Asterion

He has lost his fondness for the night.

In recent weeks the stars are no longer a comfort, their constellations only a map to memories that wound. Always before he had lingered long beneath the moonlight, following his feet and untangling his thoughts with only the company of the stars and the wind and the cool press of darkness. Now it only reminds him how lonely he is, and how wrong he had been.

So he is glad that it is daylight as he winds his way along the stream, the last of the bright festival flowers still tangled in his mane. He has never been before to Amare, but it lies between his home and the Dawn Court, and the bay is in a mood for wandering.

It would be lovely indeed, if only he could forget the winking whispers of what the location is often used for.

The creek leaps and laughs and babbles alongside him, a constant companion uninterested in his responses. The trees bar him with shadow as he walks, and birds warble overhead as beatifically as any of the festival singers.

For all of the peace of the day his mind is still a messy thing. In a last effort to distract himself, Asterion steps into the creek, stepping carefully on slick stone as cold water rushes around his ankles. He lets himself think of only this: the placement of each hoof, the icy chill of the water, the white-noise wash of it. He images each of his worries falling like petals onto the smooth surface and being whisked away, further and further downstream until they are at last washed out to sea.

It works until he sees the willow.  

The last one he’d stood beneath had concealed a unicorn with a heart of a lion. It had witnessed a reunion that had raised a mix of emotions that were becoming too familiar – joy and shame and damnable hope.

For a long moment he stands before it, just out of reach of the ropey limbs that trail slender leaves, and feels the water that tugs him onward.

And then he steps out of the stream and up the stony bank, dreamer’s heart wishful of one more discovery. With a breath he walks between its branches and into the dappled shade.

At first his mind doesn’t know what to make of it, the figure lying on the grass: her hair becomes sea-foam, her silver-scattered hide soft dawn on the waves. But then his vision adjusts, and his flighty head settles, and he becomes aware of his intrusion. Asterion’s dark gaze falls to the veiled face of the stranger, and finds just a glimpse of her opalescent eyes.

“Oh,”  he says.


@Myfanwy

Asterion

He has a the good grace to step back and cast his glance aside as she clambers to her feet, as though he’s caught her doing something more delicate than resting beneath shade on a summer afternoon. But he can’t help the way his gaze is drawn back to her, again and again, and he gives in with looks as shy as any boy’s.

Asterion has seen a thousand kinds of horses in his time in Novus, each stranger than the last; a rainbow of colors, a forge of jewelry, all manner of wings and scales and hairstyles. But he has never laid eyes on something quite like her. (It is something about the eyes, maybe, or the veil that covers them and ripples like a skein of dusk over most of her face, or- )

Her question is a lucky thing for him, for it shakes him from his tumble of strange thoughts and back into himself. Before he can help it he shakes his head, a half-smile, unbidden, drawing up a corner of his lips. “No,” he assures her. “I thought it was yours.” A pause in which his eyes drift to hers again, wondering if their shifting myriad of color was some trick of the fabric. Why this feeling, that he could look at them a hundred times and never find them the same?

“I’m sorry I interrupted your nap – I feel like taking one too, after such a festival,” he says, for surely she, too, is making her way back from the Dawn Court party. “I can, ah--” and he begins to back his way out from beneath the boughs again, their leaves whispering over his dark skin.  

Inwardly he berates himself for how badly he hopes she will stop him.



@Myfanwy

Asterion

Her laugh is like the stream behind him, like the sunlight on the water, and for a moment it makes his smile true.

And then the boughs are whispering over his back, the sunlight slanting in, and she is saying wait -

It does not take him more encouragement than that to stop. The bay does not move forward again, since she has closed up the space he opened, but instead stands half-in and half-out of the little cave of limbs and leaves. Suddenly the space seems terribly small and intimate, but then the wind comes sighing through, and the stream is laughing nearby, and the stranger’s eyes are so very bright.

At her question he ducks his head a little, his ears flicking forward as he considers her again. He is a little relieved to hear she hadn’t been at the festival, because that meant he hadn’t missed seeing her there – surely she would have caught his attention, even among such a crowd.

“Oh,” he says, “it was a wonder. I’ve never heard such music, and there were a dozen kinds of cake.” His smile returns at that, recalling the impromptu food fight that Moira had begun – though there is a small, strange twinge at the way it had ended. “And then the drinking – and the dancing…”

Already, he thinks, it feels like a dream. What he doesn’t say is that he had not been an active participant in most of those things – instead he’d watched as others made merry. He’d painted himself with Florentine’s help, striping his coat in the colors of the morning, but the storm had washed them all away.

Still, the scent of woodsmoke clings to his skin, and it would be strange not to see lanterns once the sun goes down.

“What kept you away?” he asks, and hopes it is more bold than forward. The ends of her veil move in the wind the way the willow-branches do, and shadows shift across her twilight skin. “It was so near here,” he says, as if to explain, and offers her a little half-smile.




@Myfanwy

Asterion

As he speaks, as his lips and teeth and tongue form syllables smooth as the stream that babbles nearby and soft as the clouds that drift overhead, Asterion watches her eyes.

Does he imagine the way they shift, slide far away to dreaming? The bay has been caught with such an expression often enough to recognize it in another, but it is difficult to tell behind the film of her veil. He wants to name each color that lives there, a changing pool, but he thinks to do that he would need to better see –

He does not realize he’s stepped nearer until she speaks. Then he glances away, almost sheepish, still helpless to understand why he finds himself so strangely snared.

But he looks back again, just to catch her smile, and he accepts her explanation with a nod. Had it not been for duty, after all, he might have been as apt to avoid the gathering, and he had no such excuse.

Oh, and then she leans nearer, and those eyes catch and gleam in sunlight thin as a sliver of glass. Now he does not want to look away from them, for her hair like pale stars is still too similar to another’s in the way it rests against her shoulder or ghosts across her cheek. She smells of sunlight, and windswept grass, and something else he can’t yet place –

And he forgets to try, when she gives her name.

Myfanwy,” he repeats, a clumsy try at the new syllables, but the smile he gives her then betrays no shyness. And I’m Asterion. So now you know me – I hope that means I’ll see you at the next one.”  

Ah, he has become a horse as foolish and frivolous as the worst of Novus, already talking of the next party with the decorations of the last still hanging. But surely Myfanwy was not so fierce and fervent as Calliope, and would not find him weak for it.



@Myfanwy

Asterion

Closer and closer they moved, there beneath the shadows of the sleepy green boughs, and he might have blushed, were he able, at the sound of his name from her dark lips.

Always it has seemed to him a thing too grand, too big a weight for his head stuffed so with dreams, but of late it feels more comfortable. A cloak of his father’s he’s finally growing into, and not a thing to catch him up and make him trip. The way this almost-stranger smiles at him makes him feel as full of starlight as his name.

He thinks that perhaps he is still drunk from the festival; how else to explain the way that time was moving, soft and more languid than the run of the water? How else to explain the way her gaze snared him more surely than any willow-branches could, winding around his heart, bidding it fall still?

Almost he leans forward again, more daring than he ought – but that is when she pulls away.

All at once the world comes crowding back in, penetrating the quiet cover of the willow. Before he can reply to her, before he tell her he will, oh he will, she makes an excuse that is clear even to him and retreats another step.

And then she is gone, vanishing through the trees, her dusky purple melting into the shadows, the last sign of her a flick of her silver tail.

“You’re welcome,” he says softly, but the only things to listen are the still-swaying branches, and the laughing creek, and nodding flowers that are nothing like the color her eyes had been.

With a sigh he moves back to the stream, and toward home.



@Myfanwy D: haha