The sun dipped low as Raymond and Asterion crossed back into Terrastellan territory, their shadows grown long in their wake like obedient, stilt-legged wraiths. The copper stallion's customary swagger lacked its usual smoothness and he made no effort to hide the hitches in his step as he tested the limits of his bruised chest. There was no shame in acknowledging a blow well struck.
And there was no way in hell he was going to waste the energy it would cost him to conceal it merely for the sake of his pride. Raymond was not so delicate as that.
When he stopped walking, the open prairie lay before them like a sea of sunkissed gold and the forested border was behind. What he felt for Sussuro Fields fell far short of fondness: its relentlessly open spaces drew a funereal shroud of artificial silence that each errant chirp and syllable struggled in vain to fill like water through a kitchen strainer. It seemed like a place made for dying.
Was that bias talking?
Raymond swiveled his head toward the star-marked boy. His expression surrendered none of this, comfortably straddling the line between serenity and boredom that inspires in some the desire to be interesting and in others the desire to be brief. His eyes glinted with sunset fire - those, at least, were alive and engaged in the moment. His tail twitched as he chewed on his own consideration. To business, then.
"It's a long way here from Velius," he said, perhaps surprisingly jumping straight past an appraisal of their recent performance to sink his teeth into the heart of things, "with an interesting story to match, I bet. I'd love to hear it."
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@Asterion
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
05-09-2018, 04:57 AM - This post was last modified: 05-27-2018, 01:20 AM by Raymond
Once, his shadow had not been so obedient. After the maze, after the magic, it had been as a living thing, bunching and stretching around him, forming strange shapes. Lions and lambs, dragons and birds. Images in stories he knows no ending to.
It is a rare part of Ravos that he does not miss.
Now, it stretches thin behind him as if reluctant to return. He is content to walk slowly, to let his mind wander beyond the burn of his scraped leg, the weariness in his bones. Unlike Raymond, he finds comfort in the wide stretch of plain, the grasses sighing gold in the gathering dark, the field swallows that darted swift as fish. It had been here, after all, that Florentine had first stumbled upon him, grinning ear to ear and soaked to the skin.
Neither of them had the weight of any responsibility, then. They were only children.
The chestnut’s voice shakes him from his memories, and Asterion glances toward him, his eyes dark and far away. For a long moment he does not reply, only considers – all the things he has heard of the rift-lands. All the stories he has missed. Once he would have thought it blood and glory, but he is older now.
“Not so interesting as yours,” he says at last, and lets his gaze slip back to the horizon. It is as familiar as any of those places in Ravos; they had never truly been home. That, perhaps, is something he would do well to remember. “I waited too long to leap. When I did, it took me here. It was Florentine who found me first.” He had thought it coincidence for so long – what were the chances, that he should be discovered by his half-sister, a woman who knew well of Karou, of Calliope? But now he wonders if it wasn’t chance at all.
But Asterion has never liked the idea of fate. It feels little better than gods.
Though the red stallion dismissed the idea of coincidence out of hand, neither did he ascribe to such weak-willed wishes as fate. How low must a creature fall to give itself to the wills of unseen strangers, to be blown from one crossroads to the next like a tumbleweed in the wind? There would be no hands plotting the course of Raymond's life but his own. Fate could fuck right off.
But if there is neither coincidence nor fate, whence cometh those quirky little windfalls, the stars that aligned seemingly at random? In those uncertainties walk the scientists of the world.
As Asterion spoke Raymond pivoted around to better face him, weight shifted to his left haunch. "And Florentine is what, some kind of queen here?" he replied. The words seemed incredulous, though his tone told a more nuanced tale. Raymond respected the flower child for the aid she had offered in saving Ruth's life - or at least postponing her death, as cruel reality would have it - with no expectation of reward. Such magnanimity was rare in his circles, and he marked it well when he saw it. But she was exactly that - a child - and the salvation of a hundred Ruths would not have convinced him that a butterfly still damp from the chrysalis should sit upon a throne with the sharpened sword of Damocles suspended above her head through every waking moment.
It was enough to ruin even great people.
But this was not Raymond's kingdom and these were not his ways. If they called Florentine their queen, then his disapproval would not spare her from the sword.
Speaking of the sword...
"And if she's a queen...." Raymond's tail arced like a red serpent past his right shoulder, its blade aimed squarely at Asterion's face. As before, he pulled it up short - but only just. "What does that make you?"
He was not the kindest teacher.
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@Asterion
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
05-10-2018, 02:57 AM - This post was last modified: 05-13-2018, 05:20 PM by Raymond
“Yes,” he answers, remembering well his own surprise at the series of discoveries his first week here. “There are four courts in Novus – Dusk, Dawn, Day and Night. Each has a sovereign. The previous queen abdicated a year ago, the week I arrived, and named Florentine in her place.” He might have gone on speaking, had not Raymond already known Flora, or had his own surprise – a year here, how strange, how wrong – not caught him off guard.
Or had the chestnut not himself continued, in word and in deed.
Asterion freezes the moment he catches the lash of red in his peripheral vision, throwing up his faint telekinesis like a hand to block what he could. It does not end up being necessary, but as his pulse feathers along his throat and his dark-eyed gaze slides to the other stallion’s, he promises himself that one day he will have a defense for such a weapon.
He will not be weak forever. He cannot afford it, and neither can this court.
Ever so slightly he inclines his head toward Raymond, and then he begins to walk again, keeping his lips a firm dark line despite the way his heart races.
“Responsible,” he says, and there is a weariness in his voice that is far older than his five years. No longer did this all seem a grand adventure. “Flora named me her regent. But there is still so much here I don’t understand, and we are all so young.” He does not only mean himself and his sister; he thinks now of Israfel, of Cyrene. Of all of them, trying to be wise.
But then he glances back at the stallion, set aflame by the sunset, and there is something hungry (greedy, almost) in his gaze. It is there in his voice, too, though the volume is still soft. “What was it really like – the riftlands?”
All thoughts of crowns and kingdoms are pushed down, for once. He is a boy again, and his mind is full of time worn down, and worlds that changed like weather, and monsters –
Raymond wagged the bladed tip of his tail against Asterion's telekinetic block like a parent's scolding finger, taking full advantage of the pause that his surprise attack inspired to squeeze a combat lesson into the midst of the conversation. "Spoiler alert: flinching will not keep this thing from cutting your eye out - so don't do it. You were so worried about your pretty face back there that you lost sight of the real threat."
The tail blade may as well have been an agitated serpent as it fell away in a looping arc.
Not that Raymond was irritated. He appreciated the chance to stretch his legs and make good on an arrangement long overdue, appreciated more the chance to get familiar with Asterion and Terrastella afterward. But the red stallion's bearing, like his tail, was always sharp and often unpredictable.
He fell back into step with the star-marked bay, at once the respectfully attentive listener as Asterion unloaded his private insecurities. He wasn't wrong - they did all sound yong, Florentine especially, but rarely in Raymond's experience were the weightiest decisions allowed to fall onto the most qualified shoulders. If there existed a great dungeonmaster in the sky, it must delight in presenting challenges for which the party was ill-equipped.
What hope had a third-level wizard against a mindflayer?
Asterion's thoughts turned toward the Riftlands. The red stallion pursed his lips, struggling with ways to describe a land that could honestly only be written as the last desperate fever-dreams of a mad god's dying brain. Nothing was certain, nothing was fixed, and everything was as likely to kill you as not. Fear and fatigue were far deadlier enemies than the infection ever was, but that insidious malice had been an ever-present threat in itself. Nobody got out of the Rift unscathed.
"It was hell," he replied blandly, "of a most degenerative sort. You cannot outmaneuver sickness and you cannot strategize in a world that changes with the wind. Calliope may delight in hunting monsters, but I know a lost cause when I see one."
Raymond glanced his way. "If we're lucky, it will tear itself apart in peace and leave the rest of us the hell alone."
His tail twitched as though readying itself for another swing.
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
You lost sight of the real threat, Raymond says, but Asterion thinks the red stallion is wrong.
There is no part of the man that is not a threat, no side of him that Asterion would want to tangle with, no part that bladed tail could not reach. Almost the bay says so, but he knows this a lesson and he does not want it to be his last.
He will be a good student, eyes that watch and ears that hear, a mind that considers all that it is taught.
They walk together through the swaying grasses as the golden light grows thicker and birds begin to wing their way home. The regent does not consider whether he should be laying his thoughts so bare before the warrior; the red is a piece of his old life, almost a friend, and Asterion is still sometimes made a fool by the stars in his eyes. He should have learned, after Reichenbach, to be more careful.
He should know better, too, than to feel the little trill that goes through him at the sound of the unicorn’s name. Hell, Raymond names it, but Asterion has never had a head for strategizing, and has never had opportunity to outmaneuver.
Almost he tells his companion that he feels better at surviving than planning. That he wishes he had gone to the rift, instead.
But Raymond’s words are clipped like the firm closing of a book, and there is nothing soft in the glance that catches him then. The bay only nods, considering the idea that the rift might reach this place. It is a possibility he had not considered – but then, Florentine had never spoken of the dangers of the rift. Only the wonder of it. “Then I hope we’re lucky,” he says finally, and turns his gaze away once more, ignoring the disquiet that stirs in him.
He is no less hungry for stories, but he knows of other tellers.
Yet there are other things to be learned, though they do not quicken his blood in quite the same way. Ahead of them, lines that were never natural break the horizon, solemn stacks of stone. Asterion is not sure if he is ready to be home, to wash the dust and tension from his muscles.
“What would you have done, in my position?” he asks, referring not only to the battle that left them bruised and sweat-slick but to the smaller lesson only moments before. “How would you defend against a man like yourself?”
It would be difficult to categorize how Raymond felt about Asterion - or about anyone, for that matter. Friendship was a luxury he'd not been able to afford for a long time, and no sooner had he indulged himself in the companionship of an innocent, defenseless kitten than reality saw fit to strip that from him. Suddenly the isolation previously enforced by necessity seemed like the only logical lifestyle choice, but the red stallion also understood he could hardly get on in a place like this on his own.
In essence, he didn't want friends but needed them anyway, which made the whole ordeal of sending holiday cards even more of a drag than usual.
Thus his professorial aggressiveness truly came from a desire to help. Asterion was an attentive and eager learner, if lacking in self-confidence, and Raymond could appreciate his desire to try even when he seemed happy to admit he was well out of his depth as regent of Terrastella.
How would you defend against a man like yourself? he asked, and Raymond chuckled in spite of himself.
There was a reason the rendari had little love for such encumberances as battle armor. He patted the bay stallion lightly on the flank with the flat of his blade as he veered toward Tinea Swamp - a gesture of fraternal warmth among his kind that probably just seemed vaguely threatening to anyone else - and shrugged his amusement at the question.
"Me? I wouldn't bother trying."
And with that he took his leave to continue exploring, leaving Asterion to finish his trek back to the distant court with his own thoughts for company.
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
The sound of Raymond’s laugh is a warm, friendly thing, and Asterion surprises himself by how glad he is to hear it – how proud, almost. It makes him wonder if it is how a son might feel.
The feeling does not last long.
His skin wants to shiver beneath the touch of the warrior’s tail-blade the way it would under a fly, but Asterion does not let it. Instead he only smiles at the red man, though it feels weary and faint, and waits for response.
Me? I wouldn’t bother trying.
At this a black-trimmed ear twitches, and the bay raises a brow. But he says nothing as Raymond pulls ahead, parting the long and waving grasses around him and grows small in the distance, redder even than the sunset.
For a long moment he only stands and watches, feeling the tension in his jaw, the way his muscles ache after their spar. And then he shakes his head, and sighs, and makes his slow way home with his head full of thoughts and his body of bruises.
