Private I've been swimming to them in my sleep;

asterion*

He does not notice the way those faerie lights fade out; he is too filled with the brightness of her. On the verge of tears her eyes are vibrant, a new fire just lit, and he wants to warm himself there for days. Her smile is soft, but everything is under the moonlight.

But then she begins to speak, and there is nothing for him to do but listen and begin to fall apart. It is slow, gentle - the way a smoldering log vanishes to ash, the way ash drifts on a dark, cold wind before settling, silent, to earth.

He’d thought they might go outside, but instead they wind through the castle - passages he doesn’t know, filtered by moonlight as they pass by arched windows, shadows making bars on the floor that pull at their passing steps. There are many times they pause, and maybe they both have tears in their eyes, and he wants to reach for her, seeing some glimpse of all the ways she’d shattered when he wasn’t there to hold her together. Maybe because he wasn’t there to hold her together - and wasn’t that always their curse, to belong to too many things other than each other?

And then they come to the kitchens, and he remembers - as she must be, even now - a day when snow fell thick and light and lovely, and she welcomed him within, and shattered a porcelain cup when he dared steal a kiss from her. And she calls back to another moment, painting frosting on his cheek even when he tries to duck away, and he remembers a day blushing in the sunshine of Delumine, telling his sister of a girl he wants to dance with…

Asterion doesn’t know what she’s doing, as she laughs, as she eats the sweets she could never resist. She had talked like an ending, but she laughs now like the start, and her sticky kiss lingers on his skin, and he is ready, he is ready, to leave everything behind but her.

He has no more kingdom. There is nowhere that needs him, nothing that calls to his undrownable sense of duty. For the first time in his life in Novus, there is no need for him to split his devotion to the one he loves, and so he still thinks -

Oh, but then her pace quickens. He follows her like a ghost, helpless, increasingly worried as her pace speeds up, as the agitation in each step becomes clear - and when she stops at last, when she turns, there is a tear glittering like a diamond at the corner of his eye.

And all those suspended wishes, all those curling ashes, find the ground at last.

At first he wants to say I don’t understand. (And what an echo, what a ghost that is - a fragment of memory, a piece of his final conversation with Aislinn a lifetime ago. How is it that he’s here again, beneath the perfume of Delumine bonfires?) After all the other things she’s told him tonight, all those bits of herself she’s shared, all the sugared kisses -

But Asterion does not cry, not even when he realizes where she’d led him, in this castle he doesn’t know. Back to the foyer, back to the doors that led out into the velvet night, the empty streets, the long way home.

Home. Asterion doesn’t have one any longer.

He lifts his chin, meets once more her molten gold eyes. “I wish,” he says softly, with a sad little smile that hides his drowning heart, “that you had just turned me away at the door. Goodbye, Moira. I’m sorry for all that I caused you - you never deserved it..”

Asterion goes, and though it is as though all the gravity of the world is behind him, he does not look back.

@~~Moira~~