[P] you play the part of savior;

[Lysander]

 
 
 

 

He knows Isra is not in the city. 

Lysander knows it and yet he walks its crooked pathways, scented as they are with bonfire smoke and the dry-dust smell of dead leaves. Everywhere he casts his gaze there is a sign of her, a stretch of gold where there should be only dirt, a trail of flowers more delicate than any living thing. Her city carries its queen’s touch like a brand or a beacon and the stallion hunts each lingering sign like a bloodhound. 

Of course it does not lead him to a storyteller-queen, nor to a Ghost with a starving knife. Yet when he falls in step behind a mare who leaks light like blood, whose skin is the red of firelight off burnished copper, his body goes tense as a wolf's.

Another beast of Ravos, loose on Denocte’s streets. 

But Eshek is no Calliope. Lysander has not forgotten what stories he has heard of the goddess of fire, of chaos and light and ash. He had not shared her appetites there and to see her here (but more than that, to see her now, when the world is crumbling anew) makes something black turn over inside him, makes his skin shiver as beneath the feet of a fly. 

It does not keep him from calling after her, from raising his head like a buck in its prime, from leaning into the wind that tousles the dark curls of his hair and tries to remind him, with its near-winter bite, what it felt like to hold all of life in the palm of his hand.

“I didn’t think I’d see you in a mortal world again.” The words are pleasant enough, dark green off his tongue and heavy with rich soil, but the smile he wears glints like a half-buried spade. Once Lysander would have wondered if she remembered him; now he does not much care. His vanity has been buried away, though it was slower to fade than his ichor and immortality.

Still he walks like the god he once was when he draws near to her, all the grace of reeds bowing before a breeze, all the strength of choking vines winding around an old dead tree. And his eyes, when he looks at her, remember the secrets of a hundred centuries. Down and down in the roots of his heart does he bury the trembling question are you still a god? 

“Why have you come here, Eshek?”

 

you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night

@Eshek

[Eshek]

There are reeds singing in his step, hollow and full of wind-song. He's louder than the fires crackling pale at her back and the smoke rising in towers of prayer towards the black thickness of space. When he comes she licks the air and it tastes like bitter, rotten wine on her corpse lips. She smiles, to hear the thrum of his steps and a deluge of flickering light pours out from her. It pours from her eyes and her mouth, like sickness and plague. She's poisoned with god-light and she's dead from the brightness just as she always had been. She wonders if he knows how sweet the dirt is, how it tastes like sugar when the swamp water soaks it and makes brackish water and drowning mud. Each of her eyes holds a promise of it, of death, of darkness and she's eager to close the distance between them. She leans into the space not like a wood-land creature but the space itself, reaching out endlessly in a refusal to be tamed. There's stardust in her teeth and wormholes in the hollow creases framing her rib-cage where the fire is afraid to glow. He is a forest and wine. She is everything in the places where the forest is full of rot, bones and moss. And the forest always dies, even when it's reborn it dies and dies and dies again. She wonders when he will die. “Oh." It's not a question but a sigh of light in the way the moon sighs through the dark clouds that try to devour all the stone-light of it. She blinks and the fires look bright because she lets them. “Is this a mortal world?” Stardust makes the words coarse, like dust and smoke and soot, when she raises her eyes to the tines of his antlers reaching from his crown like bones reaching out from a spine. Eshek knows it's not a mortal world anymore. Not now, not ever again. How could it be? She wonders if he looks at all her light and realizes that the course of this place has shifted and realigned like a fracture, jagged and sharp enough to puncture through skin. “I am here.” A pause, an aching throb of light that taste like life when she swallows it down, down, down like a stone of a planet. It sits heavy in her stomach and she feels bloated with it (bloated like a fat, dead sea-worm). “Because your world is broken.” Each words sits on her tongue like a gavel, a blade of judgment eager for the neck. Eshek has come, as she always does, to save them all. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Lysander

[Lysander]

 
 
 

 

It was foolish of him to have asked, when he already knows the answer like he knows the way it feels to die. Like he knows the way a knife-blade smiles as it nestles between his ribs. Like he knows how the breath of a monster smells with her wings and mouth opened wide to receive him - of brine and of blood.

Has he always been so foolish? Or has Novus made him so, have the years with a mortal mind and a mortal heart and his mortal running blood shaped him into something soft and full of worry like a rotten trunk?

Is it love that has made him no better than a man?

Lysander comes closer, until the light from her eyes and her mouth and her nose cast a sick moon-glow on his own skin. Until he can smell her and be reminded of what the world smelled like, rising from the dirt like a seed, everything rotting and growing and swift and dead. If he struck her with one of his tines, would that light spill out the hole in place of blood? If he struck her with one of his tines (tipped in poison, for Lysander is wiser prey than he was) would she wither?

“Terribly mortal." He does not offer more; nothing of the gods on their mountain who loved to smite and vanish. He looks at her god-light and licks his teeth as jealousy curls around his heart, nestling up like a wandering dog that has been gone long and long.

Oh, how he tires of being weak.

When she continues, each word slow as a pendulum (each word the tick of a clock counting down) his smile grows like a vine. Florentine’s dagger bumps against his chest, a warning or a goad, when he reaches forward to touch her shoulder, to lay his antlers against her cheek.

“It is not my world,” he says, sweet as grapes heavy and ripe and ready for pressing, and Lysander cannot himself tell if it is a lie.

you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night

@Eshek

[Eshek]

A hundred blurred light-years flicker in her gaze as she watches that swinging metal blade against his heart. She can feel the magic of it it, pulsing like a second heartbeat between his bones, begging to be tasted. Another part of her is disappointed that he has a blade at all, that he hasn't already torn the world asunder with his crown of bones. “Mortal.” Light makes the word bitter in the darkness, and it doesn't sound like a repetition but a name. Eshek wants to rip her skin open and paint the word in whorls of light across his ribs, down his back, shape it to look like tears falling from his eyes like stars from the sky. She wants to anoint him in herself, until he rises dripping ichor and gold instead of blood. Would he shed his antlers then like a season? Her body leans into the space between them. She misses when her body could split apart like jaws, when her ribs could hug like a snake. This body carries none of her old grotesqueness and her infinity moons that took the form of organs. All this body holds is holiness: religion, light and death. A hoof scrapes elegantly across the stone, it sounds like a blade drawn across old bone. The lift of her head is almost defiant. When he touches her shoulder it seems almost if she might impale herself upon his tines. She thinks about it, about drowning him in the holiness of her. She's dead anyway, she's eternal. In the end she only lowers her head when he lays his crown like a kiss below her eyes. She smiles and her teeth grind like a saw between her bloody lips. “If you have not taken it, ” The words blow like a breeze across his brow and she watches the air move beneath it like she's the east wind. Her teeth are still grinding together, bone on restless, dead bone. Eshek pauses, inhales and swallows soot and the sweet tang of ivy. She inhales him. “I will.” The east wind says. And then, she presses her cheek hard into his tine, hard enough to cut. Light drips down him like tears of the moon, like the sorrows of every burning sun in the infinite blackness of space. Lysander is more lovely with drops of her running down his crown of bones like snakes. Her blood makes him look like a god dripping ambrosia. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Lysander

[Lysander]

 
 
 

 

Something seizes in his chest to see her eyes flick and feast upon Florentine’s dagger. Oh! He would rather Eshek study his own heart than that finely-carved blade of silver and steel and hungry magic. It feels like a filthy sin for such a one as her to see it, and some ragged ghost within him wants to whisper mine.

It is a different word she speaks, and Lysander is grateful for it. Even when she says it like a curse, and anoints him with it like a new name. But he does not deny it, only continues to study her like a fox studies a wolf, each of them hungry, each licking their teeth.

There are few around them, now. Perhaps the people sense something in the way they look at one another, and are afraid; perhaps there is something instinctual in them still, the same thing that bid them hide when they lived in caves and a storm swept in from over the fathomless sea. Perhaps there is still the shadow of a god somewhere between Lysander’s bruised ribs - but maybe it is only Eshek, who could be nothing but a hound amid the hares.

Lysander does not feel like prey, even when her teeth grind like gravestones in his ears. He wonders how her god-light looks, reflecting off the smooth bone of his antlers or the green-shadow shine of his eyes. The night no longer smells like bonfire smoke and the dead-leaf dust of autumn; it smells like the ruin of cities fallen a thousand years ago, it smells like the wind that blows between the stars, it smells like the deep rot when even the body has dissolved away. He could choke on that scent; he could get drunk on it like wine pressed below a priestess’s feet a hundred years before.

When she says I will it is not like a promise but like something already written, a book closed. But he has no time to answer, not with that pressure against his tine, not when she has opened herself like a flood to him. Lysander thinks of the poison on the points of his antlers and knows to her it is nothing.

Her blood is hot and bright; it paints him in phosphorescence. It is like he has dipped his antlers in gold, it is like a nest of fireflies have settled on his skin. Nausea twists his stomach but that is the mortal part of him, the part that understands what she is the way any man does. But he does not lean away - now he lays his tine against her throat, now he licks her shining blood where a drop of it has landed, hot and foamy, on his lips.

He had never wanted to swallow the world. He was not that kind of god.

“There are other gods here,” he says, and tilts his head just a little bit more. He thinks of them, fled even from their mountain after committing their crimes, and sighs to envision his antlers piercing flesh. “They might not appreciate the competition. But if you hunt them, let me help you.” His voice is black and ravenous, and (almost unwillingly) Lysander pulls away.

you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night

@Eshek

[Eshek]

Aether is spiraling in her like a tornado and it's gnawing at the shores of her flesh and the cracks in her bones. With each whip of spectral wind she's breaking down and molecules of her are floating around her stomach like drops of rain that have escaped the atmosphere. There are stars gloaming in her chest, as if she has swallowed the goddess of this place. There is a sun flaring in her heart and the core of it is oddly frozen and hard as ice. On her skin there is the reflection of twilight, pastel colors that shift and look like paint dripped from a sharp handled brush. In her eyes there is the rising of every day that has ever been. Each blink of her eyes is both night, day, and all the things between the two. She wants to tell him she's already devoured all the gods, that the light of her is already etching eulogies to them on the canvas of her bones. Instead she too licks the blood falling between them and it tastes just like her sweat tastes. It tastes like a universe-- salt, stone and stars. “Were.” Each word is silver and metal sharp on her tongue. She bleeds with her words and her own light on her lips feels like a pyre on her cool skin. “There were other gods here.” When he withdraws his tines she wants to dash herself against him, as if she is the sea and a he rock that hasn't turned to sand. She wants to make sand out of him, sand that could be tossed into a wind so that it might tear flesh from bone. Instead, she lets him pull away and she understands. She understands even as she wants to crack open and swallow him whole like a wave on a single oyster hiding a pearl. Darkness falls when she blinks, lit only by the fires at her back and the small fireflies of blood dying between them. Each drop of her falls and together each forms a constellation on the dark stone at their feet. She looks at it and doesn't want his blade anymore. “I am already hunting them.” Eshek opens her mouth and between her bone white teeth there is the night. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Lysander

[Lysander]

 
 
 

 

Later, when he is alone (though he feels more alone than he ever has, standing with his head beside her heart and her blood on his lips) Lysander will search himself to see whether he misses feeling like the birthing-place of the universe. He will think of her, the night-dark of her skin with the stars shining through, wrong wrong wrong, and test himself for jealousy, or regret.

For now there is only the entropy that comes from standing near her, a wasps-whir buzzing that spills out from where her heart should beat. What, oh what, lies between her gaping ribs? No organs but nebulae, no muscle but the mold that grows out from the dead.

Only when he pulls away can he breathe and remember where he stands - in a city, in a court of starlight and smoke, where there are mortal men to be hunted. The further he leans from her, the less it feels like the world is unknitting itself, unmaking and unmaking. Lysander looks at the foaming blood between their feet just as she does, studies it like a scatter of bones, and only shifts his gaze up when he finds nothing he can read.

To be too near her is to walk the edge of chaos. There is no room for him in the universe of her - and Lysander is not ready to be swallowed up by madness. Not yet, not in this world where his heart has become a fragile thing, brushed with golden feathers and turquoise scales.

When he grins at her it is as a coyote grins to a wolf, a wary licking of teeth. He does not meet those mad corpse-light eyes, which make him wonder whether it is darkness or light that waits at the end of existence, and which is worse. “Then I wish you a willing foe.” Lysander nods to her, a tilt of his antlers still crowned with her not-blood and not-ichor, and walks away.

He heads first for a bonfire, and the laughter and noise of the markets, for the night is all at once very dark, and very cold.

you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night

@Eshek

[Eshek]

Hunger is swarming at her. A corpse made of insects instead of vegetation is blooming in her. Canopies of wings are spreading across her insides, thick enough to devour every inch of night that threatens to creep inside the holes of her. Roots of larva are digging in, spreading and spreading, and Eshek already knows what will blossom in the rich grave-dirt of her soul. She wonders what she could grow form the wine and blood soaked soil of Lysander. What could a god grow in a heart heavy with blood instead of Ichor? Eshek looks at his tines like altars and adornments. She looks at him like hunger is swarming, and blooming, and rooting inside her like a forest. The roll of his jaw beneath his skin looks like a prayer when he cannot meet the gaping holes of light the world around her calls eyes. Eshek feels flowers sprout in her forest. They are sharp and full of stars. She grins back at him and it's how a universe grins at the black trapped between its gravity. There is a forest in her but she is not wolf in a wood. She the space in which a hundred forests live. And in those forests a million predators look at each other, licking at their teeth like worry is not blooming in their hearts. Lysander turns away from the obscene constellations of blood shining between them. “Willing.”She laughs, and laughs, and laughs. The bonfires and the music all seem quiet (hushed like dead things) in the echo of her laughter. A meteor lives in the violent forest and roots of her amusement. Some gods... Some gods are not universes. This Eshek has always understood (even as she wished it wasn't true). Universes are always willing, but gods... gods are not. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Lysander