I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
Asterion does not notice what’s happening behind him until the dragon rises up out of the sea.
At first he thinks it’s a summoning of his own magic, as the water stirs in a frenzy and foam froths up from some great creature beneath. But as soon as the head and the arc of wings breach the surface his heart holds in his throat in awe (in a little fear) and something in him rises as the dragon does from the sea. Oh, he is glad Fable is not the same dragon as the last that ruled over Denocte. There is something terrible about that beauty, and about the power just as present in each gleaming scale and inch of membrane iridescent with water.
But right now Fable means hope. And when he turns at last from that growing mountain of ash to see the unicorn giving wings to each clam and crab he wants to pledge himself to her, to say I knew you would not be broken. Instead the Dusk King says none of these things; he only greets her smile with a deep nod and a look as black and fierce as her own. There is a rainstorm at her back, now, sweeping in from over both of their courts, but the only moisture in the air is still the mist from the waves as they dash themselves against the beach.
He does not ask her what hells she has traveled through to be here, or how she had escaped from Raum. This beach was no place for his own guilt, or the shame of his inaction; and anyway, perhaps none of the before matters, for here they stand now. Instead he goes to her, as Cirrus’ wingtips flash in the faltering sun and she calls the other birds away. Asterion touches his muzzle to hers with all the care and caution of a wild thing, and is glad her skin does not smell of smoke.
Still the water keeps its distance from them both, still a swell of waves waits to answer his will. His lungs follow the rhythm of the water and his heart drums at the cage of his ribs, the least steady part of him. “I have always felt braver beside a unicorn,” he says at last, and turns his gaze back on the black cloud before them.
Perhaps the wind would shift, and blow all that death out toward the open sea. Perhaps there would be no monster, no ruin at all, and what they face is only chance and weather. Asterion hopes so.
It's the moment that he touches her, as if she is a wild-thing or perhaps a real unicorn, that she knows their cities will be safe. Asterion's touch is a hook and he's catching each bit of her, that holds in it the sea, through the gills. The magic under her skin hums and surges. It boils and rages every bit as fiercely as that distant disaster. Her skin is too tight. Each of her bones are starting to feel like tools of resurrection instead of joints and cages.
Isra feels alive and furious.
Fable wonders if they could sink into the center of the volcano and grow flowers instead of death. Could his unicorn make gold instead of magma?
Isra feels like she could remake the world.
She brushes her nose against his shoulder and inhales salt and sand instead of stardust. There are no stars on her lips, but she still looks him in the eye and her voice becomes the whisper of a new blade. “And I have always dreamed of being brave besides the stars.” Each of her eyes reflects the wall of seawater around them back at him. Something in her chest crashes through her veins like the sea against rocks that are refusing to move.
When she looks back at the exploding wall of soot above the waves her heart sings for destruction. But her stories never told her how to kill a volcano, only how to forge weapons out of silk and make grave-dirt out of evil. She does not know how to fight the earth. But she turns a sea-slug drying out in the sand into a butterfly and wonders if she can turn horses to thunderbirds.
“Do you think the wind will turn?” Isra says and she does not sound as afraid as she should be. Once she would have cried, now she only thinks of all the ways in which she has become a weapon.
“If I told you I'm trying to save the world, would you believe me?”
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
Isra feels like an eruption too, he thinks, but not one that’s happened yet. She is a thing that’s building, being made, folding and refolding as she forges herself into - what? Something beautiful, something terrible, something evil men should be afraid of.
He wonders if the gods are afraid of anything.
The king is grateful for her touch, which cools him like a sea breeze and steadies him like a hand. But it is her words he smiles for, a wry thing curled in the corner of his mouth, for they both know she has been brave below the stars a thousand times already. He says nothing, only drops his muzzle in the slightest of nods, and turns as she does back to the open water and the distant island.
His smile is still lingering at her question, though all the warmth has left it in the face of that reaching black cloud. “I would have said yes, once,” he answers, and there is no fear in his voice, either. Fear, he is finding, is a choice - and they don’t have the luxury of options, today. The dark death will come for them or it will not. It will be the end or it will not. It leaves him feeling strangely peaceful, despite the bird-quick stutter of his heart, and every instinct pleading run.
He is still watching the sea when he speaks again, soft and low, the ocean reflected in his eyes. What is the plan if it doesn’t?”
Isra is not thinking of endings. Nor is she thinking thoughts of salvation as she looks out towards that wall of black soot and banked walls of sea. Rather she is thinking about a hundred stories. Each is dripping lines of script in black ink across her thoughts. She's thinking about it like holy scripture--all that wonder, all those heroes, all those deaths.
She is thinking of each blot of ink sinking into her blood like poison. She is thinking that her magic is eating up each drop it it, each line of holy, legendary writ like a lion eating a banquet of lambs.
Isra is thinking about becoming. It makes her smile wild, and more than a little dangerous. There are sparks in her eyes, lighting bolts streaking down across a meadow of glass feathers and torn up trees. And it's in that moment that she becomes a war, and she knows that it's going to end in death. When she swallows it's acceptance on her tongue, not brine, or salt, or bitter tears.
There is only one way to rid this world of monsters.
Fable swoops upward and his wings are cutting through ribbons of ash like blades through silk. The darkness glints across his shining belly like night streaking upward across the twilight horizon. He does not think to dive back into the sea, even with the soot starts to dry out his salt-water hide and burn in his eyes. He doesn't know if he'll stop until that mountain in the distance dies.
Even a dragon knows that all of this ends in death. Although he hope it's not his unicorn's (or his, he thinks he is too young to burn up and dissolve into the thick skies). But as long as Isra is still below him with a war in her heart and a determined beat rattling against her rib-cage he will fly, and fly, and fly-- to the end of the world if she asked it of him.
Isra does not look away from that black looming beast when she says, “If it doesn't turn maybe I will finally find out how deep my magic runs.” Because she hasn't found the bottom of it, not since Raum woke her up in a cave with Acton's name written across her skin in swirls of dried blood.
Her magic eats a another story and another hero. It starts looking for another one (another lamb). Isra tries not to think about the way it feels against her shattered heart.
She doesn't do anything but wonder how quickly Fable can carry her to that island exploding in the sea.
“How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.”
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
Asterion has wondered, when his thoughts are idle, half-dreaming things, when his gaze is on the stars or the sea or the tree limbs that sway like arms welcoming him home, whether he would be different if he had been born a unicorn.
Of course it is impossible - he is the son of a simple stallion who was, in turn, the son of a simple stallion - but that is half the point of daydreaming, of fairy tales. Would he have been braver at the beginning, if he had such a noble weapon jutting from his brow (instead of the mark of a star, like a kiss from a distant constellation - a kiss from his mother)? Would he have felt he was more born to war? Likely it doesn’t matter, because he is here now.
The dragon cuts once more across the horizon, ripping spaces in the ash for the distant stars to shine through. The smoke eats them up again, but Fable is not done; he tears a new hole in the fabric of that dark destruction, and another, and another. How good it is, how lucky they all are, that Isra is no villain. How terrible the thought of her as anything else - even considering it makes him feel like a traitor.
“Yes,” he says softly, and still neither meets the other’s eyes. “I should like to see you turn the ash to butterflies.” Perhaps he could ask the ocean to swallow the island - perhaps it would even listen, as much as it could. “Sometimes,” he continues, and his voice is soft as a confession, here at the edge of the world, “I wish there were no courts. That our only loyalties were to each other.” Like now, he thinks - if only it wasn’t disaster that forced them to unity.
Fable’s shape is dark over the water, and fleeting as a swallow. Slowly, with a sound like sighing, it begins to rain.
When she looks at him and traces the way his lips form a gentle word like butterflies she cannot help but think that they are both suited for things other than crowns. Isra wants to take the word from him and pretend that she wasn't about to say she would turn the volcano into a pyre.
And then she would have told him that it's gods and ghosts she would place upon it. It would not have burned for them.
So she touches their shoulders together and she tries to bury all the awful things growing like vines inside her where once there was only stars and sorrow. Each black dot of ash that falls on her, bloated with water, turns to to seed. Soon it's roses, and apples and pears running down her skin mixed with the rain. When she shakes more and more seeds fall to the sand beneath their hooves that has never seen the stars, or the silver moon.
Isra wonders where the tide will take them when Asterion loosens his noose around the waves. Part of her hopes that far out in the deep a god will see them as bits of warning, that they will clog his tides. She hopes he will choke on it.
Because Isra is not returning to the sea. The stars own her now, and she owns the stars, and the moon and each constellation hiding a story.
“After this we could change it. We could change all of it.” Fable loops lower, and her tangled soaked hair almost sings in the weight of that dragon breeze. A fountain of sea-water joins the rain and the dragon swings it like a sword through the black ash that is still turning to seed the moment it touches Isra's skin.
She brushes her nose against his cheek and she thinks it must have been an easy thing for Eik to learn how to love the dusk king. “I will always be loyal to you Asterion.” And that word loyal, sounds nothing like butterflies when she drops it from between her teeth.
Even that falls in the sea like a water-fat seed.
“I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.”
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
Even now he cannot turn to rage; even in the face of this newest disaster nothing like fire burns in his bones. Oh, there is anger there, large and looming, but it is as deep and low as shifting earth, as cool as a lake in the heart of the mountains. It moves slowly, building like a storm. Higher and higher it towers - towards the gods, and toward a kidnapper-king, and toward all things cruel and evil in their world, all things that might seek to hurt.
For the first time in his life it is hard to cast his long gaze down to the empty beach and imagine the one he grew up alongside. It is hard to picture anything peaceful and safe. But maybe he’d been telling himself a story even then, remembering all of the violet sunsets and none of the driving rains.
Isra’s shoulder is warm against his, and there is only comfort between them when he leans into her touch. The king’s eyes do not stray from that black cloud like a press of ink marking the sin of the world. But there is still the water below it, eternal, reflecting the sky. It is a strange kind of comfort to know how much of it he could draw up in their defense, how it would obey more effortlessly than any soldier of Dusk to their king.
When she says that they could change the world he almost believes her.
Asterion smiles as though he does, and at last flicks his dark gaze to her, studying the sea-green and the sea-blue of her eyes. He isn’t sure he’s ever noticed, before, how reminiscent of the ocean they are. Somehow the fading sunlight makes her even more mysterious, glittering on her brush of scales. “I look forward to dreaming of that new world with you. Though I think my court would cast me out for it.” The king’s dark lips quirk up, wry, at the thought of a people so loving and so stubborn. No born Terrastellan would allow court lines to dissolve for the notion of harmony; they were as sturdy as the oldest trees in Tinea, with roots reaching further than even the branches that comb the air high above the earth.
But it is good to dream.
She touches his cheek and the smile fading there and her words fall on him like soft rain. “And I you,” he says to the unicorn, sure as a pledge, and turns to see the way that ash and water strikes her but seeds roll off. The ground is growing heaps of them, to be washed away or blown into the wind and settle, and take root, and grow - what a marvelous creature the unicorn queen is, ever remaking the world around her. “Come what may.” There is a note of fierceness in the last, of ocean floor far beneath the surface waves. A certainty that does not shift.
And though it begins to grow prematurely dark, with that threat of annihilation blotting out the sun in a way not even a dragon could dispel, Asterion is not afraid.
A trecherous thought is blooming in her (or maybe it's a hundred of such thoughts rising in vines through her mind). It grows roots, and petals, and it's blooming under the dark ash sky. The vowels of it are whispered in magic and the echo of her nightmares that are still full of fang and hornets. And maybe that's all her mind is now, a tangle of trechery and rage that's choking out the life of every story she used to know.
Because Isra is looking at that black-death looming and the seeds pouring off her flesh like the blood of the first garden. She is looking and and looking. She's wondering what is stopping them from remaking it all; what's stopping them from tearing out each unholy and terrible thing from this world? She could make an island out of the sea he can push back. She could make seeds from sand. Isra could grow a garden in a wasteland if she wanted to and Asterion could water the roots.
Maybe she's thinking that there is nothing to stop her from becoming as terrible as she needs to be to make all that is evil in this world tremble.
And then maybe she's thinking about love.
So she only leans against him and traces the hollow curve of his throat until she can feel the drumbeat of his heart against her nose. Isra closes her teeth around the treachery boiling at the back of her throat like acid (and she closes her trublent ocean eyes until she can see only blackness, only nothing, only the ink).
“Come what may.” She echoes against the hollow of his chest, and she can't help but think it feels like lying. Death his not coming today, or maybe ever because every drop of dangerous magic in her blood is boiling, and smoldering, and begging for a flame.
Not today.
“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
