He meets Death on a pathway leading down to the beach. 

It has known many feet, including Asterion’s, and has been worn bare and thin and weaves like a ribbon between the dune grass and wildflowers. The air smells of wild rosemary and salt and overhead the clouds drift slowly, heaped soft and high. The bay stallion is only wandering (he has no particular reason to be anywhere, these days), but of course he goes again to the water. The shoreline is both wound and balm, and now with his power an ocean within him he is called more strongly to the sea. A part of him knows he’s been doing this too much, lately; that he cannot keep losing hours watching the waves, letting the foam and wind sigh around him, listening without hoping for the voice of a particular gull. So he tells himself tomorrow, tomorrow. He need not have.

She is waiting for him, around the shoulder of a dune. She is spectacular enough, and sudden enough, that he stops at once; but the horses of Novus are so beautiful and strange that for a moment he doesn’t realize what she is. Not until he meets her eyes (a feat against the glow of her) does he understand she isn’t another stranger, and when she speaks his name a chill wends through him like the reverberations from a struck bell.

He wonders, before the world dissolves around him, if she is Vespera, come in another form. But his once-court’s patron goddess should know that he is not the running kind.

Then there is no time for wonder. A breath, a blink of the eyes, and they are pulled into another world. Flora might have known the feeling, as no stranger to cutting through worlds with her dagger, but Asterion has never been so transformed; it is an uncomfortable, bottom-dropped-out feeling, and that is when he first stirs with fear.

But there is wonder, too, when he opens his eyes. She is too beautiful and terrible to look at for long; he drops his gaze away, and that is when he sees the figures on the stones, thin strokes he can’t read, repeated again and again and again -

He looks up when his name rolls again from her lips. The once-king makes no attempt to speak, to protest or to question; he only listens, and feels the tremble of his heart, even as something like knowing begins to grow in him. Her eyes spark and shift like embers and he is mesmerized by them as he listens, and when she says horror, when she says from this world and into the next, for the first time his mind blooms with dread and resistance, no matter how she told him not to fear.

But I am not ready to die-

And then there are the doors, and the choice.

Each door is simple, worn wood, knotted and whorled. It is hard to imagine hell behind them. But as the terrible, awful voice echoes inside his head, he looks from each to each and believes her. That his death is here and waiting, that this is no dream; and he opens his mouth to speak at last (to thank her, or to question her, or to protest? Not even he knows) only to turn and find that, of course, she is gone and he is alone. The mist curls gently, obscuring the markings on the floor, softening the outlines of the doors.

Asterion looks to the door of earth. He thinks of Ravos, and the goddess Maemo, and how she wept after instructing the plants to grow thorns and strangling vines to teach her people to care for what they had neglected. He thinks of standing in a cave, with all the weight of the world above him, keeping him close and safe but always with the knowledge of being crushed. He thinks of Veneror Peak, the strain of muscles and lungs to climb the mountain and breathe the thin air and meet the gods at their earthen altars.

He looks to the door of fire and thinks of Talia, running at a gallop into dry-desert flames that whipped higher, hungrier with every thing they ate, and her determination to burn and become nothing but ash. He remembers standing on the beach and watching the faraway crimson glow from dragon fire as it ate up the pass that led to Denocte. And he thinks of the bonfires of the Night Court, and how they mean joy and cleansing and renewal.

Asterion looks at the door of air and thinks of Moira, and Aislinn, and all the girls of storms he’s loved. He thinks of the whirlwind that forces the trees and grasses to bow before it, and the roar of the gales that sent waves dashing up against the cliffs, and what it must be like to fly with nothing but that sound in your ears and nothing but the wind to cradle your body, to carry you home.

And then Asterion looks at the door of water. He thinks of oblivion, of being consumed, of every hollow space in him filling up with water and drifting down, down to the bottom of the sea. What fear there must be, going into the cold and the dark and watching the light grow farther and farther away as your lungs beg for air.  He remembers the terror of the Dusk Court’s flooding, new rivers sprung up from nothing, frothing white and too strong to fight, carrying away homes and horses. And yet it is water that lives in him now; it is the sea, always the sea, that he’s walked alongside.

His heart is pounding, his senses awake. He feels more alive in his fear than he ever has; he isn’t ready to die. He cannot possibly choose his own ending -

But then he thinks of a story Florentine had told him, once. How after a hundred lifetimes of rebirth and adventure she had come, old and frail and wise and joyful, and lain her body down for the last time. What a privilege it is, to choose your death. And he has never been afraid of pain.

Asterion is not quite smiling when he approaches a door at last, but his heart is steady. For a moment he stands with his eyes closed, pulling in one last breath, imaging the cold and the dark and the pull of the water that waits for him, that has always waited for him -

And he opens his eyes, and steps through.

There is the sound of the sea, and the smell of it, but it is a sigh and not the roar he was braced for. There is light, and the blue of cornflowers, and the crying of the gulls. He is back on the path with the wind tugging at his hair and he is still alone, with no footsteps before him, like all of it had never been.

But Asterion is heavy with his death, or maybe only the choosing of it, and before he gives himself to questioning whether it was real, and what has changed, and what it means, he lets the sunlight wash over him and feels reborn.