Asterion

Always, when his thoughts are a Charybdis that threaten to pull him down, he seeks out the sea.

It is no different tonight, not long after a Dusk meeting that has left him as weary as he has been on Novus. He only pauses once, in his pilgrimage to the water, and that is to watch (with horror, with awe) as the mountains across the water burn and burn and burn, a distant pyre to some dark god. Surely it was lightning, that started that blaze – except it spread so quickly. Except he can still hear Jude warning them all of dragon-fire. Except the only fires he has known have been started by men or by gods.

He only hopes that everyone is safe. Asterion can’t keep his gaze from the distant smoke, like fingers that yearn to scratch a scab or worry a wound.

At last the water – but he is not alone for long.

She draws his gaze like a swan landing, and he marvels they way he always has to see her. At first his mind does not connect the burning beyond her with her presence here; he is too happy to see her whole, to see that she has found flight again. That she has come to see him.

He starts forward, but her words stop him before he can take a second step. His ears twist, uncertain. His nose catches scents he’d hoped never to know again.

“Aislinn? What do you mean?” Oh, why does she smell like ash? His gaze, so dark, keeps wanting to draw away over her shoulder, where smoke rises in a column dark as sin against the bruise of the sky.  He tries to match his breathing, his heartbeat, to the hush of the waves as they kiss the sand in sea-foam; for the most part he fails.

That lick of flame on the horizon, that smell of green things burned to black on her skin, it reminds him what it is to be afraid. He is dizzy with the memories – one fire he ran from, fled like a coward boy, and another he ran into, to save the twin who repaid him with hate like cold gold.

He does not take another step toward her, though the water beckons him, whispers for him to come and be healed. Asterion pulls in deep breaths that taste of salt and sea-grass, the things he loves, the things he is made of as much as any star-stuff or silver twilight.  

And then he levels his gaze at her, and a slow suspicion gnaws at his heart, narrows his eyes. So many questions he has meant to ask her, but has never had the time; now he must push them away again. Always there is more trouble. He thinks of the festival, how happy he was with her, how blissfully ignorant of the darker things that transpired that night. How there were never enough answers, only more questions. The accusations Jude had leveled – is that what she thinks, too?

The regent straightens, and watches her as she stands in the water (not so different from another night, a year ago, her tail trailing from pale starfire to dark soot on the rippling surface).

“Is that why you’re here?” he says, and angles his muzzle toward the distant blaze, the one that sets his skin to shivering, that makes his traitorous, remembering heart so unsteady. “What have your people done?”

There is a burning in the night, there is ash on the air (if he kissed her, would she taste of it?) but Asterion is cold, cold, cold.


@Aislinn ahhhh

Asterion

When her eyes blaze at him, a blue that freezes, it is Calliope he thinks of. He has seen that kind of look before, but it was the unicorn who wore it – and it was for the world she found unjust, the gods she would tear down. Not for him, though it had struck him then as if it were.

He wonders who Aislinn’s look is for.

Try to understand, she says, but oh, how can he, when he has told him nothing? Flame spits higher, throwing sparks like an assault; Asterion winces, and despises this weakness in himself. He should be better, he should be stronger, he should not tremble as his dark eyes reflect a distant glow, a forest burning.

Her voice, her movement, calls back his attention. A breeze bitter with smoke - woodsmoke, truly now the incense of the Night Court – tangles their hair, stirs the water of the bay to whitecaps. Oh, if only he still had his power over that water, the sea singing in his veins – maybe then the distant burning would not turn his heart so cold.  

But he is powerless, bare before her, and his mouth is a thin line as she bares for him her scar. As if he could have forgotten it, that skin-soaked night he raced for Denocte, to wait out her whispers, her screams. To confess his love.

He might have done it again, there between the sea and the shore, but her next words catch him like a fist.

Even then, perhaps he might not have spoken if the accusations and warnings of Jude were not so fresh. Perhaps he might have held his tongue if an explanation had been earlier coming, or if the horizon were not burning, or if he didn’t feel like everything was falling to ash around him.

Almost, almost, he brushes his muzzle against her scar. Almost he presses a kiss to the constellations he has memorized, the ones he has dusted with cinnamon kisses.

But Aislinn is not the only one to know loyalty, and anger, and cold fingers of fear. She is not the only ones whose people have bled and been maimed.

His voice is soft when he answers, and he says nothing of her scar (what can he say? He hurts for her, he remembers too well the tatters of her wing, the screams, the crust of dried blood, but she had chosen that fight, if not the result). For all its quiet, it is no less firm – a carrying current, slow and silver beneath the burning sky.

“Their Regent rebelled against their court? I know nothing of that. I only know of a Regent who rebelled, in his way, against this court, then abandoned it when his intent was laid bare. Recently we were told that he might set Terrastella alight out of petty pride. A warning I did not take to heart, though I see now I should have.” A sigh, a whisper of sorrow that shivers along his skin. He has never been so weary as this world has made him.

But he has pledged himself, and he can not leave, to be borne upon the waves to brighter shores. There is a people under his care, and he loves them as he loves her. Loves her even though her gaze scalds him, even though she could call down lightning to smite him if she wished it. (And would she? His heart says no, but he does not recognize the Night Court any more, not since the festival, when the two of them danced as Lysander bled).

He forces his voice to be measured, his expression smooth. She cannot hear the way his heart races like a rabbit’s over the noise of the waves. “Peace, you say. Then why does your own country burn? I would not look for peace from men who would do such a thing. I would not look for peace from men who would beat a citizen at an occasion of unity and never offer apology, however insincere.” His eyes are the endless sea to the fire of hers, and they might have stood like that for a long time. Until she looked away. Until the distant fire kissed gold along her cheekbone, and she said the word goodbye.

“Goodbye?” His voice falls to a whisper; he shakes his head like the word is nothing more than smoke. Something he can close his eyes against. But like smoke, it lingers in the air, and it tastes bitter, bitter. “For how long?” Suddenly the space between them is an ocean, a chasm; it is a shut gate, a burning pass. Oh, Asterion wants to bridge it and he leans toward her, a ghost seeking warmth.

But it is too far – too far to cross alone.

“Please,” he pleads, more unsteady now than he has yet been. Even the seafoam that rushes up and kisses his hocks does nothing to soothe him. “Please stay. Help me to understand – don’t leave me when I don’t understand.”

He does not tell her the truth – that he is afraid of what might happen if she does.






@Aislinn  oops wrote a book

Asterion

He does not know what he expected, standing there with his heart and his hope both caught in his throat, but he had thought he might at least have an answer.

But there is nothing, nothing to soothe the whirlpool within him, nothing to explain the questions he had leveled. He can feel that ocean inside sucking him down, down; the depths of it threaten to whisper over his head, closing him in silence, in darkness.

He listens to her speak of warnings, of statements, of chaos. He listens and waits for any explanation, any word of what had caused that fire that eats and eats at the horizon, or what it might mean (the only fires he has seen had been set from madness, from rage). And he waits in vain.

Do you know what I am? she says, and oh, there is such a storm in those eyes when he meets them. It sets his heart to trembling, whether from fear or from sorrow he cannot say.

When he had first seen her, stumbling on her like a boy in a dream, he had thought her wild, he had thought her lovely. Both of those things are true still: she is a summer storm, magnificent, but all the fireflies are fled. She had never been a maiden, twining flowers in her hair in the woods – it was a goddess he had stumbled on, as Actaeon had stumbled on Diana. Would he, too, be punished for such a small sin?

I do not blame your people, he wants to say, and I do not blame you. But uncertainty holds his tongue as the silver of her hair glows from the distant flames, a star set alight.

Please, she says, echoing his own plea, and oh, Asterion loves her. Suddenly he is so very weary.

Had he not stayed for her when she begged, clothed in bandages and blood? How many more fights would leave them all beaten?

All of these things he considers, gathering them up in his heart like smooth stones. He could cast them away, or they could sink him.

“Go then,” he says at last, and his voice is so soft that it might already be a memory. Asterion does not take his gaze from hers, but he lets his heart dip below the waves to be cradled by the current. Never has a goodbye felt so like drowning.





@Aislinn 

Asterion

He watches those proud wings unfurl, and tries not to think of the brush of their feathers against his skin, soft as a kiss in a dream.

He watches her exhale, and tries not to think of the way he had counted her breaths, there in the infirmary that smelled of blood and antiseptic, guarding her as she had slept. Even then he should have known – even then he had been helpless to hunt her demons for her.

He watches her turn away, and tries not to think of the times their eyes have met across a crowd, the way he felt drawn to her like something inevitable. Like their ending had been already decided and nothing could rewrite it.

Asterion watches her rewrite it now.

Oh, he has never before felt a pain like this, such an aching where his heart had been. He would not have thought it possible, to feel it like a wound, like a physical thing. Asterion wants to be sick, wants to fold up on himself and cry like a colt for the thing he has lost. But he forces himself to stand firm, to breathe in the salt and the brine like a balm and welcome the way it stings, to watch until there is nothing left of her but the memory of a constellation he could trace in his sleep and eyes the color of no blue he will see again.

He does not hear her say goodbye.

Ash falls on the waves, and through his tear-blurred eyes it looks like snow.

Their summer of starlight is over; the dreaming is at an end.

It is time to wake up.





@Aislinn   oof.