Asterion

 



Asterion is grateful that he is not alone when he climbs once again to the peak.
 
Oh, he is accompanied by no other beside him, but his bonded is there in his mind, as real and vital as though she sat on his withers or soared lazily on the currents of air far overhead. They had agreed (or rather, she had cajoled and he had insisted and she had begrudgingly acquiesced) that this was something he needed to do by himself. Even so, the gull is no less present in his head as the trees thin and the dirt turns to stone and the autumn sunlight doesn’t stop the wind from reminding him that winter is coming.
 
Tell me what you’re seeing, he thinks, a game now well-familiar.
 
Pelicans, she thinks back, and Asterion almost laughs at the sour note in her tone. They’re migrating south, and hogging all the fish while they do. And the tide is coming in, washing in logs from that storm the other morning, and I think I saw that sister of yours, chasing clouds again.
 
His smile is no less warm, then, although no one can see it. So all is well.
 
All is well, Cirrus agrees, and the Regent grunts and continues up the endless slopes.
 
The trails are still well-worn from the meeting at the Summit, but the bulk of the fervor has died down. There are no other worshipers this day, as afternoon turns to golden evening, and why would there be? For the gods lived here no longer. They were free (if they had ever been bound), and maybe that makes what Asterion is doing foolish, but that has never stopped him before.
 
Indeed, he almost feels relieved when at last he reaches her shrine. There is nothing but unholy dust and a vacant pedestal and thin sunlight and wind.
 
It is easier this way, he thinks, and then on the heels of it: I should have brought an offering. But Asterion would never remember to be anything but what he was, unadorned, carrying nothing but himself.
 
Almost he has forgotten what it was like, to have magic; but he has never forgotten standing beside No, the water-god of Ravos, and speaking to him as though to a friend.
 
Water has a way of reshaping things to its own design eventually, he’d said, and Asterion wonders now if the words are still true. If there is any saltwater left in him, or if there were ever any design, any plan for any of them. Maybe the gods were just guessing too – ah, but that it is a fearsome thought.
 
He does not know if Vespera can hear him, now that her ears are elsewhere. But he thinks of Marisol, and her steadfast faith, and he drops his head to touch his dark muzzle to the empty base where the god’s statue had sat.
 
“Thank you for Cirrus,” he says softly, as a chill wind that smells of pine rakes its fingers through his hair, “if you are the one to thank. I know I have not been faithful to you, or to any of you, but I hope you forgive me.” A wry smile shapes his mouth. “I was hardly faithful when I saw gods perform miracles before me. I just wanted to give my gratitude, but…oh, Vespera, I don’t understand. I don’t know what any of you want. I don’t even know what I want.”
 
With a sigh he leans away, and stares out over the whole of Novus, unfolding before him like a map. Always he’d longed for adventure, and perhaps here he’d found it – perhaps he’d simply never known what to do with what he had.
 
“I just want them to be safe,” he says, his voice a whisper of seafoam, and the wind tears that away from him, too.






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