Asterion does not notice what’s happening behind him until the dragon rises up out of the sea. 

At first he thinks it’s a summoning of his own magic, as the water stirs in a frenzy and foam froths up from some great creature beneath. But as soon as the head and the arc of wings breach the surface his heart holds in his throat in awe (in a little fear) and something in him rises as the dragon does from the sea. Oh, he is glad Fable is not the same dragon as the last that ruled over Denocte. There is something terrible about that beauty, and about the power just as present in each gleaming scale and inch of membrane iridescent with water. 

But right now Fable means hope. And when he turns at last from that growing mountain of ash to see the unicorn giving wings to each clam and crab he wants to pledge himself to her, to say I knew you would not be broken. Instead the Dusk King says none of these things; he only greets her smile with a deep nod and a look as black and fierce as her own. There is a rainstorm at her back, now, sweeping in from over both of their courts, but the only moisture in the air is still the mist from the waves as they dash themselves against the beach.

He does not ask her what hells she has traveled through to be here, or how she had escaped from Raum. This beach was no place for his own guilt, or the shame of his inaction; and anyway, perhaps none of the before matters, for here they stand now. Instead he goes to her, as Cirrus’ wingtips flash in the faltering sun and she calls the other birds away. Asterion touches his muzzle to hers with all the care and caution of a wild thing, and is glad her skin does not smell of smoke. 

Still the water keeps its distance from them both, still a swell of waves waits to answer his will. His lungs follow the rhythm of the water and his heart drums at the cage of his ribs, the least steady part of him. “I have always felt braver beside a unicorn,” he says at last, and turns his gaze back on the black cloud before them. 

Perhaps the wind would shift, and blow all that death out toward the open sea. Perhaps there would be no monster, no ruin at all, and what they face is only chance and weather. Asterion hopes so. 

But he is glad to stand beside her nonetheless. 



@Isra

Asterion.

Isra feels like an eruption too, he thinks, but not one that’s happened yet. She is a thing that’s building, being made, folding and refolding as she forges herself into - what? Something beautiful, something terrible, something evil men should be afraid of.

He wonders if the gods are afraid of anything.

The king is grateful for her touch, which cools him like a sea breeze and steadies him like a hand. But it is her words he smiles for, a wry thing curled in the corner of his mouth, for they both know she has been brave below the stars a thousand times already. He says nothing, only drops his muzzle in the slightest of nods, and turns as she does back to the open water and the distant island.

His smile is still lingering at her question, though all the warmth has left it in the face of that reaching black cloud. “I would have said yes, once,” he answers, and there is no fear in his voice, either. Fear, he is finding, is a choice - and they don’t have the luxury of options, today. The dark death will come for them or it will not. It will be the end or it will not. It leaves him feeling strangely peaceful, despite the bird-quick stutter of his heart, and every instinct pleading run.

He is still watching the sea when he speaks again, soft and low, the ocean reflected in his eyes. What is the plan if it doesn’t?”




@Isra

Asterion.

Asterion has wondered, when his thoughts are idle, half-dreaming things, when his gaze is on the stars or the sea or the tree limbs that sway like arms welcoming him home, whether he would be different if he had been born a unicorn.

Of course it is impossible - he is the son of a simple stallion who was, in turn, the son of a simple stallion - but that is half the point of daydreaming, of fairy tales. Would he have been braver at the beginning, if he had such a noble weapon jutting from his brow (instead of the mark of a star, like a kiss from a distant constellation - a kiss from his mother)? Would he have felt he was more born to war? Likely it doesn’t matter, because he is here now.

The dragon cuts once more across the horizon, ripping spaces in the ash for the distant stars to shine through. The smoke eats them up again, but Fable is not done; he tears a new hole in the fabric of that dark destruction, and another, and another. How good it is, how lucky they all are, that Isra is no villain. How terrible the thought of her as anything else - even considering it makes him feel like a traitor.

“Yes,” he says softly, and still neither meets the other’s eyes. “I should like to see you turn the ash to butterflies.” Perhaps he could ask the ocean to swallow the island - perhaps it would even listen, as much as it could. “Sometimes,” he continues, and his voice is soft as a confession, here at the edge of the world, “I wish there were no courts. That our only loyalties were to each other.” Like now, he thinks - if only it wasn’t disaster that forced them to unity.

Fable’s shape is dark over the water, and fleeting as a swallow. Slowly, with a sound like sighing, it begins to rain.



@Isra

Asterion.

Even now he cannot turn to rage; even in the face of this newest disaster nothing like fire burns in his bones. Oh, there is anger there, large and looming, but it is as deep and low as shifting earth, as cool as a lake in the heart of the mountains. It moves slowly, building like a storm. Higher and higher it towers - towards the gods, and toward a kidnapper-king, and toward all things cruel and evil in their world, all things that might seek to hurt.

For the first time in his life it is hard to cast his long gaze down to the empty beach and imagine the one he grew up alongside. It is hard to picture anything peaceful and safe. But maybe he’d been telling himself a story even then, remembering all of the violet sunsets and none of the driving rains.

Isra’s shoulder is warm against his, and there is only comfort between them when he leans into her touch. The king’s eyes do not stray from that black cloud like a press of ink marking the sin of the world. But there is still the water below it, eternal, reflecting the sky. It is a strange kind of comfort to know how much of it he could draw up in their defense, how it would obey more effortlessly than any soldier of Dusk to their king.

When she says that they could change the world he almost believes her.

Asterion smiles as though he does, and at last flicks his dark gaze to her, studying the sea-green and the sea-blue of her eyes. He isn’t sure he’s ever noticed, before, how reminiscent of the ocean they are. Somehow the fading sunlight makes her even more mysterious, glittering on her brush of scales. “I look forward to dreaming of that new world with you. Though I think my court would cast me out for it.” The king’s dark lips quirk up, wry, at the thought of a people so loving and so stubborn. No born Terrastellan would allow court lines to dissolve for the notion of harmony; they were as sturdy as the oldest trees in Tinea, with roots reaching further than even the branches that comb the air high above the earth.

But it is good to dream.

She touches his cheek and the smile fading there and her words fall on him like soft rain. “And I you,” he says to the unicorn, sure as a pledge, and turns to see the way that ash and water strikes her but seeds roll off. The ground is growing heaps of them, to be washed away or blown into the wind and settle, and take root, and grow - what a marvelous creature the unicorn queen is, ever remaking the world around her. “Come what may.” There is a note of fierceness in the last, of ocean floor far beneath the surface waves. A certainty that does not shift.

And though it begins to grow prematurely dark, with that threat of annihilation blotting out the sun in a way not even a dragon could dispel, Asterion is not afraid.



@Isra I hope this works as an ending? <3

Asterion.