Asterion has always been too happy to share his secrets. Oh! he gives them away in fistfulls, a new one with each glance, each sigh, each soft-spoken word. He has never managed to learn to keep them back, buried deep where they might not wound.

She could take them all, learn his shapes down to his shadow, and never hear a protest from his lips.

Easier to give himself away in pieces and cuts than look at her and see the salvation in her eyes, a savage kind of love. He wants to tell her already he will only break it, only make it black and twisted through the alchemy of disappointment - she need only ask Marisol, she need only ask Talia, she need only ask Moira and Aislinn and every soul he’s ever begged to love him.

But then there is a flicker of something else in her eyes. He knows by now the water has not put it there, that she is host to a wilderness - host to a rift that has only one home, now. And each monster and its shadow waits behind her eyes and he wonders if they beg to be set free, and if she herself is captive or keeper or both.

“Thana,” he echoes, and it does not feel like death when he says it. It beads over his lips like living water, like warm gold. He should say nothing else, should be glad for what small gift he has been given, but - “That’s not what it means to me.”

The king does not move as she opens up a distance between them. Light pours in from the fading day and the pool seems brighter now than when he arrived; gold spills over the dead things in her wake. Every muscle trembles to pursue her and he trembles, too, to watch her go - the way she runs makes his legs long to join her.

But he has never been able to keep up with unicorns, and she has already given him so much.

Instead he only watches her until she is a red spark on the horizon that finally goes out.

---

@Thana closer for you <3