There is despair in the deadness of marble, and opal, and gold-leaf furling at the edges, and the unicorn understands the agony of it. It lives in the spirals of black, and silver, streaking through the whiteness like lighting through the sky. And if it lives as lighting in marble it lives in her too, like blood drops falling from the jaws of a fox onto the ivory belly of a winter hare.
Here, twisting between the guards and the bodies pretending to be stone as idols pretend to be false, she is nothing more than another frozen-in time artwork of a thing everyone is pretending to remember. Sometimes a stallion staggers around her with a garbled apology falling from his lips. Sometimes a mare shrieks at her when she blinks slowly as a cloud across the moon and turns her head at the racing echo of their mortal heart.
And she does not laugh at them as a child should (for she does not look or seem childish).
She only looks at them with a strange look that bellows as silently as a dead-clock; unicorn, unicorn, unicorn, and then, dead unicorn. And if there is a smile on her lips it is the lost look of a doe in the morning fog standing over the fawn she knew would die at the first kiss of winter. Or maybe it is more like the look of the wolf steeping in the bear den with his thoughts full of rabies, and need, and madness.
Or maybe it’s the look of the cub, the one right before it tucks itself down to sleep in the belly of that same mad, mad wolf. It does not know, as dead things never know, that there is nothing beyond the black slumber until a unicorn comes.
Whatever the look is, it carries itself bone heavy on her face as she stops at the marble outline of a horse racing towards war. She traces the outlines of his eyes-- wide rimmed, and bloody, and pitted with the whittled down knots of woods. There is misery in his eyes, and that same agony they unicorns understand the depths of, and a hundred whispering screams of the wood that died to become eyes in a hallway fat with stone.
The mad-look (cub-look, wolf-look, doe-look) waivers on her face like water down a mirror. The blade at the end of her tail whines against the marble as she drags it back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth like a lion at the throat of the mad-wolf. Her look shifts. It changes. It becomes. It is made.
Danaë smiles, a marble unicorn’s smile, as vervain unfurls from the gone-to-war eyes of the stone statue.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
It’s there in every white-froth crest, in every shark snarl, in the thunder bowing low over the sea. thump, thump, thump, or maybe it’s lub, dub, lub, dub.
In my ears it echoes in the same way the tide echoes in the hollows of my bones where marrow should be. With every step, every briney breath, every challenging mirror cry of my soul, I hear that heartbeat. Somewhere beyond this dreaming sea of mine I know-- I know-- that my sister is tangled with me in our bed awashed in silk and chainmail with our wolves curled around us like roots a seedpod.
Somewhere I know I am not alone.
But here I am the only monster on the shoreline. My horn is the only crown taunting the straight line of the horizon with a whistling song. I am brightness in the dark-tide, pearl in the ink and gloom of the night, moon in the dark places empty of stars.
And I do not run through the solitude like a wolf looking for a pack.
I walk.
Step after step, slow as a tide first coming to land, my form never quickens and hungers for a place where the darkness might cut open into the light. It is not the light, or the horizon, I hunger for in this ink and gloam.
The sea is a mile of cool-pearl kisses against my belly as I wade into the waves. It curls mother-gentle around my hocks and my knees. It pulls at me like I am nothing more than sand, or dead and pale shell, or driftwood.
And I follow it. Until the sea aches against the pulse below my cheek-- as if it might swallow the heartbeat I have given it in this dream of mine. As if it is jealous that I still fill it to bloating with a roar that is not its own.
Somewhere a drum starts to beat, and a mare starts to scream, and a fire starts to smolder. I close my eyes. Because when I open then, I know, that I will be standing belly deep in a sea of bodies and it’ll be a blood-tide curling around my knees.
I know this is how it starts. This is how it always starts.
IN A STORY, a girl is a tree / is a bird / is a wilderness
I am beginning to think that I might be lost.
These passages all look the same, or else unrecognizable, and I can no longer hear the lash of the sea against the coast. I think that I am standing in an impact wound; the shards of mirror-like substance stretch up and arch over my head like a ribcage, each jagged and precarious edge like a cut-out against the darkening blue of the sky. They reflect the image of branches, a canopy of leaves that is nearly familiar – I can almost place where it is in the Gold, or where it was, lifetimes ago. They are like fire above my head, a pattern of reds and yellows and oranges of an impossible, burning richness; I only spent half of the autumn season in this land of “Novus,” but I am sure that none of the trees could display such beautiful, vibrant colors. I used to think that they were normal, but now-
I suppose they were more special than I thought. I’ve felt that way about a lot of things, lately, and with each life and death. I don’t really miss most of them, though. Not yet.
(I think that I probably will; but it isn’t as though I’ve left forever. I’ve only left long enough to find the heir – and surely I will miss this place, too, once I return. What I have come to realize, after life after life after life, is that life is a slow-growing composition of things that you’ll come to miss, whether you know it at the time or not.)
I keep walking. There are fantastical images scrawled on the mirror-like walls of shard; the further I am from them, the less that they seem to reflect anything I know, and the more that they seem to reflect things that I can barely put words to. Great balls of fire and ice against a void of black. A deer with wings in the place of eyes, bounding alongside me at a distance, each movement like my reflection. A fish upside-down in the water, with a mouth full of wolf’s teeth. I don’t know much, in this labyrinthian expanse of unfamiliar images, but what I do know is that it is growing colder, and darker, and more bizarre with each passing moment. I wonder what this place will be like when night falls. (I wonder if I really want to know.)
During the day, it was easy to distinguish the shards from reality. When night falls, it becomes much, much harder. I am forced to learn this by experience – when the sky grows black and starless, I can no longer tell if the lights I see in the distance are some strange reflections or people with lanterns or will'o'wisps or the gleaming eyes of large, unseen monsters, or if the trees I see are real or only the image of trees, or if the splash of blood on the ground only a few feet away from me is on the mirror or beneath its surface. Worst of all, the images begin to seem depthless, less like reflections than doorways, and, so, when I reach the reflection of a bridge, I keep walking, but it’s not a bridge at all, and the reflection was-
Below. I’m falling, suddenly, down into a narrow abyss, and I only barely catch myself, wings snapping out to support me at the last moment. I don’t think that I would have stayed down there, but, beneath my hooves, I find myself looking at my first face – and directly across from me, staring out from another mirror and lit low by lights I recognize as fireflies and the lanterns that they hung in the trees during New Year’s festivals, I see someone that I can no longer put a name to.
It’s cold, and dark, and I don’t know where else to go, so, after a moment of hesitation, the familiar sight of him sends me trotting up to the mirror, hooves clicking against the flawless surface of the mirror below my hooves. (It is clear and dark, like the surface of a lake at night; I feel like I could fall through it.) He watches me approach, and I can’t help but find it strange that I can’t place his expression. “You know,” I say, as I step close enough to lean forward and press my forehead to the image’s shoulder, “it’s really frustrating that I can’t remember your name.” It feels cold and hard and smooth like stone, not warm like skin – and I know that I should have expected it.
He turns his head; looks me over. The golden laurels in his hair catch like bits of flame in the lantern-light. “Should I stay here until the morning, you think?” I certainly think that he is less likely to do anything to me than most of the other reflections I’ve seen, and I can’t tell where the line lies between image and reality for any of them. Predictably, he doesn’t say a word. I’ve never heard any of them speak, though I feel like they should be able to. I roll my eyes, which is probably unreasonable, and take a step back. “You were much better at giving advice the last time we met…”
The only response I am given is the howl of the wind through the gorge. I shiver, and press my wings a bit tighter to my sides.
@Andromeda || I'm glad we have a thread again <3 || emily skaja, "rules for a body coming out of the water" "Speech!"
BECAUSE NOTHING SHE COULD SAY COULD CHANGE THE MELTED MUSIC OF HER SPACE Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace / Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief / Because her grief required no imagination / Because it was raining outside the palace / Because there was no rain in her vicinity.☼
“So,” Ereshkigal says, and laughs in a sound like the waves, “have you decided what you’re going to name them?”
It takes every ounce of Seraphina’s self-control not to reach for the bird – and, while reaching, to curve the sickle-shape of it around the slender curve of her throat and press down, hard. The violence of the impulse nearly shocks her, but it doesn’t; she has spent most of her life violent. What surprises her instead is the suddenness, the way that she can normally tolerate the demon’s prodding without batting an eye, the way that she nearly wears her bruises like they are begging to be disturbed, the way that she has the distinct feeling that she is standing on the edge of something precipitous, and any wrong move will send her falling somewhere sharp and dark, into some abyss even deeper and emptier than the ones she has tried to claw her way out of before.
She looks at the bird – the demon – for a moment, sharp glints of eyes alight with ill-contained loathing. (Ereshkigal laughs, again. She is always laughing, and it is never at anything good.) And then she looks away, towards the black, churning waves beating up against the shoreline, and she sets her jaw in a line and refuses to let any words out of her mouth, or to allow any of her wayward thoughts to leak out to her companion. Ereshkigal would only find them hysterical, she is sure. She would only encourage them. She would love to see her try to kill her – and she’d love it even more, when, inevitably, she faltered, when she could not do it.
And as for the names – she is trying not to think of them.
She knows what Viceroy named her, once, so many years ago; she knows because it is Seraphina, it is burning one, it is a cruel irony and a skin that she tries to shed whenever she meets some new stranger. Burning one, with her empty-eyed stare, with her perpetual frostbite, with her skin like a trail of ash and smoke. Burning one, unable to ever set herself ablaze. The name doesn’t suit her at all – and it probably wasn’t meant to. She’s sure that he meant for it to be unattainable, and a disappointment.
She is only like a fire in that she fears drowning.
Whatever her name was before that, she is sure that it was more beloved. She doesn’t recall her mother much, anymore, and she can’t remember when she could remember her last – at least in more than broken shards, pieces that didn’t quite fit together. She has the distinct feeling that she was loved, though she cannot remember it, and she is sure that she was given a loving name in kind.
Even if she remembered it, it would no longer be hers; but here is the question. Can she love these children, even knowing that she never, ever-
She has spent most of her life wondering if she could love anything. Unfortunately, she knows that she can, because there is this aching burn inside of her where all the things and the people that she used to love and lost used to be – but she is still not so sure that she can love anything right. She has tried to console herself. She has tried to tell herself that she can take care of them, at least, even if she doesn’t know how to love them like she should. That would be something, at least, more than what she’d seen granted to so many children who grew up in the sands of the Mors-
-but it would not be enough, and she knows it, but, if she thinks about it for very long at all, she finds herself overwhelmed again. Hopeless, or maybe helpless, if there is any real distinction between the two.
She shoulders it. Licks salt off her lips.
(Ereshkigal is probably right – she can’t put off thinking about it forever.)
The sky is clear and winter-grey, and the waves are frothy and darker than she remembers, swirled with grit and kelp; it almost reminds her of ink, and that of a maze she stepped into so long ago that it feels like she lived it in another life. (It probably was; she does not need Ereshkigal’s insistence to tell her that she should have died, after her fight with Raum.) It is cold, but she doesn’t want to be in Solterra right now, and she hasn’t in weeks. She does not want to think of the sun, or of the sun god, or of the kingdom left in ashes and stone in her wake. She does not want to consider if this is meant to be some twisted blessing or some belated punishment. Most of all, she does not want to be seen by anyone who might recognize her, and the world outside of the desert knows her less.
She pulls the yellow fabric of her scarf tighter about her throat, shields her face; pulls it over her eyes so she cannot find herself looking again, disbelievingly, at her sides, and the way that she can barely recognize them as her own.
@Eik|| <3 <3 <3 || june jordan, "what great grief has made the empress mute?" ; title from "eurydice," h.d. Sera||Eresh
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Sleeping in a cage between walls is still strange enough that Thana rarely surrenders fully to the call of the moon. She sleeps as wild things do: fitfully, with nightmares, and unsettled despite the feel of love’s ribcage pressed tightly against her own. Tonight her dreams are feral things full of rabid spit, and monsters, and a river brighter and more blinding than a solar flare. She dreams of deserts, and caves full of dead dune monsters, and canyons above which a hawk is crying out in lament and in hunger.
And she remembers none of her dreams when the sound of her daughters streaking from their room awakens her.
But she is no less the monster in her dream as she follows them. And she is no less a graveyard of death when she tilts her horn into the moon and wanders through the winter-gardens of her king. Eligos is no less a thing in a canyon cave as he follows his unicorn, and her offspring, through the sickle moonlight and the winter snow brushing against his hollow belly.
They, monster and mother-unicorn, are disappointed in the twins for their trail left bright as a line of blood through the snow. Each had been taught better by way of horn, and blade, and tales of sufferings instead of happy endings.
But tomorrow is soon enough for another lesson. Tonight the monsters are curious.
And so they follow, beyond the gardens and the crests of dunes rising from the earth like lungs and hearts from a body. Their steps are near-silent in the winter and their forms are nothing more than a blot of darkness against so many other bruises in the earth.
They follow until the night becomes wounded with lanterns and light. They weave between the horses that stare at them with eyes rimmed in the white of both caution and fear. Nothing turns their focus, not the music, or the whisper of sin, sin, sin, that calls to the dark creature living in their hearts. They follow the trail of lichen blooming across the mortar, and mushrooms creeping from the knots of banquet tables, until the twins are once more (safely) in their sights.
They call it instinct instead of love. They are wrong.
Thana lets a mortal offer her a drink with nothing more than a nod. Eligos presses his shoulder to her own and she can feel his body trembling with the need to hunt, and rend, and ruin, and consume. In their language she hums to him in notes of calm, calm, and later.
On the way home we will hunt and remind the desert monster of their gods. She says to him.
And he does reply, not in words but with a purr she feels like a second heartbeat begging entrance to her chest.
By the stage her daughters have cornered a mortal man. Even from the bar Thana can see the hunger in their eyes and the dip of hunger in their spines. She smiles with a mouth full of teeth that know the feel of flesh and the bitter tang of blood.
Below the eye my loves, she thinks, he cannot deny you entrance.
And when she sips whatever liquid the mortal has given her, it’s not liquor she tastes. It’s the blood of a poacher and the sweetness of cruel justice.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
All the gods are dead and their bones are not in the mountain buried in the frozen winter stone.
The north star is in the stone.
And she is broken.
Time has ticked away and she has been unable to grasp the hours, and minutes and second. There is no sunlight, or moonlight, or firelight, by which she might count the moments of her suffering. All she has are drops of her blood to count the hours (and there are so few drops left to fall from her).
Drop. One. Drop. Two. Drop. Three.
Between the drops there are the roar of a leopard chained with her ribs slat-sided with hunger.
And between the roar there are the laments of feathers dreaming of the winter air of the cosmic coil. Those dreams are threads of blackness, of crow-faced boys with teeth that smile instead of snarl, of wine scattered across the ground in place of seeds. She waivers between the three as another thread without shine and a knot. If she is anything but a thread on the wind in the darkness she has forgotten what it is.
There is only blood, and pain, and leopard hunger, and the lament of a chewed out star.
Between the only things that there are Warset is awake in the newborn dawn. Her eyes are thick with salt and quicksilver. Each feather in her wings, as they flutter uselessly at her sides, is more torn up than the last. Cruelty is a heavy cloak on her form, an oil thickening her blood, a tear catching in the hollows of her cheekbones. She wears each more gracefully than the last. She is a masterpiece of suffering, and mortality, and broken glass wickedness.
And if there is a name on her tongue, and a song of save me, save me, help me, she does not know how to form the sounds of it with her thick tongue parched of water. All there is the image of a dark pegasus, and a desert boy, super imposed in the places between the constellations etched across the backs of her eyelids. Their names are beyond her.
But the dawn is trickling in through the cracks of her mountain-belly cell. The spiderwebs are dusted in frost and rose-gold and today, this morning, her world is not as bleak as it was the night before. She hums. Her lips feel like a cage of wasps as she sings a song of a hunter caught in a wheel with their prey. The wheel spins, and spins, and spins, and she does not know how to free herself from her.
Outside her blood is glittering silver in the dawn-light where the stone has been watered by her misery. Outside there is no dragon, or stallion, to guard her brutal cage of suffering. The devils have wandered from their inferno.
And inside, in the darkness cracking with light, Warset lifts her eyes to the crack in the stone and lets her song turn to the war-cry scream of the suffering and the hopeless.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
You are the earth. But also the sun, and the sky. You are elements, bound and fused together. And you must never forget you can be everything all at once. At night, he dreamed of spirits in the wind. Of monoliths and structures, towering towards clouds, sometimes ashen, sometimes cardinal and cerise, where they reached and soared, where they drowned and cloaked. He dreamed of leathery wings and draconic calls over the abyss, fathoms and shadows he’d chase below, until he could spread his own wings and follow them into the ether. He dreamed of metallic plumage resting across his withers, the warmest of smiles tucked against his cheek, of tenderness and love. He dreamed of a sagacity resting across the tip of brows and the arch of a hidden grin, of a wisdom he’d eternally cherish, yearn, and crave – wanting to listen to the sounds of the rapt syllables, the riveting phrases. He dreamed of whispers on the breeze, of harpsichord angles and angels twisting, interwoven into their own chords until they breathed his name in the still of twilight. He dreamed of mountains, great and small, the abyss of blood and sand. Of a void he could never have again, except in memories, reaching for the stars and finding them too far away, even for him to seek. Of a canvas brought to life only in slumber, for it couldn’t exist thereafter – consumed, swallowed, and gone. At dawn, the boy rose and flew, feathers extending towards the sun, eyes searching, scorching, for worlds he once knew. For veils to lift from their shrouds, peek over his gaze, and tell him he was home. That they were no longer wraiths and ghosts. That there was no shame in the etching of family, in seeking out all he understood, in fervent, desperate wishes that couldn’t come true. That their catacombs didn’t line halls, that their sepulchers weren’t resting in oblivion. That he might be able to reach and snatch, grasp and tear, and pull them into his heart, into his soul, where they could perpetually remain. Maybe this time he pushed himself too far. Perhaps he ignored the warning signs, the billowing of the chilling, glacial winds, the way exhaustion pulled and tugged across the seams of muscles, along the arches and ridges of his spine, against the fortified enamel of his bones. The rising notes of aches and pains chiseled their way through his skull, pounding on membranes, vivid, stark reminders he needed to cease – And still, he didn’t. Because down below looked like sand, dirt, soil, loam from a land he once knew. He once loved. And if he could just fly a little farther, a little further, than it would be worth it. They’d be there. His kin. It wouldn’t have all been for naught. The Oasis below did look strikingly familiar – and he coasted on zephyrs and clouds, drifting, drifting, drifting, until the ripples and cascades weren’t the pools from his desert. But it was far too late, and there was no end to his descent, until he felt the ground beneath his hooves, and his knees buckled. His body, his weight, fell forward, and his chin rested in the sand, sides heaving, lungs coveting, wings like jagged, fallen knives. He could barely shift his head, to peer towards the water, and realize his mistake – the delusions, the mirages – and the sand was warm beneath his cheek, when hope ran aground and his heart gave out. The reddened gaze closed, trying to hold back the reality, the inward workings of despair, gripping through marrow and flesh. But you must remember to rest.
This was, frankly, embarrassing. Yep! There it was. Toro was convinced that everyone thought he was so desperate, he had to go on a blind date. In another court. Alone. (Isn’t everyone else going alone? A sane person might ask. His mind says: Don’t people bring friends to double dates? I don’t have any friends. Don’t tell me it’s not a double date. I already know!) He’s asked Hajduk not to come with him; the lion is inside Toro’s head anyway, and despite Hajduk’s insistence that a magic lion will make him “seem cooler, just like he wanted,” Toro has decided he must go it alone. Alone. Alone.
Toro’s gift was this: a necklace which featured a golden serpent swallowing a citrine sun, its rays a ring of tiny, circular garnets, and its tail and head connected to a chain, so the serpent could settle at the base of the wearer’s neck, guarding her heart. It had cost - well. He wasn’t spending the money on much, anyway. It didn’t matter. Why think of the price when - when - he thought back to the merchant, smiling at him knowingly when he shied away from the question of ‘who.’ The jeweler had winked and said, “We all have our secrets.” It took Hajduk to tell him that she was more likely than not implying that he was having an affair. “Two girls,” Toro had said. “Imagine.” He’d buy such jewels for them both.
The meadow was blanketed with a layer of snow, even whiter than he; he would have appreciated the snow had he not been more concerned that it made him look yellow. The lights strewn about did enough of that, he decided, turning him orange with their glow. Night brought a chill upon the world that the Solterran was unaccustomed to, and it was with great apprehension that he stood there, shivering, waiting for his date to arrive.
SUDDENLY I'M THINKING / OF ALL THE TIMES I MISSED the chance to love something / that was not breakable.☼
With each passing day, the weather grows colder. With each passing day, the truth of her situation grows a little bit more undeniable.
Her soft, golden scarf is pulled a bit tighter around her throat to keep out the cold. She has it pulled high, to cover most of her face, though no one is out here; somehow the sight of herself is shameful. She doesn’t know how to explain the swell of her sides to anyone, least of all anyone that she knows. Any answer that she can come up with only makes her feel sick with shame, nauseated with humiliation. She did not want this. She did not want this, and it was not her fault, she did not do this-
She wouldn’t have chosen this. She knows that in a way that sticks in her throat, and she finds it troubling. Can she still love this children, although she would not have chosen them if she’d been given the choice? She doesn’t – know. She doesn’t know if she can love anything at all, at least in the way that she knows that she should be able to love, but she is worried most of all of trying to love something thrust upon her. The worry catches in her windpipe like a wishbone, and, no matter how she presses at it, no matter how she tries to cough it up – she can’t get it out.
She’s worried and sick and deeply, deeply ashamed. It has been years since she has wanted to be seen, but now, more than ever, she wishes that she could find some way to hide from everything and everyone – to disappear entirely.
The truth of the matter is that Seraphina is scared.
Her breath comes out as a soft white fog. She is only wearing the scarf and the sword; the leather armor does not fit quite right, in her present state, much as she loathes to admit it. Seraphina dreads the end of this, and the birth of her children – she knows nothing about that, but that it hurts (it cannot be worse than anything she has experienced before) -, meeting them for the first time, seeing them – but she loathes this, and she wants it to be over. She has forgotten what it means to have some sense of routine, and she has forgotten what it means to be anything but gapingly and agonizingly lonely, but she desperately wishes that-
She doesn’t want anyone to see her. She doesn’t want to be alone. Those two terrible, clashing feelings make her feel-
She doesn’t know how she feels. Sometimes she is sickeningly aware of her situation, and it makes a cold, cold panic well up in her with such a sudden ferocity that it almost brings her to tears. (But – she has found that she cannot cry anymore, no matter how much she would like to.) Sometimes she feels utterly detached, as though she is seeing this happen to someone else, as though her body is not her own (she has not felt like she possesses it all the way through in some years), as though these are not her children. She’d never thought of having them before, but she had always thought that it should be a happy occasion, something to be celebrated-
She supposes that is for lovers, not for someone like her; not for a woman blessed by a fickle god. She doesn’t know how to do this. She wants to be happy, but she thinks that she has forgotten how.
Ereshkigal is somewhere nearby. She can feel her presence, her probing voice at the back of her mind; she has a rabbit in her claws, bloody and ragged, and she can feel something of that too. The crunch of its bones between her shark-like teeth. The tear of skin. She doesn’t want to think about it. It isn’t appropriate for – this. She should be more tender, she needs to be more-
She exhales white, sharply, tiredly. She is so tired. She looks better than she has in years, because she has to, for their sake if not her own, but she is so tired, and she is sure that it is not from sleeplessness, though she cannot remember the last time that she laid down to rest without being plagued by nightmares.
She presses forward through the sea of browned, winter-dead grass, unsure of where she is going, or of why. But it is a matter of pressing forward- it is a matter of continuing to move, and to push, regardless-
@Moira|| she's....having some complicated feelings. || darshana suresh, "porcelain" Sera||Eresh
He tells himself that it is good for him, to see a place in Novus he never has before - somewhere without history, without memories stirred up like muddy water with every step.
He tells himself that it is good for him to be so far from the sea, which has been whispering strange things in his sleep.
And for the most part Asterion believes these things. Beneath the midday sun, with winter (as he knows it, anyway, cold and white) a memory kept beyond the desert, he feels more himself than he has in weeks. Here he need not worry about being recognized, and anyway the Solterrans are so busy with their own business that hardly any glance his direction. So he is left to explore on his own, wandering beneath the thin shade of brightly colored banners, curiously eyeing the wares displayed on silk-covered tables, listening to the call of birds he doesn’t know the names of. And in each alley, beside each well, he imagines Eik, and smiles.
Eventually he arrives at a statue, a stallion with his forelegs flung to sky, head twisted, eyes defiant, each strand of hair too realistic to have been carved by any hand but a god’s - or a monsters. Asterion’s dark eyes drop from the stone to the white marble beneath, and skim across the poem there. At the end - That peace for what they paid - he sighs, and turns, and feels the sunlight fall like a warm hand across his back.
And there in the winter light is his friend.
Asterion doesn’t hesitate before crossing the hard-beaten path between them - not even long enough to study Eik’s expression, or look for new scars. He presses his forehead against the gray’s, and exhales a breath that surprises him its shakiness; when he withdraws and shakes his head his lips are shaped almost like a laugh.
“I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” he admits, and the expression in his eyes is more complicated than the one his mouth wears.
And for now, the thing that lives within him that is not him stays silent and still.
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take;
