Even now he isn’t sure why it is with Eik, and Eik alone (save for Flora, who shares his blood and half his history) that Asterion feels all himself, only himself, without pretense. It isn’t only that they both left - although, guiltily, he knows this is a part of it - or that they met, years ago, before either of them were anything but wanderers.

It is something in the man himself, and his steady, patient soul. And Asterion will always be grateful for it.

There are new lines on Eik’s face when they draw apart, new scatterings of white on his muzzle. He looks faded in the daylight even though he smells and feels gloriously real, and the bay averts his dark eyes, as though if he doesn’t look he can pretend he didn’t see. When he thinks of his own meeting (vision? Dream?) with death, and the change that came after, it isn’t joy he feels, or even relief. Don’t leave me, he wants to plead, like he never became anything more than a foolish boy.

He follows his friend easily, without the burden of words between them. Anything he says in this moment would be too light, or too heavy; he has lost the perfect balance, if ever he had it. It is enough to walk beside Eik, to let the soft wind brush his cheek, to let the clamor of a strange city - a city beloved by someone he loves - fill the spaces of his mind that he’s afraid to.

His smile widens, unburdened, when the grey says that it is good to be back. He wants to ask what has changed, and what remained - but even that feels like a dangerous question, too loaded with recent history, which is stained red. “It seems impossible that I’ve never been here before,” he says instead, easy words with as much weight as the shadows that slide over them from bright banners hung above. “Now that I know how nice your winters are, maybe I won’t leave.” Despite his jest, shame flickers in his heart (an emotion on which the thing within him loves to feed). Once, the two of them spoke of the responsibility of power - and then, when Raum came to the desert, and Asterion’s power might have done something, saved someone -

The breath he blows out is unrelated to Eik’s question, but still fitting. “It was good to see it again, and see it safe,” he says. He meets his friend’s gaze, but only briefly, a moth-wing to a windowpane. Asterion thinks of the cold of Marisol’s eyes, the bluntness of her words, all the old stone of the cliffside which could batter a man to pieces. “But it seemed clear that the nature of my leaving left hurt that could not be solved by my returning. I feel that…there isn’t a place for me anymore. The wound has healed and I would only open it again.” His cheeks warm - shame, again. The errant king wants to ask how it was for Isra; instead he looks at his friend and says, smiling again, “Tell me of your daughters. I met Aspara, briefly, on the way to the last festival in Denocte. You have much to be proud of.”