It seems strange to see her dance beneath a roof, however lovingly adorned, however bespelled (if only for a night).
It is perhaps a testament to his time in Novus that, prior to this moment, Asterion had not thought it strange to stand in a ball-room and listen to music with a hundred strangers and friends. To wear silk or bone or anything at all. Only now does he see it as strange; when he is near enough to speak to her he closes his eyes and sees them not within a great walled castle but out beneath the sky with its river of starlight with the wind in their hair.
Oh, his thoughts are turning fanciful again, and for a moment he lets them.
This near to her he can smell Terrastella on his skin, and he does not expect the way it makes his stomach twist with homesickness and his heart tug with longing. There is the wild salt of the sea (so different from Denocte’s bustling port!), there is the thick rich scent of Tinea, there the sweet summer-grass of the fields that roll like carpet out from the city. No matter how wild she looks, no matter the strangeness of her skull mask and the ringing bells wound in her hair, she still smells of home, and Asterion’s heart beats bright against his ribcage.
When she speaks he is still caught in that rush of feeling, and so he knows at once what she means. “No,” he says, and in his voice is a vow. “They will not.” But as soon as he says it his gaze shifts to curiosity, for he is sure he does not know this girl, sure he has not even heard the ring of her voice even in a dream.
So when she names him he is doubly surprised, as though he has forgotten he is a king. Beneath his mask his dark eyes widen for a moment, and then he laughs like moonlight on the sea. “More than I can name,” he tells her, as the bodies turn around them, a push and pull like the tide. “And yet each moment brings another.” They are foolish words, those of a inexperienced prince and not a king tested, but his blood is wine and starlight and his eyes are full of a wild girl with magic writ across her skin. “I will tell you one in return for your name,” he says, and his dark mouth curls into a smile, bare inches from her cheek. The thought that he could simply ask (or order, if he was that kind of king) does not cross his mind at all.
@Leto
and hardly ever what we dream
