There is a gale howling on the mountain. Above, the clouds are a heavy bruised gray, but these and everything else are made invisible by the snow falling thick and furious. The wind moans, gnashes its teeth, seeks to dislodge any living thing from the path. What trees there are this high up rattle their thin bare branches like a warning.
Inside Asterion there is a howling, too.
There must be an empty place within his chest, for such a sound and such a darkness. He has never been empty before, but always too full, full to overflow, of love and want and worry and dreaming. He is finding that it’s easier, to be hollow.
Ice coats his lashes, snow clings to his sides and buries the stars there. Each breath is a wisp of smoke whipped away by the wind and still he climbs. There is a part of him dimly aware that he is calling the storm, that his magic is crying out for the rain and oh, the clouds obey. At one point he rounds a corner and staggers against the wind, leaning for a moment against the slick stone of the mountain, sensing but unable to see the precipice yawning before him; and then he puts his head down, pushes on.
So it goes until the air is so thin and frigid it feels like swallowing icicles, until the only remnant of warmth is the burn of his muscles and lungs, until his eyes ache with cold. And then the path twists again, and rises once more, and he is above the storm.
The change is as sudden as stepping through a doorway and leaving the world behind. Asterion blinks against the sudden midday sun and blows out a shuddering breath. From here the clouds look like the surface of the sea - tumultuous, dense enough to drown in.
Ahead waits the altar of the gods, but the stallion makes no move to continue. For the first time in his life, he feels like a god himself.
The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices
the blood on my teeth begins to taste like a poem, like religion
euryale snarls and swings her long sword, crashing it against the marble. she desecrates the statues, with every trembling thrust of her blade, destiny. the marbled effigies rattle and crack beneath her delicious fury. her sword sings through the air. slicing, and whirring, with a trembling violence. she laughs into the silence. she laughs with her blade. the passionate clamour of steel, as it rings through the air with maddening assailment. she throws her silky head backwards and howls with her sensual madness. she has lived for so long in her hollowness. it is her own emptiness, that laughs back. each fervent echo of she. consuming her. devouring her. forever, euryale.
maybe, her hunger had escaped her. maybe, her hunger feels, unleashed. fore the hunger of the gods, torments the skies now; they were reflections of euryale's internal universe. the zephyrs scale veneror peak with a vengeance, with a titan-fury. the mistral winds, toss and turn. they are savage wolves in the foray. savage lovers, amid the tempest storms of hera. sheets of pale violence, unseen amidst the snowy curtains. yet their holy burn, lays within each lightening whip of windstorm. with each virulent caress of stormy desire, drawing taut and wicked against flesh; raw, and tempestuous as the sea. to the kings and queens of the mountains, however. where the air is aching-thin and, ever gasping. where the air feels piercingly morbid, wintry cold, with both need and violent desire. somehow, the silence up here above the mortal kind, and kingdoms below, always proves to be most consoling for all her unabashed, violence and hunger.
here lies romance. here lies tragedies. there is acceptance up here, amongst the gossamer clouds. there is eternity within the nothingness of gray space, and stars buried so high, and heavenly. within the frigid mountain air, that sucked at lungs like sleek vinyl trapped over hot, sweaty skin. there is holiness here. the promise of desolation. such songs of alleviation, becomes a means to an end. fore there are endings up here, too. the end of all things - allowing for new beginnings. new worship. new love. and maybe that is why she is up here, lost within the intimacy of her thoughts. amidst the foggy chill, the bruising clouds, with winter's wrath pouring her snowy deluge. chilling scarlet skin and layering slivers of snow, upon euryale's eye-lashes and slender backline. fore is that not the mantra for sea? for sky? for water? for wind? constantly changing. constantly evolving. never the same, yet always restless - forever damned, beneath its stoic waves and reflective, catatonic stillness. is this why you are up here so? to lay yourself beneath the mountains, to rise above it - rise again, and again. renewed. reborn. and from the ashes of our worship, from the bedroom cries of our wild religion; i will make you; i will call you, i will claim you; i will love you;
"king."
when she turns to face him in the still-shadows of winter, it is her gaze that pierces him and not her sword. her sword points at his heart like a come-hither talon, and her lips curl upward into an almost-smile, as dark and empty as her soul. when her song finds him, her voice is desire, incarnate; soft, dark poetry of her lips. her voice sings scalding hot, compared to the gelid vapour that leaves her sensual mouth, in smooth plumes of gentle, mountain-mist. her voice is blazing silk. her voice is fire and ice, as she sings for him. a ghostly caress, wrapping tightly against her tongue. winding against her fangs with all the hungry, venom-sweetness of lucifer; her voice is the lucifer. there is no playfully, wicked laughter in the tone of her voice now. nothing unabashed nor coyfully taunting. not as it was, the many nights before, during their first meeting by the ocean, where she whispered like a mermaid whispers to a drowning sailor, 'king'. there is no seductive spells of silver-siren words, she yearns to cast upon him. her voice is bedroom-whisper, instead. a low, husky whisper that sounds equal parts primitive growl, and equally so the alluring, croon of a vampiric queen.
"so far from the sea," another dark, silk-whisper leaves her saccharine lips, and the lilac-haired temptress finds herself circling him with the delight of a hurricane. circling him, and yet not touching. her blade lifts the earthen snow. her sword drags through the white powder, like a knife drags through pale flesh, behind her. she is the tempest. she is the storm. this is her calm. only the brush of her flank, finds his muscled side. only the promise of her lips, shadowed along his spine, gives way for both her desire and need and consumption. the most subtle of caresses, it could have been a ghost that kisses his skin, instead.
her silken blues, were no longer the tattered veils of a corpse bride. they swell heavily, upon the barren floor. swaying against the snowy earth like draconic serpents, rippling with all the gracefulness of a gown. grecian robes, unfurling in their Athenian wake, how they curled around him in all their translucent beauty. her sultry thighs, revealing themselves, then hidden away; her dark skin, glowing beneath the tumultuous folds of satin-blue. euryale draws, nearer. they are so close, now, his breath feels hot when it falls like sensual invitations along her face. she holds herself in purring defiance. she feels ever so guarded, and she guards her heart, viciously. she has always known him and his potential to be dangerous. and now, now; he looks dangerous. with his tousled hair, unkempt in its obsidian tendrils. with the hollow hunger of his gaze, sharper than any blade.
"what has become of you?" such sensual lyrics, honeyed-syllables, falls from her lips. euryale calantha wants to step even closer. she wants to put her shoulder into his chest. she wants to whisper those words against his ear. she wants to end the distance between them with a kiss. she wants to fill the spaces between them within the shadows of their embrace. she wants to pull him close. warm his cold body, with hers. But there is danger in that, too. the sea calls for you. you do not belong here, dear king.
If he was ever alone in the peace above the storm, the sacred quiet of the mountain, it was not for long. Asterion turns at the word that sounds to him like a rap against armor. His dark eyes travel up the length of the sword, from tip to fur-wrapped hilt, and to the woman who holds it. There had been displeasure in his expression when he heard the voice, and then surprise as he found the speaker, and now a smile blooms on his dark mouth.
“Lady Euryale,” he replies, low. When she draws near he makes no move save to broaden his stance, to feel the sunlight (thin though it is) warm his weary muscles. It is a pleasure to watch her, he thinks - the steadiness of her gaze, the motion of her ribbons a current around her. The line the sword draws in the snow. He wants to ask her why she’s brought it here, what she hunts. He wants to ask her if she’s used it to kill, the way he’s always wondered about her teeth. Who are you really? she’s asked him once, and now, as he has many times, he wonders the same of her.
She is the brightest thing in this faraway world, and his gaze leaves her only briefly, to glance across the clouds as though he could see through the storm to the ocean at the horizon. “But nearer the stars,” he says, still smiling, though the smile is heavy, slow. If there are stars in him now, they are in eclipse.
What he does not say is that the sea is always in him now, murmuring, ebbing, churning. His blood obeys the same tides, his mind is a whirlpool.
But Asterion does not want to think about these things, or the sea. Not when the softness of her brushes against his shoulder. Not when her breath warms him better than the sun. The caress of her ribbons raises a shiver to his skin and he drinks in the color of her, vivid as a venomous snake, a warning he doesn’t intend to heed. He wants to reach for her in turn, an impulse unlike him. At last the sword falls still, and the woman too; they are close enough he can see bits of ice in her lashes, hear the whisper of her veils.
He wants to touch her, to share her warmth, to forget the bite of the wind and the howl of the gale and the feeling of being alone. (And the thing within him, it wants to touch too - to take.
At her question he meets her eyes, bright tourmaline in the bone white of her face. There is another world behind his own gaze - a sick place, a holy place, where dying and creation are the same.
“I am free.”
The wind picks up, scattering snowflakes around them like diamonds, or magic. And the once-king reaches for her at last.
The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices
the blood on my teeth begins to
taste like a poem, like religion
My heart is cold – a cathedral, still and silent – with ghosts made of moonsong. Without soul, without warmth; only the screams of filtered moonlight, only the wild aching of bruised oceans, and the steady breath of wilderness racing like rivers throughout my celestial body. My heart is a wild animal – an animal that knows no tenderness, nor mercy. Only death, only resurrection and beautiful, wide-eyed chaos. I can feel my heart baying now, cold and lupine, singing like a wolf in the thick, ivory expanse of winter. I can hear my heart pulsing – visceral and lonely – pulsing right through me, straight and rigid. Piercing like a silver arrow pierces tender soul and flesh. You wear your armor on the outside. I wear my armor on the inside. I hide my heart like a sacred temple beneath a forbidden castle, made cold, with its endless, immortal hunger.
I hide my heart like a dragon hides its gold, its treasure – too devastating too part with, too heavy to completely swallow, but always mine, always with me – guarded. There are parts of me I do not wish the world to see. How soft I can be – how hopelessly tender. How fragile and delicate like a rose might be. But you threaten all that too, don't you? You find the shadows, you follow the path of coldness, of isolation. You follow me. With your gentleness, with your tender dreamers' gaze, with your star-wild eyes and a voice made soft by the roaring waterfalls and endless oceans you carry. You are the forest to my winter– my forest. The dreamcatcher to my dreams. And I look to you like a wolf looks to the wilderness, the moon; with hopeless want and tender aching. An ancient ache, as old as love, as wild as creation – gentle, like a kiss; soft like the brush of fingertips against your cheek. I want to bask in your embrace and call us holy. I want to hold you close and never let you go.
The universe falls before them in comatose stillness. The snow descends, like a sleepy drug. Everywhere is a blinding sea of hot-white. Everywhere is a blistering porcelain against the stark, grueling face of December. Yet still, she feels his warmth amidst all this shadow and ice. Still, she hears the gentle murmur of his voice, drifting to her like a long-awaited dream. There is a tenderness in him that smoothes down her curves like silk. The way he moves, speaks, breathes – the shadows within his gaze, the enchanting beauty of his attractive face and dark, smoldering skin – all of it, is unravelling her heart made of winter.
"Do you always gaze up at the heavens?" Her voice breathes along his skin, a soft and sensual caress that recites like poetry upon his flesh. If there is hunger in her heart, it does not show – there is no predatory want in the curl of her soft smile now – nor is there any trace of violence within the sharp curve of her alluring lips, her graceful body. If there is passion and want, it is only riddled like coy blades through a fallen angel's smile; swimming within the claret rivers of her heavy-lashed stare, and vampiric silence made holy with darkness, and allure. Euryale aches to hold him close. To pull him within her embrace, where they both might be intoxicated by the scent of their skins, caught in the timeless romance of a cruel winterstorm. She wants to tell him how she'd pull the stars down for him – or how the softness of his voice, should break her iron heart into pieces so sharp, even the universe should shatter and be unmade by her want. Her hungry tenderness. How he could be the one she follows into the twilight, the shadows – that he could be her Orion; and together they would race against the darkness – side by side, eternal and dreaming and free.
Euryale wants to tell him so many things, and yet her heart feels frigid – her voice, a ghost. "Asterion, I...." Her voice falls against him like smoke. Soft, ethereal, apprehensive; a dark whisper made of dreams – made of moonlight, and windsong. She only stills herself when he reaches for her at last. Her sword lightens from her grasp, brushing the earth in a thrumming of steel – startled by the sudden rush of heat. His heat. She returns his embrace, slowly. Unfurling like a rose unfurls beneath the warmth of his touch. Kissing the frost along his cheek, brushing the snow from where they gathered upon his lashes, and temple. The blue that weaves her physique curls around him now, tangling the length of his hair within their celestial fingertips. Her heart feels light, with a strange aching, as she brings her lips near his own. Drawing her chest against his frame, so that he too may feel the wildness of her heart.
"This can't be real," She whispers again into the narrow space between them. The way the snowflakes flutter along his brow, the way his mouth settles into a smile – the way he murmurs the word, 'free' – the brief flicker of his swarthy gaze as he looks at the snowfall around them, before returning his deep brown eyes to her. If you are so free, then why do you follow me? She wants to ask, to press the question into the curve of his neck – to seize his mouth with a slow kiss. To breathe him in, deeply. But she only smiles, dark and silent, a soft sigh leaving her lips, scarcely heard above winter's gale. "I once thought you were a knight – for all your chivalry. Instead, I now think you must be a very powerful magician, wielding such magic – all this snowfall can't be real," Into the hollow of his neck she whispers – darkly playful, taunting – taking in his scent, the rich notes of masculinity, the hard lines of muscle. Her thoughts, an echo of his; swathed in bewilderment, intrigue. Even as they stand together against the biting December-cold, how familiar his ocean-scent, his taste; his body made perfect to shadow hers.
If he knew, if he knew he was unmaking her - oh, Asterion would tell her to harden her heart.
There is nothing he can give to her; he was only made to drown and recede. That is what Novus has taught him: that his love is not a thing that stays. Since the day his twin left him, warned him never to come near her again, he has been afraid that all he loves in the world will eventually tell him the same.
As, each in their own way, so many of them have.
In his heart, his secret heart, Asterion wants to be claimed. He wants to be told you are mine, and I will not let you go. That is what first drew him to her, this huntress, with her vivid eyes and the glint of her teeth. He has always courted danger - he has always wanted it to court him back. Always it has turned down the dreamer-prince; the monsters always thought him too soft for their tastes.
But he does not feel soft anymore.
Her breath is the warmest thing, here in the mountains where the air is thin and ice coats the stunted trees like a veil. He wants to curl into it like a cat in the sun; his muzzle moves toward hers, a ghost of a touch. “Since I first learned to follow the stars. It took me so long to learn this world’s constellations…” When he blinks, it is another world’s darkness he sees, and another world’s stars. In the country of his birth, in Ravos, he’d always thought they pointed him true. It wasn’t until Novus that he accepted they shone the same for everyone.
It feels strange to have the sunlight sear his eyes when she whispers his name - her voice is made for shadowed places, holy quiet. They should be beneath a cathedral of trees in a forest with moss a dark drapery over the boughs and sunlight pooling like the blood of an offering. They should be back among the mangroves with the sea a hushed murmur beyond them and the moonlight slicking the leaves.
Yet here is enough. When her words falter, a rough smile curves his dark mouth; he sighs when her lips find his cheek. Her heartbeat is a rhythm he could sing to, the ribbons she wears a caress. When his own heart begins to quicken and he thinks of Moira, golden-eyed Moira, he pushes the thoughts away. And when the thing within him, the strange, dark thing, wants to peel back his lips from his teeth and taste Euryale and the rush of her blood so near the surface of her skin - he tries to push those wants away, too.
Oh, he would pray to only be himself here, himself unburdened, if only he knew who to pray to.
This can’t be real, she says, and his mind echoes the same - but Asterion says nothing. He feels the warmth of her, flush against him; the memory of her lips leaving patterns on his skin, the bite of the cold, the roil of the clouds beyond the cliffside. It is all real, real and vivid, and if he flung them both from the mountainside that would be real, too-
When she speaks he is drawn back from these dark imaginings, and grateful for it, even as the chasm within him yawns wider, darker, hungrier. But maybe Asterion is learning at last to pretend, because he laughs as the snowflakes melt on their skin, and the wind tousles their hair and shudders her thin veils of blue like flags of victory or surrender.
“I always wanted to be a knight. To be good, and noble, and brave.” His words form clouds of vapor and he watches, unfeeling, as they dissipate. Then he smiles at her, darkly, and lips the crest of her neck as her breath tickles the hair of his throat. “But now I think I’d prefer to be the magician. Snow in the mountains in winter is not so strange. But I could show you magic…” Around them, the wind begins a wordless moan.
The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices
the blood on my teeth begins to
taste like a poem, like religion
A passionate hunger blossoms beneath her porcelain breast, where fever turns to wicked devotion–wicked devotion, to frenzied want. She can feel it in her heart, budding like a new-rose against the eclipsing, auroral moon of her emotions, her thoughts, her intimate desires. She can feel it in the way his voice breaks her consciousness, like an ocean-tide; crashing roughly against the glacial veins of her serpent-heart. Her heart is ice, yet o–he threatens that, too. The danger of him, the mystery of him, becomes all too-irresistible. Consuming her thoughts, even as she stood beside him now, fixated upon the silent, pulsating language of his own wild soul–
Euryale remembers how soft he had been, when she had first met this ocean prince by the relentless, whispering oceans of Terminus Sea. She remembers the way the water moaned for his name. She remembers his armour made of constellations, the way his skin shuddered against hers in the dim moonlight as they stood side by side then, drinking in the dark, beachside ambience with the sultry, midnight moon gleaming against their skins. She remembers the way his breath fell to quickening with desire, or fear–she could not tell back then, but in the hear and now, with her wolven impulse drinking him in; she cannot sense any fear in him. Only dare, even dark impulsion. There is a new recklessness in Asterion–a recklessness, a danger, she so loves. It makes her want him even more.
Euryale does not want this moment to end–not with the promise of his flesh so warm against her lips. His skin pressed like heaven against her mouth. Not with the heat of his masculine body brushing so intimately against hers, as they share their warmth beneath the gilded rays of sunlight receding through soft, gossamer clouds that flew its austere veil against their skins like two lovers at dawn. “And the stars on your skin, Asterion–how did they get there?” Euryale breathes those words, darker. Huskier. Like holy prayer, like wicked devotion–ghosting her lips above his own lips, pressing a shadow of a kiss against his mouth. It is almost a whisper, almost a moan–the way she breathes out his name like darkness leaving her lungs, escaping her soul in fragments of passion and celestial light.
When her breath falls against him, it falls silky and ethereal. Within its hiss, caress tempest passions–a promise for something more, something deeper (like lust, or love). She leans into the strength of his chest, finding sanctuary in his embrace, though they overlooked the roaring lands and seas below, a dangerous breath away from falling into its violent riptide, its great below. Euryale bows into the rippling shadows of his swarthy frame, pressing into him with a soft purr. She could linger in the memory of his scent, bask in the vicious undertow of this wild devotion. Her skull tilts against his, their brows touch, and when she speaks it is almost sweet, almost saccharine. “In my softest moments, I too, would gaze up at the heavens–but only at night, and only for the moon,” She whispers those words against his ear as he steals a kiss along the crest of her neck. Beneath the dusky slants of raw light, he is lean, carved–he is someone she can lean into, someone she finds strength in.
“Brave knights are too good for this world,” She almost wants to taste him. To drag her fangs across his skin and leave lovebites there. To draw blood from his throat and call it another kiss. But she does not, she only supresses the thought of kissing him in such a damning way. She resists the urge within her to devour, to consume–when the wolf rises within her throat, its jaws only howl with tender, aching want. The icy witch holds her love for him in a secret place in her heart. “Show me then. Your magic?” The snow billows around them, the ivory flakes descending upon her heavily-fanned lashes. When she breathes in, she exhales out–a spectral kiss, aimed straight into his soul.
He wants to cling to her like the last warmth in the winter mountains, like an acolyte to the feet of the priestess that might save his soul or damn him. Asterion doesn’t know which he wants - to fall and sin and lose all fear, or to be forgiven. Either way is absolution. It’s the tension between them that’s killing him.
The stallion does not want to speak of soft things, not with the heat of her skin against his and the bite of the cold stinging his eyes to tears. He can’t think of the stars without remembering the way they fell on the island, when he returned, and each light so violently and exquisitely extinguished felt like a little death. Even so, his expression softens when he thinks of Aridela.
“They came from my mother,” he says simply, and thinks of all the stars she bore - enough to make his look like a simple constellation.
But that mother, and those stars, and that sea, are all so far from him now they sing to him only in memory. And he pushes those memories away, roughly, when she presses the bone-white of her face against his with a whisper. It is difficult to picture her soft, even for a moment. He almost asks her what she would wish for; instead he only presses his teeth against her skin.
“So I’ve learned,” he says, low, and he would have begged her for those bloody kisses then. To mark him in scars and not stars, to leave his blood on the snow as proof he is something more than a dream or a dreamer.
The snow is beginning again; the clouds are creeping higher, swallowing the blue. Soon it will be cold enough to kill. His dark eyes far again to her sword; he wonders what she brought it for, what thing she hoped to slay this high above the world.
He could ask himself the same question.
“My magic,” he repeats, then withdraws enough to look at her. At once the wind finds the space between them and sets its fingers in. She is the most vivid thing in the world; he wants to lose himself in all that color. “Follow me, Euryale,” he says, and his smile is as brief as a breath of mist before he turns and winds further up the mountain, away from the precipice.
The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices
