Asterion

Even in his quiet moments, Asterion is never quite still; only in the way that a lake is, when the wind isn’t moving and no fallen leaves set the surface to rippling. Mostly he’s still in the way a slow river is – nothing wild like an ocean, no furious froth or slow pull of tides.
 
But when she says I have heard of Ravos before,, he swears his very blood freezes. For a heartbeat – two – nothing in him moves save the tremble of his silver-touched hair in the after-storm breeze.
 
He is breathless, transfixed, as she continues.
 
A lion. A rift.
 
A lion.
 
The word breaks the spell and he is still no longer.
 
“The lion,” he says, and there is a note of frenzy, of desperation in his voice. Of need. His heart is a rabbit in his chest and it is racing. “Is she here? Have you seen her?” There is no need he can see to describe Calliope, and any words he could name would fall short, anyhow, of her silver-slick horn, or the livewire way she stood, or the way when her eyes were on him he wanted to be more.
 
It does not yet occur to him to ask who her mother might be.
 
It is impossible that conversation might move on from this, when he would linger in this moment of discovery forever. The storm has washed the world around them and made it cleaner, each color more vivid.
 
He would not have let the conversation move on from there, were it not about fate. Were it not about fathers.
 
Even so he only nods at her assertion, following her closely as a shadow as they drift like mist through the field. He draws up when she turns and drinks him in, her expression measuring, unreadable. He tries, too – tries to read her face like a map of places he’s only heard of in stories. It’s like searching for landmarks he’s never seen. The golden girl, honey-dark in her dampness, is a stranger to him – and yet, and yet.
 
Gabriel.
 
That name, too, is like a fairy tale, like a legend. Aridela had only spoken it once – twice – but Asterion has treasured it in his heart. It was buried but shallow; it was never far away, following him like the moon.
 
It could not be – but the boy has too long been hungry for fate to find him, desperate for his own grand story to begin. He had thought that the unicorn was it – but how he could he deny this meeting? The summer storm, this wild, merry girl, and everything now holding its breath.
 
He exhales with a shudder of lungs; his heart is frantic wing-beats, quick and shallow.
 
“My father’s name was Gabriel,” he says, but she has already turned away. He is too afraid to say it again, as if the words, once spoken, would vanish like his friends into the rift. As if voicing it would make it un-true, a strange and fearsome kind of magic.
 
But his heart is still full of it, and his dreamer’s eyes, when they look at her, are searching for pieces of himself. Like Talia she is golden – but the golden of a morning in full spring, not the molten gold of cast-down idols, the gold of statues in distant, dusty tombs.
 
It takes him a moment to realize she is leaving him – he is several yards behind, now, and lopes to catch up, suddenly self-conscious. Suddenly nervous,, afraid he might wake at any moment, afraid that none of this was real. The storm-wet world glimmered at the edges like an illusion.
 
Yet there was no doubt in his mind at her question. “Yes,” he breathes, and dares not blink. 




@Florentine

Asterion

His head is too full with too many things. The loss of magic, the gain of family, this new world - Novus.

He has no idea how much more there is. He has never seen a court, a keep, with walls of stone and beds and libraries. Asterion has ever only been a horse, bedding down in grass and thickets, drinking of streams, dreaming in the open air. Half-dazed he follows her, his sister, a softer gold than his twin. What else does she know, beneath her crown of flowers? What other missing pieces of his heart might she fill?

The storm has moved on; the crickets have come out to sing. It’s a gentle serenade, with the quiet sigh of the wind, as true dusk follows them into the strange halls of Terrastella.