A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
He’d caught a few hours of elusive sleep, nestled beneath a copse of fir trees, the ground beneath them bare of snow and thick with the scent of their needles. But winter was not going out with a whimper, and some time before the moon set he woke to find his breath turned to mist, shivering even in his winter coat.
Asterion was still loathe to sleep within stone walls – they remind him too much of the maze of Ravos, each turn hiding some new monster – but he doesn’t mind walking them, at least long enough to warm up, and so he goes.
He finds himself drifting, a slender sleepless ghost, down the first hallway Florentine had showed him when she’d led him back here. They weren’t the rooms she kept anymore, but they felt as familiar as anything, and for a while there is only the sound of his feet on the stones to keep him company.
And then, around a bend, a soft chiming clear as starlight. At first he thinks of Aislinn, thinks it still even as he catches the scent of woodsmoke, but it is not the gypsy girl he finds.
He hadn’t expected to come once more face to face with the man he so resembled, and as they had at the Dawn festival Asterion’s dark eyes skim over him, half-impressed and half-uncertain. Reichenbach was like a hero out of one of his childhood stories; surely anyone would aspire to be him, or to have him. He feels insubstantial in comparison, twilight on mist.
And yet, from what he’d been told, this was the man who had broken Aislinn’s heart. What, then, does that mean for his sister?
Catching himself staring, Asterion ducks his head, a gesture somewhere between shy and deferential, but when he lifts it again his dreamer’s gaze doesn’t hesitate to settle on the glimmer of the King’s eyes, pale in the fading moonlight that seeps through the doorway.
“I’ve had little luck finding her lately, either,” he says softly, and a corner of his lips curls in a smile that is lost in the shadows. “But it might help to start with the right room. Lucky that one's still empty.”
@Reichenbach hi
