I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
He’d asked her to meet him here, far from the eyes of the court, where the wind and sea covered all other sounds and where they’d stood before, years ago.
It isn’t guilt that keeps him out of the city (though of course he feels guilty, all that mixture of shame and grief and worry made a pearl in his heart long ago) but discretion. Thana had told him how long he’d been gone, and - it is too long. Too long for an explanation and amends, too long to upset lives and return to what was. Asterion is sorry, even as he’s relieved.
He is sorry, too, to listen to the gulls and hear no familiar voice among them. He wonders what became of Cirrus - if the bird is gone or only not listening for him anymore. Asterion has tried just once to reach down the bond between them, and had met the silence of a void and not a wall. He can’t watch them now, circling over the surf or diving low over the beach. Instead he watches the water, the endless roll of it, the push and pull and swell and fade.
It says nothing to him, for all its crash and hush, its whisper and roar. It had only ever been his own thoughts flung out and carried back to him, tumbled by waves and smoothed by sand, and even knowing this he still stares at the place where the water turns to whitecaps like he’s waiting for advice.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
When the letter first arrived, Marisol had not believed it was real. What fool would?
But the writing was his, with the same enviable slant of elegance it had always had; and it was his voice, too, the right words in the right order, so specifically his that even an artful forgery would not have been so convincing. The chances it was not real, then, were slim.
It had taken her a moment to process—a few slow blinks, a mouth half-opened in surprise so intense it made her stomach curl and bile rise into her mouth. (Thankfully the castle was mostly empty by then. The only one to see her caught in the nightmarish silent scream was a servant who knew better than to ask about it.)
Perhaps also damningly; the letter was brought by a gull. But not Cirrus. For a moment she had hoped, beyond hope, that with the king’s return his bonded would be brought back to the world of the living too. But the bird’s eyes were as empty as the rest of its flocks’, nothing more than admirably polished stones of basalt in a skull Marisol was overcome with the urge to crush.
But she had let it fly away, and did not follow it into the air.
The next morning Marisol is up at dawn, stiff and trembling with cyclonic emotion.
Rage, then relief—horror, then yearning—her feelings form Vespera’s perfect circle, a snake eating its own tail.
In the cold, pale light she slinks out from the citadel and into the town center. No one has quite risen yet; shops are still shuttered, fires only beginning to be lighted; the cadets on morning watch are still bleary-eyed and distracted by the too-slow thumping of their hearts. Then the streets spill out into the fields and then onto the cliffs, and though Mari’s step looks certain, each stride feels like it will be the one to plunge her down,
down,
down,
right into the core of the earth.
And when she sees him—just as he had looked before, not a scratch on the starry skin, not even the healed web of a broken bone—the plunging of her heart only grows faster and falls deeper and then the whole world is smooth black silk and her body-numbing lost pulse.
Mari stops sharply. Bluegrass rustles in the wind off the sea and scratches at her hocks.
In the silence, in the hard set of her mouth, in the furious cold gray of her gaze, there is only this to know:
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
The sound of her approach is lost to the sighing of the waves and the wind, and maybe Marisol hadn’t intended to be heard. Maybe she’d intended for him to turn, and catch her staring, and feel his heart curl like a fist at the slate he finds there.
It isn’t the first time - it’s far from it - that she’s been angry with him, or disappointed, and Asterion had steeled himself for those reactions now. But this feels different, worse than a gut-punch, worse than the sear of her spear along his side in a spar from another life. Worse than Thana, the first he’d seen, saying It was easier when you were gone. Do not find me again. He wonders if Marisol will say the same; she looks like she’s thinking it.
Is it such a sin, to have come back home? To be alive?
Asterion dips his head, and does not smile. But his eyes are as soft as the dawn-light, as dark as deep water, and where hers say nothing his say please.
“I am so sorry,” he says simply, after a long moment of silence where he waits for her to speak and knows she will not. “I never meant to leave.” Another pause; he wants to step nearer, to press his forehead to hers and to inhale the scent of her, which is so near the scent of home. He stays where he is, feeling the sea-foam cold around his hocks, feeling it pull the sand away from beneath his feet like its coaxing him to follow.
“Neither do I intend to…make things complicated for you. Or more complicated than I already have.” Almost, his lopsided half-smile emerges; his eyes still say please. The wind and cold and light fill the space between them and he wishes for her words, for her voice, no matter how frigid or hard or hurtful. “I don’t want it widely known that I’m…returned. And I hear that Novus is seeing its first true peace in years. That Terrastella is prospering under its queen.” Asterion wants to say that he is both grateful and proud, but he knows that would risk sounding condescending. He wants to say forgive me, but he never will.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
He looks—he looks—
Just the same. Just like the boy she’d loved. The one she’d missed like a phantom limb, whom she sees now with a hallucinatory clarity: the same eyes, dark-wet and shining like stones at the bottom of a river; the same tousled, blackish hair, the same look on his face, half plaintive and half guilty; the same thin star on his head, a sliver of moonlight, a coldly white spilling of starshine like runoff from a creek, Vespera’s halfhearted attempt at marking the site of a Judas kiss.
Mari swallows. Her jaw tightens; her teeth grind. Perhaps, she thinks (not without a tight twinge of guilt in her stomach) this would all be easier if he had the decency to come back broken, at least bruised, and let her pretend that he had suffered, too. What a sick thing to think. What a terrible way to feel. She can’t breathe through the iron weight that sits heavy on her chest and the pressure it places on her already-struggling lungs. Every inhale feels like the unfortunate grit of breathing in sand. Her eyes sting with the salt of tears, the wind coming off the ocean, the part of her that wishes—
he had never, would never, come back at all.
In her ears there is the rush-and-howling of a cold, sharp breeze, the throbbing, humming sound of her blood rising like a tide. When he says I am so sorry she almost cannot hear it. When he says I am so sorry, the sound of Marisol’s pain—a sound unbearably close to the noise of a struggling heartbeat, a throbbing pulse, a constant, unwavering blood-ache—nearly drowns it out.
I wish it would have, she thinks, and every inch of her feels raw, raw, raw. Cut open and doused in saltwater.
I don’t want it widely known that I’m…returned, Asterion says, and the Commander flinches visibly, harder than she can ever remember turning away from the point of a spear or the edge of a blade. Her whole body tightens like a wire. And I hear that Novus is seeing its first true peace in years. That Terrastella is prospering under its queen.
Oh. That stings. It should be a compliment (Marisol’s eyes water). It should feel good, validating, the kind of proof-of-goodness she has been chasing since childhood. But instead it feels like failure—condescension—the pinprick of a knife twisted deep into the chest and turning, turning, turning.
And in a way that is as unlike her as anything can be, Mari’s voice breaks in half when she begs: “What do you want, Asterion? Not to be widely known—that you’re alive. So you’ve come home,” she says, her tone half angry and half heartbroken, “just to leave again? Leave—me again?”
Now it is her turn for those gray eyes to say please, please, please.
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
He sees her throat move in a swallow and feels as though he’s watching her ready for a swing. How many times have they leveled with each other with the sea alongside them, or the stars overhead, or a pitted battlefield between? And still he can’t read her, not between the whispers of his hopes and the gnawing of his fears, and the mist that begins to rise then is not all the ocean’s doing. It might be funny, if he’d even noticed; it’s been a long time since he’s had such a loose grip on his magic.
There is so much to tell her (there were so many monsters in that world, Marisol, and so many wonders) and to warn her (Commander, we need to watch the island - it isn’t right, it’s too much like where I was) and to ask her (oh, my friend, do you think it’s possible to meet Death? For something happened to me that I don’t understand). But his tongue is a deer tangled in wire, and hers is a stone, and when she bodily flinches his heart does the same.
Now there are tears silvering his own eyes, more saltwater for the sea. And at last she speaks, in a voice he never imagined could have come from her, in a way that makes him wish - oh, he wishes -
(Sometimes he dreams of walking into the sea, further out and further out until there is no land, only sky and water, and letting it at last close up over him in salt-brine embrace. He wonders if that was what waited beyond the door of the water-death, the inevitable door in the not-dream where Death told him to choose..)
“That has always been my failure - the things I want. I want everyone whole, everyone safe, everyone happy. I want to walk away for eternity, always over the next hill; I want to stay in Terrastella until I grow roots like a mountain. And whatever I choose it is a betrayal of something or someone else, or of some other part of myself.” He blows out a harsh breath, aware of how petulant it sounds, how self-pitying. It isn’t how he means it; he’s only trying to explain the tension that’s lived inside him since he was a boy, the tide-pull of dreaming and duty.
“I failed you, Marisol. And this is home, it has always been home - which is why I want to learn the rest of Novus. In all my years here I have hardly set foot out of earshot of the sea, I have never seen Viride or the Mors. There is so much I need to understand if I’m ever to…” he trails off like a wave to foam, unsure of what he was going to say. Maybe it was belong, maybe to lead again. In the face of her anguish everything he says only sounds like an excuse; had he thought he could simply explain? Oh, Marisol, the magic island broke Flora’s time-cutting dagger and we were stuck in the place she was born for a family reunion; have you ever seen a world decaying? The moral of the story is still: he left for a year and the world went on without him.
Asterion’s gaze has dropped to the churn of water at his feet. He swallows, clears his throat, lifts his chin to meet her eyes again, and when he forces his voice to be more than a whisper it emerges low and rough, a confession. “I’m too ashamed to face them. I’m afraid they’ll look at me like -”
like you are. He doesn’t say it, doesn’t need to; it’s there in the plaintive lines of his face, the grieving-dark eyes.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” he finishes softly.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
Tension builds inside Marisol’s body. A knot of thorns rises and falls in tandem with her breath; it scrapes the soft spot just between two ribs and prickles there with faint pain. Her throat is dead-plant, desert-sand dry, no matter how much she swallows or attempts to filter the grit between her teeth, no matter how deep she breathes, and it makes the cool wetness of the air coming off the sea feel like a personal mocking. Take it, says the world. The thing you need is right here—take it. And she can’t.
Has she become softer or sharper? Warmer or colder? It is impossible to decide between the urge to curl her mouth into a snarl or a somber frown, impossible to decide which is stronger—the relief that he is alive, alive, alive—the bitter, deeply hurtful disappointment that he has no excuse for being thought dead.
And that confusion only grows deeper and more painful when she sees the shine of tears in his eyes. If this is an expression she’s ever seen him wear before, it must have only been once or twice. His gaze shimmers like moonlight on water; and when Marisol realizes that it is the patina of tears making his dark eyes glint so bright, she is almost sick. Nauseated. The muscles wound into tense knots. She feels ripped in half at the spine, between wanting to wipe those tears away and wishing they would fall faster.
Doesn’t he deserve it? Shouldn’t he suffer? Anselm’s voice breaks suddenly into her head, and for the first time she can remember it is tinged with appalment. Who made you judge and jury, Marisol?
Since when are you a god?
Some disgruntled part of her wants to argue that she always has been; at least that’s what the evidence points to. And it might be that Anselm feels the thought anyway, an acid feeling that sinks through the length of their bond and attempts to dissolve it. But Marisol holds her tongue. Her oldest talent.
I want—says Asterion. But his voice fades out before he can finish the sentence, his speech made into static by the buzzing of the Marisol’s blood.
I want, he says again. And again it passes through her without any impact whatsoever.
He wants and wants and wants, these things that Marisol cannot process or acknowledge, drowned as she is by the weight of her awkward, nearly childish rage. Perhaps the most frightening part is that she looks unscathed. Irritated, certainly, but also cold and stone-stoic. Less outwardly furious than disgusted. She runs her tongue around her teeth, tastes salt and blood and bile.
And a little laugh escapes, a single rough breath, disappointed to the extent of sounding sick. “Then how can I be mad?” she responds bluntly. “We all want things. That is the nature of living. I only assumed you were smart enough to understand that the nature of living is not the same as its responsibilities.”
Her mouth settles into a dull line.
“I gave you too much credit.” And then, acridly, tight with bitter mocking: “Forgive me.”
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
He had thought they’d known each other better.
He wonders if it is the change in her, the teeth of the kelpie that makes her so cold - but no, no, she has always been slate, sharp and gray as the tip of her spear whose scar he still wears. It would be easier, to think it isn’t truly her that looks at him with those eyes, with that mouth that twists, with that laugh -
Asterion hates that laugh, and the line her mouth shapes afterward. It is tempting to focus on these things, to compare them to all the other expressions he’s seen her wear (and disappointment has been among them before; that is nothing new between them), instead of listening to what she says. But her words are barbs, and what else can he give her but his attention? He owes her so much.
The words strike him like stones, though he doesn’t flinch. Inwardly, though, they are driving him back to the sea; there is cold foam on his hocks, his knees, his chest and throat. Inwardly, he is being buried by I only assumed you were smart enough…
It is a good thing he doesn’t know how much of this is still ahead of him, how much heart he still has to be bruised, how much shame he must swallow like bile, because if he knew he might have gone back to the island. Back to that creation-dust world, watching things die and be reborn, waiting to be struck by a falling star, or swallowed up by a monster. Only a fool would go on, would smile sadly like he is smiling now, looking at her with his eyes dark like smooth wet stones pulled from the bottom of the river.
Forgive me. She’s taken the words he wanted to say, has turned them on him - and she must know what it will do to him, what it is doing; the knowing is there in her voice.
All he’d given her was an honest answer. He wishes it would have been the right one instead, the thing that would unlock her, soften her expression, pull them together like a mending thread. He wishes she would have asked what happened, instead of that accusation that posed as a question (what do you want?)
But if there is an answer to this, it’s clear he’ll have to find it on his own. And why should it be any different? It isn’t her responsibility. He has given her enough of those already.
Something in him says, stay and fight. But Asterion doesn’t know what he would be fighting for, and anyway he’s always been better at letting go, and there is not a battle with Marisol that he knows how to win.
And so he smiles a tight, terrible smile, as a thick fog rolls in from the sea. “That’s your misjudgment. I’ve never hidden my mistakes, not that you’d let me, anyway.” He pauses, touches his tongue to the back of his teeth. “But I was right, to believe in you.” Almost he says goodbye, but it would be too much, a bad joke. Instead he only nods, and turns away, and vanishes into the mist and the growing thunder of the surf, which contains all the feeling he doesn’t know how to express.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
Mari knows this cannot end well.
She can feel it—the stomach-turning knowledge that all these years of friendship are sliding to what feels like a close, a rock sitting in the pit of her chest, pulling her down to the pits of Hell. It hurts. It hurts in a dull, aching way that promises long-term insistence. It hurts; not like an open cut but like a broken bone, an injury that years from now is still likely to pulse and ache.
Her chest drums with dark-blue pain. A heartbeat twice as large and intense as it should be, beating with tight fists at her chest until it feels sore, and breathing begins to take manual effort. Mari clenches her jaw until it throbs; and her whole face grows numb with the pressure her sharp teeth place on one another to keep back the words that threaten to spill out of her like blood spat from the mouth of a pit fighter.
The world narrows to a pinpoint. Asterion is at the end of a long, long tunnel, and he is fading away faster every second they stare at each other. His features melt into one another. He slips into the background, his eyes blurring into his skin and his skin blurring into the grass, and by the time Marisol blinks—furiously, beating away the sting of salt and wind—she almost can’t remember what he looks like, though he’s standing right in front of her.
The world narrows to a pinpoint. Abruptly it falls away on either side, shoving Marisol backward, warping into a poorly-made wind tunnel, and she stands frozen into a world distended from its realistic proportions. Mountainous trees. Flowers the size of boulders. Rivers that rise up and arc back to the ground without spilling. What sky is this that stretches into one long streak of blue and white and starshine, that tears the constellations apart at their seams, melts the sun into a pool of ichor?
I was right to believe in you.
Marisol’s heart stops.
Every cell in her body jostles anxiously for attention; but she cannot (and would not) do anything but watch as he disappears, swallowed by the fog like Isra’s boat.
“No, you weren’t,” she mutters, and turns the other way.
![[Image: ddg6quy-9d15dab5-339c-4b09-8b57-20a99fda...jvUop12efQ]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/c175b84a-409b-40aa-8b86-49ed65b989ee/ddg6quy-9d15dab5-339c-4b09-8b57-20a99fda550e.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2MxNzViODRhLTQwOWItNDBhYS04Yjg2LTQ5ZWQ2NWI5ODllZVwvZGRnNnF1eS05ZDE1ZGFiNS0zMzljLTRiMDktOGI1Ny0yMGE5OWZkYTU1MGUucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.j-t9RuUsmMyaVL-O1rvZqbyyPYdOvtjHLjvUop12efQ)
