Pain is a hunter and he the golden hind. For a time he had fled to the thicket of sleep until her voice had flushed him out, and ah! It has caught him now.
But the storyteller has blunted its arrows, made dull its sword. It burns to live but he remembers what it was to nearly die, a shard of silver buried in his side cradled only by blood and no ichor. It is better by far to burn.
And anyway, he deserves the pain – for his foolishness, for his arrogance. He is a god no longer, to topple monuments to other deities; he is only a man, and has become like all the others, just as he’d said to the black unicorn. Men are a brotherhood of bravery and folly, thinking themselves invincible, daring the world to make them suffer.
So he suffers now, and laughs through his teeth all the while, because it is how he knows he lives.
“Isra,” he repeats, as though her name is a medicine, too. Despite her warning he drops his muzzle a fraction in the slightest of nods and his green eyes are bright with pain. “I am Lysander. And I think my tale might have ended here without you.”
At the stirring of her warm breath on his side, the blood-buzz of forest flies, he half-closes his eyes. This, strangely, is familiar; an after-image from a previous life. One of stumbling barefoot through forests and drinking enough wine it replaced all the blood in your veins and offerings made in the moon-dark, in the damp grass, and all the flies that would gather in the morning.
He shivers beneath the touch of the leaves, cool and dry as skeleton fingers. Oh, the storyteller and the listener carry such different memories.
At her words he smiles, though she does not see it as she turns away for the bell-shaped purple plant. “The first one’s always free,” he says, and thinks of the story in the meadow, of moonflowers and children and the air scented like a garden. “But if pain is the price for your stories I hope you keep your medicines always close.”
His gaze lifts from the richly pigmented petals to her sea-eyes, and so carefully he takes the flower from her mouth. It is more bitter than blood on his tongue, but Lysander does not grimace as he swallows beneath the bird-song morning, as he waits for the plant to take effect.
How much of the world, he thinks, could be both healing and hurt, depending on the measure.
In the light slanting gold her scales glitter the same as her eyes, the both of them telling of sunlight on the sea, and his heart slows to keep pace with such far-away waves. There is still a sour aftertaste in his mouth but her words are sweet and soft, and though he would prefer to watch the way the morning makes a goddess of her he obeys when she coaxes his eyes to close.
Already it seems to him that it stings less, though it might only be her words. The world smells of the cool cleanness of pine and the bitter, wet tang of crushed plants, and Lysander sighs and lays his head across his knees, his muzzle on the carpet of pine and rich soil.
And he listens and listens, and begins to forget there was ever a world other than the one caught in tines of bone and cobweb.
call me in the darkness
@Isra
