Asterion, too, loves the sea.

Never only the danger of it - though that is always a part. Asterion, born a dreamer on a quiet shore, has always loved the mystery of it. The constant sameness and constant change, the way it is like the moon, always there but never alike from one night to the next. Sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar - sometimes still and sometimes ravenous.

The sea is his confidant and his courage, and now it is within him, too, in that that secret place where magic lives.

Tonight the king descends the path down to the shore in the dark. He is not afraid of missing his steps; he knows each one by heart. Already he can hear the sea and it is a hungry thing, sucking at the rocks, pulling at the sand, wanting and wanting. Asterion is not afraid of this, either; he wants, too, though he does not know quite what. That is why he comes - he has always found his answers somewhere in the pause between waves.

But the waters are too rough to step into; even in the starless dim he can see the white caps, pale as arctic wolves, all froth and hunger. So the bay follows Euryale’s footprints (though he does not yet know it) back inland, into the knotted, twisting roots of mangroves and jutting limbs of cypress, the outer reachers of the swamp. The smell of salt does not fall away but thickens, and sheltered from the wind it is almost warm, still damp - it feels to his half-slumbering mind like living in a monster’s mouth. Still he is unafraid, still he knows his way. Asterion has spent nearly two years untangling Terrastella’s secrets, though he knows (and is glad for the knowledge) that there are many more.

It is her laugh that alerts him to her: the bay stallion freezes, one dark ear twisting, his breath falling soft as he listens. It is not a laugh he knows, and neither does he know why it raises a strip of hair down the nape of his neck.

Still he turns toward it, stepping carefully now over the tangling limbs (he does not know them so well as the salt-spray rocks of the cliffs). When he sees her it is only because of her color - so bright, so strange, even beneath the shadows and the boughs and the starless night. Her face is as pale as a skull, and he tilts his own, his dark-eyed gaze steady on her, his breathing like the sigh of waves on a quieter beach.

“Hello,” the king says softly, wonderingly, into the heavy, briny air between them.

Maybe he ought to be more bold (or maybe more afraid), but that was never his way.  



@Euryale hello!

The salt is always in his blood, even when it is not worn on his dark lips.

Asterion’s breath is the sigh of a slumbering sea, and his veins are only currents, pulling inexorably down to his dreamer’s heart. The moonlight has long ago left its mark on his skin in the strands of silver in his hair, the dapple of dusk on his shoulder and hip. The king carries with him the sea - but oh, is that cold, thrashing darkness within him, too?

Against that backdrop of crashing waves, dulled but not diminished by the tangle of root and leaves behind them, Asterion watches her approach.

The bay is not familiar with a danger such as hers. He has faced monsters, he has faced snakes, but he has never faced anything where such intentional beauty and danger meet. Her laugh, her smile, the blood on her breast (which first he’d taken for only moonlight on another shade of red across her foreign hide) - all of these encourage his heart to beat faster, his eyes to be wide and wary. Yet Asterion does not give ground; he only tucks his chin nearer to his chest, watching her with a gaze darker than the space between the stars.

He may yet be a dreamer, but he is not so foolish a one as he was a year ago. Girls under the moonlight are not so tempting as once they were, especially when they smile sharp with iron, with blood.

Who are you?

Her words are like jasmine, sweet and dark and soft at the edges like petals. One of his slender ears flicks back - the pulling, rough-throated sound of a wave retreating from a cave in the rock, the cry of a shore-bird. He thinks it is strange, to hear a gull after dark. But his eyes never stray from her.

“I am Asterion,” he says, as simply as he has always given his name. He is no king, in this moment; just a man alone beneath the moonlight, his footprints swallowed up by the waves. Even Cirrus is sleeping, her thoughts apart from his own.

Euryale, she names herself, and he tilts his head. It is not a name he might have expected form her; it puts him in mind of a songbird, yur-a-lee, and he wants to try it out on his own tongue. But she has come nearer (though he does not remember her taking a step), and though they are of a height something about her, perhaps the bone-pale of her face, the blood on her chest, makes her seem to loom up out of the dark.

Asterion has heard the legends, the tales of horses who live in the sea, who change once within the waves. The ones who do not eat oat-cakes and sleep in the city. And he wonders, oh he wonders, if he has finally met one.

Even so he cannot summon fear. There is still a boy in him, a boy who dreams of being a knight, and that boy says adventure when the rest of the night whispers run.

Instead he extends his neck, his breath spilling warm between them, and says “Are you one of them - the kelpies that come to shore beneath the moon to feed?”



@Euryale

There is a part of Asterion that is like a moon-shadow.

It is almost never seen; he rarely ever wanes so far. But even as a boy he had known that there were no adventures without blood, no heroes without villains, no magic without cost. Such things are further from him now, perhaps, than they had been as a colt; but there are still moments (on the battlefield with his teeth set, or at the Summit surrounded by gods and stone) he is reminded. He has always admired dangerous things, always loved them.

She is dangerous. He had guessed it at first, as soon as he saw here there beneath the dappled moonlight - but now Asterion knows, the way he knows when a fox is near. Still he does not (cannot?) draw away, only stands and watches dark-eyed and quiet as a seal.

His name on her lips feels like a fly shuddering on his skin, like the reflection of a star rippling on cold water. Light shattered into pieces. “Euryale,” he says in return (the way he had wanted to before), and there is something like a smile in his voice, though he can feel his heart beating like a bird’s.

When she claims she is not one of the kelpies he is not sure that he believes her. The bay king has learned, at least, that not every stranger he meets gives the truth, whether they wear a crown or a dragon or nothing at all. There is the crash of the sea behind them, after all, and the brine still sharp in his nostrils. One of his dark ears turns.

But then she continues, her voice the whisper of sea-foam over jagged rocks. The moonlight catches something, a flash of white at her mouth, and is is the first time Asterion notices her fangs. He knows then she did not lie. “I have heard no stories of them,” he says, and his voice is no whisper but it is soft, soft, the murmur of the tide. Like the tide it pulls, insistent, and there is something like a challenge in it, or a question.

Her gaze rakes over him, more intently than the moonlight ever has watched him. She is nothing, he thinks then, like the others he has known: she is not a summer storm, like Aislinn, or a phoenix like Moira or a lion swallowed up by a unicorn like Calliope.

She is a wolf, and she is hunting him.

It is almost enough to make him turn. But Asterion has never been a coward (though he is often afraid), and he draws in a deep breath as her attention slides along him like a finger. And then she asks her question, and the king forgets about retreating to the waves. For a moment he is quiet, and then he tilts his head toward her and the ocean sighs.

“Neither,” he answers her, “but I dream of both.”




@Euryale

He does not yet wonder if the moonlight has led him astray, or if the waves were sighing out a warning against the rocks as he turned into the darkness of the trees. Asterion has never known a woman like her - a wolf or a witch or whatever she is, that she looks at him so, with promises in her eyes that all end in blood.

For the first time he thinks that Florentine would call him a fool, to see him now, and Marisol would curse him outright. For the threat is undeniable in the glistening curve of her teeth, in the arch of her neck, in the pattern of the snakes that twine so sensually along her hip, tangling over and through themselves like the reaching roots of the mangroves. And even so Asterion cannot find it in him to be afraid, for his curiosity outweighs his wisdom, and the heat of her blood is catching in his.

The king may call it fascination, but the beat of his heart knows better - it is want that stirs in him, dark and low and strange. Want for the way she moves, the way she looks at him, the way her voice traces like fingers down his neck, down his back. He does not quite know what it is he wants - to taste the salt on her skin, to scrape his teeth along her shoulder, to see if the wildness of her might make him wild, too —

All this time her eyes have not wavered from him. She watches him as the moon does, unblinking, though her lashes drift down over the red of her eyes like thin clouds might veil the moon. But no space separates them; she is near enough now that the silks she wears (thin as sighs, soft as secrets) brush against his skin with the cool kiss of a breeze. The summer night is alive around them, and the sea still rushes at his back, but it is fading, fading against the blood-rush that echoes instead in his head.

Her words are almost lost against that background noise, the way all his senses seem taken up by his skin, by his eyes. Yet one of Asterion’s ears slants toward her, and almost a smile slants in turn across his face. “I would ask the wolf,” he breathes, just as soft, and for a moment his eyes catch the blood-dark of hers. That is when she asks her question, when he can almost feel her skin on his, and all thoughts of any other kind of beauty but the beauty of wolves is near-driven from his head.

Nobody, he wants to say, or only a dreamer, but neither of them are true any more. Asterion is no longer a boy, to play at being a knight and drift from world to world like foam on the waves.

He does not want to remember the roots he has made, the ties and responsibilities that have ground him like an oak. He wants to be untethered, he wants to drift like a ghost along this laughing, wanton stranger, and take the things he never had the courage to ask for. But it is not who he is.

I am the sovereign of these lands,” he says at last, like a sentence or a vow. “I am the king of Terrastella.”

Asterion straightens unconsciously as he says it, and the moonlight picks out the silver in his hair, the star-shine on his shoulders. Yet his eyes do not turn from Euryale, and when she speaks again he is just as rapt. “Is that what you were doing tonight?” he asks, caught between the curiosity of a boy and a man. Still he has made no move to touch her in turn but oh, how his gaze follows her movements, how his skin shivers when the gauze of her ribbons drifts near.

“Not only in my dreams,” he says, and at last turns his eyes away to look back to the sea. Through the thicket of trunks and the tangle of limbs and the sighing leaves he can make out the moonlight on the waves. The tide has come in fully now; the night is quieting. “They are why I am here now. Too long apart from them and I -”, the bay king falters. He forgets he stands before a wolf, bare before her hunger; he forgets he is in danger, or in want. Only his blood remembers, coursing quick and hot beneath his dusky skin. “I forget myself,” he finishes, and when he turns back to her they are near enough to share breath.






@Euryale <3

When they press skin-to-skin at last a breath escapes him, small and slight; it might have been a sigh. Oh, Euryale, he thinks, her name still like birdsong in his mind, lush as a nightingale. And Asterion does not pull away.

To touch her is to stand in the surf and feel the crash of the spray in time with the beat of his heart; it is to feel a riptide tug at his feet, urging him away (away to danger, away to drowning). Her skin is soft in the summer night like a petal just unfurled, but he does not miss the muscle beneath. It would be easy, he thinks, to let her lead him through the night - to guide him across treacherous paths he would never tread alone, deep and deeper yet until even the dawn could not find him again.

Oh, in that moment he wishes she would; for the first time he understands why Talia wanted so badly to burn, to drown, to die. But his golden twin never had a city sleeping beneath the restive moon, or another soul bed down beside his own, sharing a secret corner of his mind.

Asterion has never been truly free.

But Cirrus is sleeping, and so is Terrastella, and he pushes them from his mind as she pins him with her blood-bright gaze. He does not quail beneath it; he meets it, bold and wanting - ah, but he does not know what he wants, except to wish he might for a night be unmoored. Never has he met eyes so openly wanton, so hungry - he might blush if he were not well beyond it, might feel embarrassed if they were not already pressed like pages for ink to mingle. Instead he only wonders if her skin tastes like the ocean, sweat like salt and brine, or more of earth and iron. Instead he half-expects (and half hopes) to feel her teeth against him next.

Instead she speaks, and her words surprise a laugh from him, brief and coarse as a fox’s. The cicadas hum around them, agreeing with her; Asterion agrees with her, too, even as the truth she whispers pierces his heart like a sliver of silver. “You are the first to say so,” he tells her in a whisper rough as sandstone, low as a thing that curls dark and secret beneath the soil and waits to grow. Her voice in the shell of his ear raises a shiver along his neck; he wants to take her ear gently between his teeth and tug. What is it a king should look like? he wants to ask, wants to demand - let me show you how I rule - Ah, but that is not him either. It is a midnight fantasy, it is white-capped waves in a summer storm, it is a dark dream that will dissolve with morning.

What she says next only reinforces this - that he is pretending, that his business is not in thickets of reaching mangroves hidden from the path the moonlight makes on the water with a wolf who makes him wish to bare his throat.

“Yes, he is too quick to say, the word like a prayer from his lips, and does not ask what else it is she needs.

She sighs and her silks sigh against him, too, there and then away; he does not remember the night being as cool as it is when she is gone. All at once the night rushes in again, the thick smells of saltwater and swamp, the night-birds singing and the breathing of the sea. But when she speaks he meets her gaze and oh, there is a an ache inside him, a hunger for an appetite he never knew he had. It is the same hunger that compels him to watch the autumn sea for kelpies, to walk the midnight swamp for a sign of the Ilati. It is the part of him that has always believed adventure meant danger.

Almost it compels him to ask her - command her - to stay.

Instead he nods, though he never drops his gaze from her. Asterion wants to name her as she has him (he will fall into fitful sleep in the cold silver of dawn, the way she says king still in his ears with an echo of her laughter) but he does not trust himself to speak. Better silence than foolishness, better to let the ocean speak for him in sighs, in whispers.

Better to turn away at last than linger forever, until he gives in to the promise of her eyes, her skin, her teeth.





@Euryale this was such fun, thank you! I can't wait for their next thread. :)