Asterion

He doesn’t think he will ever get used to the echo of his hooves on the marble floors, the way the walls close up around him and box him in. It reminds him of his dreams of the maze, the strange and glittering walls, the feelings of being hemmed and caught.
 
Asterion appreciates the structure for its artistry, for its protection from the elements, but he can’t quite picture it as home.
 
But he is trying. That is what brings him walking slowly through the halls as the morning fades to noon outside, late autumn sunlight making patters on the floor. His life has held no shortage of mysteries, but court life might be the strangest of them yet – and so Florentine had suggested he speak to someone far more experienced with them.
 
The gold-and-ivory stallion had caught his eye from the moment he swept into the meeting, striking and lovely. It wasn’t the thought of speaking with him that had nerves prickling beneath his skin like ripples on a lake; it was the setting itself. He is out of his depth here, and he knows it, and he swallows as he turns into a corner room rich with wood and leather.
 
“Isorath,” he says, managing to keep it from sounding like a question. He also manages not to stare, although his gaze can’t quite pull away from the stallion; he is beautiful in a way that Asterion is unaccustomed to.  The man puts him in mind of nothing so much as the gods of Ravos, but even they were modest and plain in comparison.
 
Isorath belongs here in a way that the bay never will, and he’s never felt it more clearly.
 
Even so, his dark-eyed gaze meets the ethereal lilac eyes of the kirin, and he tips his chin toward the desk, where books are scattered and something delicate and silver hisses with steam. “Florentine said I might ask you…how is it you learned to read?”


@Isorath  

Asterion

The room is warm in every way: the sunlight that gleamed gold and ivory off of the kirin and the rich dark walls, the heat like a balm from the fire and the east-facing room, the unfamiliar smells of bergamot and herbs and something rich and almost seductive that he cannot place.

At least his eyes have wandered from the man; he’s in his second, slower pass over the room, wonder writ across his expression, when the stallion’s words catch him. I don’t bite. Asterion would blush, if he could; instead he enters with a flick of his tail and duck of his chin, moving where he was directed although he lingers, standing. Reclining here would feel too…familiar. He might sink into those pillows and become somebody else.

He does not miss the barest hint of teeth; it makes him wonder just how honest the previous admission had been.  

In a different way, he is as awed as he had been by Calliope, the wild unicorn warrior he had once known. She had struck him from the first with her beauty and her power and the way she moved within the world, as though sure it would shape itself to her wishes.

Isorath, to the dark-eyed dreamer, seems just as commanding. And to be able to make sense of the black marks on pale pages spread before him – maybe that was power, too.

“I – I would.” His brief hesitation comes not from being unwilling but being unsure of himself; he is just a horse, just a boy. He was not made to read, and live in castles, and converse with men spun from gold and silk. His gaze lifts again, and this time he is caught, momentarily pinned by those pale purple eyes so like and not-like his sister’s. It is strange, he thinks then, that she is a Queen, that it makes her a ruler over someone like Isorath. “If you’d have me,” he adds, and swallows as he glances away.



@Isorath  here have a country bumpkin

Asterion

There was once a time when Asterion longed for nothing more than to meet a dragon in his den.

His was a boyhood stuffed with dreams of heroes and villains and gilded knights, of skipping from one adventure to the next like a smooth stone across the water. It was a natural yearning for someone born somewhere both safe and solitary. When he could deny the begging of his feet and his heart no longer, he’d left and never looked back.

Now here he was, a young man on a quest far from the ones he’d envisioned. Even so he could feel the hunger in him, the want for more prickling in his blood, and he is beginning to lean over the desk when Isorath directed him once more to sit.

Asterion sat.

The sensation surprises him; it is nothing at all like bedding down in a bed of wild, coarse grasses along the sea or wildflowers in a glen. This felt like reclining on a cloud, but warm and sleek. He manages not to exclaim anything, though his surprise is briefly written across his face.

It’s gone by the time he looks up, watching the kirin do tidy and efficient-looking things with the steaming liquid. “You just must be very busy,” he says, though he has no actual idea what a Sage does. This space suggested being far more involved than his own little corner of Denocte. Where Isorath smelled of incense and the leather-musk of books (and other things, things Asterion had no way to place) the bay still smelled of pine and wind and early winter.

His dark ears tip forward at Isorath’s admonition, not half so sure himself. Not so long ago, a black-and-silver unicorn with a horn like a rapier and a laugh like a storm had promised to teach him to fight – and that hadn’t come true, either.

Still, disagreeing seems like a bad way to begin, and so he meets the kirin’s gaze with a nod and a smile. “Under your teaching I almost believe it,” he says, then tilts his chin back toward a book, near enough for the musk-and-paper scent to tease him. His breath ruffles the pages. “What is this one about?” He hopes fiercely that it is a tale of knights and kings and wild things, though likely it is only a ledger of goods.

Things were often much more in his head than they turned out to be on paper - so to speak.




@Isorath