He should have seen it earlier, her clear exhaustion - he is intimately familiar, after all. It is the only thing he had felt, there at the end of the flooding, when every day dawned with a new need to use his magic. At first it had seemed a bottomless well, a thing he could draw from again and again, as limitless as the sea.
But it was not the sea.
He sees it only when she fights to change the sand, when her eyes close tight with her lashes casting shadows on her sharp cheeks, when sweat prickles across her skin and is no match for the gleam of scales on her belly. When she turns to him he cannot bear the look in her eyes; it is too familiar, and not one a unicorn should ever have cause to wear.
“It’s a big dream you’re building,” he says softly, and closes the small distance between them, pressing his dark nose to her cheek. “It will come back.” He does not tell the queen that she has worked herself too hard; Asterion does not think it his place (and besides, he knows the impulse too well. It is a fault he shares).
So he does not see it, the line of horses who crest the hill, who walk down to the moon-crescent of the lake that is becoming something More. He only turns when Isra looks beyond him, when she speaks (with the timbre of a queen in her voice, despite her weariness and her fear). When his dark eyes find them he cannot stop the smile that curves his lips, the way his heart warms like coming in to a hearth. How lucky they are, these new sovereigns, for the people they lead.
They gather around the glass and Asterion nods, pausing only to press his shoulder against Isra’s before going to them. “Follow me,” he says quietly, and as Cirrus circles overhead (a beacon, for others that might come) he leads the horses and their pane of magic-made glass onto the path where there was once water. They do not even balk at the wood-and-gold, and he does not blame them for the way they stare at suspended waves.
Only when they lift the glass against the wall of water does he look back at the queen of stars, holding the water suspended with his magic curled like a fist. Oh, he wishes he could lend her his strength - he cannot bind water to glass alone.
@Isra
if you'll be my star*
