lysander
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.
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