For once he does not let the anchor of his duty keep him home; for once he closes his thoughts even to Cirrus and ranges out, alone, the way he once used to every night.
Once such solitude had only given him time to tell himself stories of all the deeds he would accomplish, and an aching-sweet kind of loneliness, the kind that came always with youth and folly. Now it grants him a kind of peace, and for that he is grateful.
He had not expected to come across anything strange; only himself and the sky spread above him, a map of stars he has once more learned to read. But it is daylight still, daylight that makes bare the trail before him of broken and dead things, blackened by some unknown touch. Asterion shivers in the summer light, and pauses to trace his muzzle just above clover like ash, and then continues.
Now he is hunting, too.
Even so he does not expect the pool. Does not expect the brightness of it that sings against his eyelids even when he closes them tight; does not expect the firebirds that arc overhead and sing like no other creatures he knows. Most of all he does not expect the way that this strange pool reacts to him - not to his water-magic, but to something like his blood.
When he tries to shape it, tries to raise it, it seems to laugh at him and spill away as through his fingers - but even so it is laughing I know you, I know you. The mystery is enough to make him draw nearer yet -
and that is when he sees the girl.
She breaks from the golden pool like a new god birthed of ichor, dark crimson with the wet; he recognizes her at once from the meeting, but it is that deeper recognition - the lightning stripe that cleaves her narrow face, the scythe of her tail - that has him catch his breath and hold it. I know you, I know you, sings his blood like the water, but Asterion will not go in.
He has heard enough tales of the riftlands, and he has always listened to those well.
Be careful! he wants to cry, but what harm there may be has surely already been done, and he remembers the way she had looked at him, at the meeting. Like he was no stranger but an enemy.
And so he says nothing, and only watches, and disobeys the way the water begs him just to touch, just to taste.
king of dusk.
@Thana | notes: a response to her random event post
The water feels both cool and hot as it coos and frets at her skin. Her horn feels like a kiss of wind between her eyes when the water starts to carry that weight of that sword made of bone. Here in the deep, with light flashing strange memories underneath her closed eyes, she feels like something more.
Thana feels like magic, like a star sinking through the ocean like a stone, flaking off bits of wishes as it drowns.
This water cools her fury in brightness and she lingers below the surface like a lamb lingers in dewy, sinking sunlight. Her lungs start to burn and ache. Her tail lashes at dead weeds until blooms of decay rise up around her like the air bubbling out from her lungs. Still she does not leave the water, not until her body convulses with a warning that death has spotted her and is coming.
And so she rises, knowing instinctively that she is not done searching and so she cannot let the light wash away all the jagged pieces of her.
The ground slopes upward as she walks back up the slick, black shore. The stones still crumble to dust when she walks across them. Thana only notices the stallion, the way his edges blur where they suggest the night-sky instead of form. Before the lion of purpose starts to take her she wonders if he too is made of broken pieces glued back into something that resembles life.
Thana wonders if there is anyone in the world like her. If anyone else looks at him and feels a beast of hunger dragging claws across their bones as if they are nothing more than the bars of rusty cage. She wonders if, when she draws closer, anything but fury will pour from her teeth when she opens her mouth.
The space still yawns out between them when she stops. Parts of her are afraid to get too close, other parts whisper to her how easily her horn might sink though flesh and stardust. She doesn't know where either of those parts comes from. “I know you.” There is rust on her voice, rust and a low ozone purr.
She doesn't know if her soul sings of him because she's seen him once before, or if it sings because the magic wants her to close the distance between them. She doesn't move, only stands there watching him with tears of light falling from her horn like drops of blood falling from a mortal wound.
If he had not seen her at the meeting, if their eyes had not met (hers so cutting, so bright) then he would think her a dream as she walks up and out of the water.
It streams from her like molten gold and he thinks again of something being born, of something beginning. Even for his recognition he is not sure that this is not a vision, some fever-illusion that the unnatural steam off the water has given him. In his head echo all of Florentine’s stories from the Rift: pools like this that gifted or cursed, and forest glades full of silent stone animals, and always monsters - monsters with riddles, monsters with songs, monsters like anything else with teeth and hunger.
(Which is she?)
Asterion does nothing to close the space between them. He is glad and sorry for the grasses that whisper between their feet, for the breeze that does nothing to tremble their shadows. He is too busy trying to place her, and failing; all the parts of her add up to a picture he hasn’t seen yet. Maybe it was shown to him, once, while he slept.
She smells like ozone, like hot metal, like the beginnings of death. Asterion startles at the sound of her voice, a rusty blade against his throat. Still, he is bold enough when he meets her eyes. “Why?” he asks, and it is less eager than desperate, though it is soft enough not to startle the little-phoenixes from their flight.
He wonders again if he is dreaming, looking not at the light and gold of magic that clings to her but the carved path of lightning on her face and her neck, at the half-moon scythe on her tail. “Why do you look like-” my friends, he almost says.
But if Calliope and Raymond were ever his friends (he is not so sure, when he thinks of them) that is not a word he would use for them any more. The bay shakes his head like he might clear it, but when he looks up again she is still there, the pool behind her bright enough he has to avert his eyes.
There is a part of him that wants to touch every piece of her he recognizes, and a part that wants to run, and a part that longs with the thirst of a dying man to close the distance between them and drink the last drops of golden water from her horn. But there is something in her eyes cautioning him that to do any of these things would spell his death.
“Who are you?” he asks instead, the question like a ripple of that golden water, and Asterion arches his neck so that his chin hovers near his chest, as though he knows she hunts his heart.
She is a million different pieces standing before him and a hundred blood-white drops of water. Each piece is a hollowed out spiral of bone, blood and flesh. Each sings in her like the wind and the water make music from her horn. Each pieces hurts a little, like glass dragged across stone, when she starts to close the distance between them.
Every blade of grass that touches her dies, melted down to black rot and decay. The sharp shard of her that is mortal hunger sobs and cries in her chest. It's a silent death knell of wanting and hunger. Thana wants sweet grass and water made of light to flood the dry desert of her throat. She wants fury and blood and the pieces of his body broken beneath her like dead, bright leaves.
But when he says why all she can do is lift her eyes with her horn casting shadows across her like the base of a cross. There is nothing in the world that she wants more than the word that comes after why. She wants it more than rage and grass. She wants it more than death. Thana would happily pluck the words out from his skin if it meant that she could know. “Who.” The word is more the demand of lighting through a black sky than it is a question.
“Who do I look like?” The grass keeps dying under her hooves and the light keeps dripping from the hollows of her horn like blood. Soon the distance is smaller between them and her eyes are bright enough to be small, amethyst flames in those deep shadows cast by her horn and her hair. The gemstone on her brow makes a tapping sound when she impatiently tosses her dead like a lion.
All those pieces of her are still grinding like glass on stone and she quivers with pain, hunger and fury.
She almost tells him that she is Thana. But with all those words that might come after why she's not sure who she is anymore. All she's sure of is that she is hungry and that there is some brightness in her eyes she needs to wish on like a star and like bright water.
Thana doesn't even notice how he protects his heart like she's the monster and he the light.
It takes him a moment to notice the way that everything she touches withers away to black.
For at first there is nothing for him but the carving of white along her face, a pattern he wants to trace - and the amethyst of her eyes, so like and unlike his sister’s - and the spiral of her horn which points and points at him.
At last his gaze drops to her feet, which whisper over the dawn-light grass and burn it like parchment. Asterion cannot guess whether it is the pool that is doing it, dropping golden and deadly from her hocks and her leonine tail, or if it is her own magic, wicked and poisonous. He is not sure which would be worse - that sick magic has come to Novus, or that some new reaper has, wearing a body so familiar to him.
Still he does not back away, though it would be the only wise thing to do. Her question keeps him rooted, and her eyes, and the need in them both to know.
“You look like the unicorn Calliope, with lightning on your skin,” he tells her. “You look like the warrior Raymond - you wear his blade on your tail.”
Now she is close; now he can smell the dead grass, a whiff of decay thick and too sweet on the summer air. It is not the smell of the pool at all, and Asterion wonders why he is not afraid - he knows he should be, he is wise enough for that. But ah! Maybe it is because of what he realizes, with a sureness like a sun, even as it draws up a thousand other questions that catch in his throat like burrs and burn on his tongue like a mouthful of golden water from a god’s pool.
“You are from the rift.”
He does not ask her Why have you come? the way he might have, once - for he knows more of how the magic works, now. It does not seem like much of a guess to think that she was taken, and not sent. But there is another question that he has no answer for.
He asks it without trembling, the way she does despite the golden heat, and he asks it without taking his gaze from her own, bright and needful as it is, like watching a dying star. “Why do you look at me that way?” Like you want my death.
Lightning rises in her marrow at the word. It's small sparks of light that lick at her soul like water and like death, cold and violent. There is a storm in her, a tangle of why, and who, and then why, why, why. It swirls in eddies of light and hunger and her body quivers with the unbidden though that there might be something in his blood to douse the fire made of light and fury. The grass rots out in circles around her, patterns of blackness that hold no meaning she can understand.
But oh, there is a meaning in his stardust gaze and in her own purple bright eyes that meet him fiercely (and a little lost). “It's not his tail now.” She swings it like a whip at her side and petals fall below her blade like drops of wishes made of blood instead of seed. It soothes something in her, that small death, although Thana could not say what it is that has been soothed. Only that it has.
There is still this space between them, broken up with shadows and the tip of her horn. She wants to ask him what the rift is. She wants to ask him what he knows of all these thing dancing endlessly in her. Anything at all would be more than she knows (and all she knows is hunger and wanting). But in the end that black rot magic rises up in her like a sickness and she take a step towards him.
She wants to say, I am the rift, but she doesn't know where those words came from so she only swallows them back down. Thana knows nothing of the rift but brightness and ceaseless running. She says nothing about it when she draws near enough to taste the dusk and sweet grass rising from his skin like smoke.
They each burn like the pool of light did not.
In the end she only cocks her head at him, like a strange vulture of a bird, and cleaves the air with a little of that furious storm in her chest. “Because it's the only way I know how to look at you.” That beast of want rises in her along with the sorrow. She wants to taste the darkness on his skin so that she might have something other than death and rot on her lips. Thana wants to drink his heart and learn each secret his form has left to give.
And when she watches him, wanting and starving, she thinks that this is what dying must feel like-- the need to love and destroy everything in the world.
“No,” he agrees softly, “It is not.” And he thinks of the slap of the flat edge of Raymond’s blade against him, or the whine as it tasted the air and asked for something more.
It is the same sound that her tail makes when she uses it like a scythe and Asterion glances away from her to watch the heads of the flowers fall. He wonders why they are dead, and he thinks of Florentine’s petals drifting like dead leaves, and he imagines (it is not so difficult to imagine) what that blade might feel like, cutting into him instead, tasting blood instead of sap.
He does not want to wonder if that would please her, or if her expression would change at all if it happened. It makes his magic begin to stir inside him, a rising tide that he whispers down as she steps nearer, and nearer yet.
Asterion still has not decided whether it is the water drying from her or the unicorn herself that carries death like a long veil around her. He is not quite sure why to look at her, dark red as old blood against the gold behind and the long evening light, makes his heart beat like it is dying, too, fierce and brave in his chest but losing, oh, each tick numbered.
Their breath is caught and kept between them; the king forgets the rot at her feet and the gods-pool behind her and when his gaze finds hers again his shows the same sorrow, the same want. He wants to know everything she knows of the rift, ever monster and every piece of magic shifting like fish-scales in sunlight, like scattered drops of golden water. And yet each thing he learns is another thing that can someday be lost.
“Do you want to learn another way?” he asks, soft and bold as sunlight through fog, and slowly reaches to touch her.
He reaches out to touch her. Thana doesn't know if she should let him. Her horn still wants to crown itself with his heart. Her hooves still want to sink like a prayer into his skin. The beast in her bones wants him, it wants to bathe itself in blood and fury until there is nothing in the world for her but the taste of the dusk king on her lips.
But she wants him to touch her too. There is so much wondering in her-- a sea of it, a storm of it. Thana wants to know if she can feel anything but fury and sorrow. She wonders if all the stardust on him is a constellation of hope. Thana wonders if he knows enough about the rift and unicorns to save her.
She still doesn't know if she wants to be saved. Or if she wants this fury to wash over her like wave until she's drowning in the deep black of it.
He's still coming closer in inches and breaths tainted by the sorrow between them. Thana still feels like a stone on a hill, leaning on the hill ready to fall down in a storm wind. She still feels like her horn should wear a crown. Every inch of her feels full and hollow and she wants to explode with the weight of their emotions (or maybe it's only her emotions running wild in the space between them).
The king touches her, black and twilight cool. She shivers.
Thana trembles as finely as sand in an earthquake. Her bones ache and feel like steel and stone trapped beneath skin that is too fragile to hold all their weight and sharp edges. Only her heart moves inside her. It's beating loud as a war-drum over a fresh graveyard. It hurts, that heavy beating of her heart, and she thinks that surely he must be able to hear all the songs of war singing, singing, singing this flesh of hers.
“Yes.” She says in that war song and her teeth look like dull marble in the darkness of her lips when she bites back the fury and the sorrow. Thana wants to tell him that she is looking at him like he's a corpse. But she's looking at him like salvation too, like the fire and the flood and all the things that wipe clean the darkness.
“More than anything.” She touches him back, and it's a kiss full of dull marble teeth beneath lips sweeter than death.
There is a moment, when he is still a breath away from her, when there is nothing between them but air as taut as a wire, air that seems to hum, where he wonders if she will kill him.
He has seen what it is like, a unicorn with her horn leveled, though he has never had such a blade pointed at his own heart. This creature, she is different than even Calliope - feral and strange, a wild bird he’s never seen before. Oh, and when has he ever hoped to tame such a girl? She is a storm and he is the sea and when two such things meet there is only fury.
And then he is touching her, and he forgets all of these things.
Instead there is only the scent of her, sweet-death and ozone, and the trembling of lightning caught. There is a little of that god-water that still trickles down her cheek from her wet and curling mane and this he tastes, and is surprised (and not at all surprised) to find it tastes of nothing at all.
When she speaks - yes - his eyes fall closed. It is relief that washes him then, that loosens his heart from where it had been a clenched fist in his chest. All at once the day is golden again, and warm.
Asterion sighs as her lips ghost across his own skin, and he forgets (foolish boy!) that she might yet hold his death in her eyes, whether she wants it or no. Now there are only his questions, numerous as the stars on his dusky skin, and how hungry he is to see himself the way she does, like somebody with answers.
“Tell me your name,” he whispers, “tell me what I am to call you.”
For Asterion knows, no matter what she is and what chill promises her eyes sing, what death clings to her and falls from her like drops of golden water, that he could never call her monster.
There is a moment in which they are touching that Thana looks at him and thinks of constellations. She should be learning all the secrets of him that no king is willing to give. The beast in her belly is telling her to touch him harder, to learn the shape of him by teeth, and horn, and blade. It's telling her that she's a desert full of bones and he the sea of salt and life.
Thana pulls back and she looks at him as if he's giving her stars she never knew she wanted. She looks at him like a lion looks at a lamb who has forgotten they are a soft where she is hard. She looks at him like salvation.
All she has to give him is the way her eyes are a jungle full of wild things. Her eyes have in them fronds hiding demons made of gemstone, and rivers rushing white-hot and hungry. There are whispers in her gaze, willows swaying in the winds of death that blow so very cold inside of her. Every wet drop of purple in her eyes holds another beast and another small death.
And each drop of amethyst is looking at him so intently that the hollow place behind her eyes feels like it's full of fire instead of darkness.
“Thana.” Her lips sing over her hard marble teeth. She doesn't remember ever deciding to give him her name. The air in her lungs feels like winter and water mixed together, cool and white. It seizes in her organs and she trembles as if frost is growing out over her bones like weeds. It hurts.
She pulls further away from this king with stars on his skin and water on his lips. “It means death.” That word, death, swings out from her like a blade she's happy to wield. Thana wants to kill him but she wants him to touch her again. It feels as if two snakes are tangled together in her belly, each trying to coil tight and choke the other.
Death rolls backwards with her as she retreats with want and sorrow in her jungle gaze full of monsters. The last drop of water falls from her and horn and Thana thinks the sound it makes against the grass is deafening. She wonders if Asterion heard the sound it made, like a gate slamming shut.
She turns away and starts to run over the grasses. The water shine dances on her skin as she runs past it. The white-glow makes her look like a fire-storm running through the grasses, red and hot and dripping fury.
Thana does not look back at her king.
She is afraid that if she looks back she might not be able to keep her horn from kissing his heart.
