nearly forgot herself.” His smile then is quick but not cruel; her injury is still a fresh bruise, lying too near his own heart. Ah, but who else could have coaxed a monster from the in-between and stood laughing so soon after?
Lysander does not think the dagger he wears now, still warm from her skin as though it were a sun it lay against and not a girl, would give him such a gift.
Together they shatter the mirror of the lake, and wash away the curtain of new starlight. Together they are a tangle of limbs, of young-eternal bodies slick and cool, of flashing eyes and laughing mouths. It is easier to forget her injured wing, cradled by the water; it is easier to think of nothing at all but her teeth against his neck, her shoulder against his ribs, her warmth the only warmth.
And then her words -
“Oh?” he answers archly, and the gleam in his laughing eyes then is wicked. “Pray tell, Florentine, what sort of interesting things you know of.” He might have ghosted his muzzle along the arch of her neck, then, might have pulled dark lips from his wanting mouth - oh, but Florentine is always one step ahead of him, her words and nimble mind a river ever-running.
“Ah,” he says then, falling still where he stands with his hooves pressed into soft mud and algae, water lapping at his hips and his shoulders, the dying wake they’d made. Lysander is the closest to taken aback he has, perhaps, ever been; for a moment even his eyes widen, reflecting the moon that hangs above, a watching silver sliver.
Even so he might have said yes but for the sound of bubbles, and he drops his gaze to her, watching him like a very lovely, very silly hippopotamus. Instead he laughs again, low and full, and shakes his head. His wet mane sprays water on them both, glimmering like jewels or stars, like diamonds in a veil.
“Perhaps you should first heal your ribs,” he says, mock-serious, even as he bends his antlered head down toward hers to nip at an exposed ear. “And possibly your leg, and maybe, also, your wing-” Ah, but he ruins the guise by laughing again, and falls silent with the soft skin of his nose pressed against her neck.
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
They are laughter echoing in the cradle of mountains. They are wild song breaching the crowns of jagged mountains and drifting on up into the ceiling of the world. They are the splash of water that shatters a once perfect mirror. And the purple-black of the night sky watches as the lovers wrestle in silken waters.
Florentine fights, with laughter on her lips and vivacity gleaming in her amethyst eyes. She ignores the pain of a bruise nudged by a knee, a healing wing crushed between grappling bodies. Ever has she been the girl to live upon the edge, too full of life to ever be anything but. Florentine is a wild wind, destined to move on, destined to be but a memory.
But this night she is so very present and, as the waters fall still, as she sinks below the surface and watches the bubbles rise from her lips, Florentine knows she is still a breeze too young. Lysander is a statue before her, he is a sentinel tree, his antlers a bough beneath which is shelter and peace.
The traveller girl wonders of his wisdom, of what his verdant eyes see when he looks to her. Lysander laughs, another song to join those already gone before it. He laughs as the last bubble pops the surface, though Florentine has stopped blowing. Her held-breath is a burn within her lungs.
Boldly she lifts her face from the water and it drips like diamonds from her chin. Her breath releases as a shudder, water rippling in a wake from her sides. She is exposed beneath Lysander’s gaze and her smile, her laugh is all gone. Regret is all she feels in her heart and oh, it feels so much worse than any heartbreak before it. Embarrassment curls hot like oil and sharp as a scorpion’s tail.
Her neck curls, chin dipping towards her chest as he laughs again. She does not smile, though she watches him somber as a pyre from beneath her lashes. Each part of her Lysander names, oh she feels its ache, how right he is. How easy it was to forget them all, when inspired by laughter and love.
Her wing, her leg, her ribs… each a reminder of how unready she is. He once laughter is a phantom in the mountain passes and it returns to haunt her. Indeed, she is not ready, she knows she is not, yet the reality of how unready, how close she came – except for his eyes, his wonder for a moment and then her bubbles. Her stomach twists with a second hammer strike of embarrassment.
She was a queen once. Florentine’s wing (the only one that matters) lifts angular and wrong, from the water. She gazes at it. Yes, she thinks. She was a queen once, before her wing broke.
Florentine’s golden head nods, she agrees, oh yes she agrees yet she turns from Lysander. His laughter, though soft and genuine – she knows it is, she does, is thorn in her heart, a fan to the flames of her shame.
The water is too much, the night too still, the mountains stand as too many witnesses, so Florentine turns and makes for the shore. “Yes, yes, you are right,” are the words she leaves behind her to join their phantom songs upon the crowns of Denocte’s mountains.
Lysander does not watch the way starlight scatters on the lake, shattered into pieces with their splashing; he does not watch clouds veil the lovely face of the moon. He has seen all tese things before.
It is Florentine he watches, even as his laugh dies away over the water, and even in the semi-dark he sees the way her face falls. As she lifts her wing from the water, running with freshwater tears and feathers of gold, the once-god falls still. By the time she nods he is stepping closer to her, heedless of the water’s bite or the dagger’s new weight against his chest.
But she turns away from him, leaving only muffled words to cross the water for his ears. For a few steps he lets her go, his smile faded and his green-eyed gaze no longer laughing as it watches her draw away, followed by her wake as though he is trailing a wedding-veil. Yet before she is at the shoreline (so dark now the sun has set) he is after her, sure-footed in the shallows.
Lysander has followed her before, and doubtless will again - it is no question to him but to do so now.
The antlered stallion is silent for a moment, first following her, then drawing alongside, sleek and dark as an otter with his dripping skin. Even this closer to summer the air has a bite to it in the mountains, but he does not shiver.
Only once he draws alongside of her again does he speak, and he matches her step for step as they make their way across the whispering grass.
“Florentine,” he says softly, his voice a bed of ferns, his eyes boughs of pines bending near. “Whatever is on your mind, I would hear it.”
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
Oh she flees. She flees with moonlight as her veil, her body a golden dress peeling from the cold of the midnight lake. Florentine cradles her wing, holds it as she never cared to before – for indeed, she never cared to worry about it before now.
Yes the girl leaves Lysander behind, a solitary ear the only part of her that exposes her hope for him to follow. It is unconscious desire, for her chin is tucked tight, her gaze peering out beneath her forelock. Her wing is a trembling flag at her slim side. Her heart a fluttering bird. Each blink of her amethyst eyes is wet and the world blurs with tears that threaten to fall.
She hears when he moves, when the water splashes with his feet. Should Florentine not be grateful? Should she not be pleased? But simply she continues. Her slender limbs part the grasses that worry at her feet. All at once the Night Court is too much. It is a prison trapping her in and all Florentine has known since being a queen are beds that are not her own, a place in a court that is not hers. Who is she now? What is she now?
Flora stops only when Lysander’s moonshadow covers her. When the light of the moon is a halo gleaming through the twisted crown of his antlers. He speaks and in silence she regards him, through her haze of silent tears, through the beating of her heart and the ache of her twisted wing.
His words bring a laugh to her lips, but there is nothing light in it. There is no chime of bells nor the flyaway laugh of a time-traveller girl. It is a laugh cold like death and heavy with sorrow. “What is not on my mind?” Florentine says for she means so many things and each of them is a burden.
And how can Florentine begin when there are so many things to say? So many things that have gone unsaid? She says nothing, but drinks in his skin like soil, his antlers a diadem of earth and ivy. At his chest her blade hangs and oh it is a part of her, it defines her as much as its wearer. Golden lips touch upon the warm silver of its blade before she withdraws slowly. “Do you think me childish?” And even as she asks, her lips are a grim line, their gold pale in the moonlight. Her expression is one of grim acceptance, for it is a truth she believes of herself.
Never has she thought herself so low.
“I say children and you say nothing, but remind me of all the ways I have to heal.” She lifts her leg, her wing and rests it against the swell of her healing ribs. “You are right. Raymond thought I was a child for hunting his cat and maybe he was right, for it was she who nearly killed me.” And then there are the things which hurt more than the physical wounds she now bears. They are hidden wounds inflicted when her own courtiers betrayed her.
Ah, was it not supposed to have been easier being just Florentine?
“I want to be angry at you for evading me, but how can I when I asked in such a foolish way?” And all the fun, all the play in the water has been tainted. “Regret has a bitter taste.” Florentine says softly, sadly. And into the shade of his moonshadow she steps, and further still until her body presses against his. “If I could go back and change it, I would.” She confesses into his neck, feeling the cold, sharp lines of the dagger between them.
