Oh, Asterion has changed – he is different without and different within. The exterior parts are more temporary; he is still colored with paint, whorled and dotted and marked with twilight. Last night it had felt right, but as he walks alone through the courtyard he feels a little silly, like a tapestry come alive, a piece of a moment not meant to carry on.

Some things are better beneath starlight.

The things inside of him, though. That’s where the ground has shifted the most, and a little of it comes through in the weight of his gaze. He understands more today than he did last week, or yesterday morning, and the knowledge is burdensome, not so much an anchor as a yoke. Even so there is first surprise and then an easy kind of happiness when his dark-eyed gaze finds Eik.

The gray stallion stops but the bay closes the space up between them, near enough to share breath, hazy in the afternoon where the aftermath of bonfires still drifts around them. “Hello Eik,” he answers, and his smile is the firmest part of him. Otherwise he feels a little like that day-old smoke: smudged and drifting.

And then a breeze stirs, carrying a scent that hints at spring, a taste like the color of the true-blue sky. Around them his countrymen shake off the lingering effects of the previous night, and Asterion is not like the smoke at all. He is home.  

At Eik’s question he can only laugh, though there’s little humor of it, and think of his conversation with Florentine. “Not yet,” he answers. It is a little strange (though there is no reason it should be) to stand with the gray with stone and not sand beneath their hooves, but Asterion closes his eyes for a moment and scents the sea, the salt and brine of it carried with Eik.

When he opens them again, yet again he feels more like a man and less like a shade. Just how see-through had he been, before he was found and grounded by his friend?“Welcome to Terrastella,” he says, and though the word still feels strange on his tongue the syllables roll smooth. It is an easy name to say. “Though I hope you were made welcome enough last night. Did you happen on that honey mead?” He pulls a grimace at the memory, the blurry ache that followed, a feeling altogether new to him.

But it was a better hurt by far than what Florentine had suffered (or, for that matter, Lysander), and his expression sobers quickly. “I’m glad to see you,” he says then, and though his voice is bathed in sunlight his eyes are the same as they were by the sea.


@Eik hope this is ok, he's all -gestures vaguely- but very glad to see his friend <3

Asterion has learned, since leaving his first home long ago, that there is always a storm to come.

So many he had met told him there was something building, building on the horizon, even when the bay felt like he was living in halcyon days. Never has he been able to see the shadow of it, felt the weight of it pressing in on him, invisible but no less real. Even now, when he knows there are painful things to come, he feels no dread.

Perhaps because he is adrift no longer. Asterion is no longer a lone boat on the sea – he has found harbor, and he will weather what comes.

Oh, but Asterion is still terribly naïve, no different a dreamer than he was before he woke this morning. He laughs and ducks his head at the mention of the mead, and his smile, this time, lingers. “I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

He is surprised by how glad Eik’s question makes him; he is proud, he finds, at the thought of beings sought by this man, of counting him a friend. “It would be my honor,” he says, then twists his lips at how stilted and silly such language sounded, coming from himself. He follows the gray’s gaze as it travels the battlements, the keep, the smooth cool stone. “You’ll have to forgive my occasional ignorance, though. This place hasn’t come naturally.” It does not feel shameful to admit it; it feels like not needing to pretend.

That makes it a little easier, when Eik’s gaze finds his own again, though his expression still turns just a touch wry. “Well,” he says, both an answer and a beginning, and then he draws in a breath. “Florentine has made me her Regent – just a few hours ago. But I’m afraid I’m unprepared for such responsibility. There’s so much I don’t understand.”

The bay had looked away during the most of the telling, but now he glances back, prepared for the surprise Eik surely would wear. Maybe it had been too soon to tell anyone – particularly outside the court – but no part of Asterion wanted to lie, even by omission.

“Follow me,” he says then, and his hooves make ringing sounds on the stone as Terrastellans take down the remnants of the festival around them. “And tell me how you’ve been.”



@Eik <3 eventually I’m gonna run out of ocean metaphors lol

In this, too, they are similar: before this place (and, in all honesty, here as well) the idea of positions was foreign to him. There were the gods, and there were the places their followers gathered, and there were the wanderers like himself. Maybe there was no order to it; maybe they were feral savages.

But there had been no bloodshed over something so arbitrary as a word.

A smile lifts the corner of his own mouth at Eik’s reply, and he dips his chin, though the look he wears is just short of wry. “Thank you,” he says, “and I trust her.” The bay’s expression turns more considering at EIk’s next words, and an ear twists at the mention of whispers - he has grown more cynical since a few hours ago. Learning of Reichenbach’s actions had shifted the ground beneath him, and now he wishes he could test each step before taking it.

Still he lets his smile grow, even as his gaze moves to the castle, where he images she waits at Lysander’s side. Hopefully the man would wake. Hopefully there would not be war, another word foreign to him, one that should perhaps weigh heavier on his mind, on his heart.

“I’ve never met anyone like her,” he begins, turning back to his companion. “She is…bright and bold and soft and kind. She always has something to say, but is never cruel. She seems sometimes young and sometimes old and I worry for her—” he stops himself, remembering all the talking he’d done to Reichenbach, there in the dark hallways of the sleeping court only weeks before. Oh, Asterion has always trusted so easily before, has never thought it wrong. “But I don’t think I need to,” he finishes, and says nothing else. Nothing of the knife, or of her tales of time-travel and returning from death, or of the fact that they share a father.

He will if asked – this he promises himself. Eik is his friend, not a stranger from a foreign court. They are two figures on a beach, lonely and not alone, searching and finding.

They walk, and the sunshine patterns them with dapples and melts the snow off the gables with the soft sounds of spring. The court is stirring; other horses wind around them, sparing them no glance save, perhaps, to see the paint that still colors Asterion in whorls and lines and dots. When Eik speaks, the bay’s gaze is soft on him , though it sharpens with interest at the words. He loves stories as much as his sister does; he sighs happily at the thought of them.

“I would like to hear more about those adventures,” he says, and then cocks his head before adding “or experience them myself.” Too long has he kept to the borders of Terrastella, struggling to understand black ink in dim rooms.

Asterion hears the note of discomfort in the gray’s next words – or perhaps he did not hear it at all, only identified with it, associated it with his own feelings that milled like midnight shadows. When Eik closes his eyes, the bay looks away, still wearing a slight smile.

It fades at the next words. He cannot remember if they ever touched that day alongside the sea, but now he bumps his shoulder against the gray’s, a brief press that said nothing except that he was seen. “It isn’t,” Asterion says, even as thoughts of the black unicorn, of his twin, of the gods he had met and known and still not followed, chase one another across his mind. “Or if it is, then I am a traitor too.” There is something just shy of a laugh in his words.

He does laugh at Eik’s next words, casting another glance at the world around them. So many sounds, so much color, a riot of senses. “Yes,” he answers, “but I don’t think this is my favorite part.” Even as he says it the thought of last night comes rising to his mind – of Aislinn, waiting for him, magnificent beneath the starlight. Perhaps he is wrong; he would not be sorry for it.

“I would like to return the visit, some day. I wish it could be today.” Of course it could not; not with his newly appointed title, not with bloodstains still on white snow just outside the city, not with Isorath fled south.

This is what it was, then, to belong: to be less free.



@Eik <3 here have a novel