Eik is thinking, as he walks for the second time across the bridge to nowhere, about how despair has its comforts. Maybe not despair itself but the familiarity of it. Like pressing your tongue to the back of your teeth, like feeling in the dark a pattern you could not re-create with clay or ink or song, but upon feeling it you could tell if it had changed in even the slightest of ways.
Despair, like the back of his teeth, had not changed. It was still, in many ways, very easy. It did not require courage, or strength, or faith. It was putting your head back, kicking your feet up, and letting the river take you.
Eik is letting the river take him across the bridge once more, and he is certain it is going to spit him out at the end of the world. He is not afraid. He is not really feeling anything at all, except... something like relief. All this swimming, all this drowning, all this sand and blood and failure, it was all so tiresome.
(he only--
he only wishes he was not alone)
He is not surprised when he reaches the end of the bridge and realizes the wall of ivy is gone. He is not surprised because how could he be, with the island tugging at his heart like that, tugging in a way that felt at first like a suggestion, like innocence, until he reached into the dark and realized how deep it was, how strong at its source. It was something like destiny that called to him, and he answered wearily but faithfully.
(gratefully, even-- oh we never could resist a rhyme)
But oh, if this is the end of the world it is a most lovely end! Strange birds and stranger fruits and a gentle breeze, otherworldly in feel. The air itself is lazy and peaceful. He trusts none of it, and yet-- he begins to relax, against his better judgement. He lowers his head to a pool of clear, sharp, sweet water, and he drinks like a dying man. (from somewhere, laughter- like a dying man. hah-- and then silence)
The silence fades, or does it rise? gracefully to birdsong and hoofsteps drawing near. Eik squints against the cheery sunlight.
Asterion.
The grey's heart races despite all attempts to keep hope at bay. He leans forward, wondering-- fearing-- this is all a strange illusion. Afraid it will crumble if he takes a step forward, if he dares to feel fully the joy and relief that coil in his chest, ready to spring forward.
"You aren't a dream, are you?" Despair was so easy. Delight, done right, was so hard. It must be certain, and it must be savored. Eventually Eik smiles-- whatever the truth of the situation, a nice dream beats a dull reality anyway. "I'm so happy to see you."
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”
@Asterion <3 ;_;
Time makes fools of us all
06-06-2019, 07:59 PM - This post was last modified: 06-06-2019, 08:02 PM by Eik
When Asterion sees Eik, pale as mist through the deeply green trees, the feeling that stumbles his heart is all wonder.
“I often wish I was,” he answers, and somewhere there is a laugh in it - born of happiness and weariness but also that call back to the night he met Aislinn, his first in this world, the way she said I don’t wish for this dream to end. He understands the feeling, he lives in it now, wandering this island thick and strange with magic. It does not feel like Novus. Asterion had wondered (briefly, with guilt) what might happen if the bridge sank back beneath the waves, if the island kept unfolding like a map, if all the courts could be left behind like the things you couldn’t carry from a fire. How free he might feel then.
By now he has sewn up the distance between them and is reaching out his muzzle, his cheek, offering all of himself in greeting. Maybe through touch they could prove to one another their realness, but what was truth, anyway, in a world of magic? Maybe the gods were like Isra, maybe they had all been dreamed to life from stones. Then, at least, they could not be blamed for falling.
For a long moment he doesn’t speak. Or rather, he says nothing - but Asterion thinks (feeling a little fervent, a little foolish) I have missed you, I have missed you, I have missed you and hopes Eik with his gifts can hear him, and doesn’t mind the repetition. The bay closes his eyes as he breathes in the scent of his friend, and wonders if grief smells like salt, too, like sweat and the sea, or if it smells iron like blood or dark soil.
There is too much to tell him, and too much of it is apologies - how sorry he is for his uselessness, for his absence. For all that he has missed. Asterion gives voice to none of it, and only hopes the grey man understands.
At last he steps back, and as he does he remembers the world they stand in. When he shrugs it’s almost sheepish, the roll of his shoulders, the almost boyish look in his eyes at the surreal world around them with its wet warmth and foreign birdsong. His expression says look at all of this, isn’t is a marvel, and his head is guilty for his excitement.
For surely this is not the end, and if it is, it isn’t a happy one.
But for now he pushes those thoughts away, down into the dark where they will wait until he’s alone (they are patient things, his fears, almost loyal). He smiles and there is nothing false in it, even when he regards Eik with a gaze heavy as the press of a palm on his back. “I’m so glad you found me.” A pause when he swallows, inhales deeply the scent of ripe fruits, of sun-warmed leaves, of magic like something hot and elemental waiting just below the leaf-litter. “This is a change, isn’t it?”
Eik's heart fills with a force and certainty that surprises him. He loves the sound of his friend's voice, the way it can convey many emotions (often some of them conflicting) even over the course of a few short words. The grey laughs suddenly, a you and me both kind of laugh, and though his laughter was quiet as usual, a flock of small birds takes to the sky in surprise.
Eik knows without magic, without a word, without even a look, how the apologies build and build. You're not sure which to say first, and as you spin between them, indecisive, a wave comes and washes them all away, back into the oceanic soup of intent where they mingle with all the other unsaid things. He does not need an apology, and he does not offer one either (there are too many to choose from-- I'm sorry I didn't write, I'm sorry I didn't visit, I'm sorry for everything-- I missed you too).
Such is the company of a kindred soul.
He steps forward, presses his cheek to the starry bay, breathes in salt and sorrow. He was not completely at ease, for Novus and its magic seemed to take full advantage of every lowered guard, but still-- nothing in the world ever felt so easy as standing there with Asterion. The ocean, while out of sight, filled the air with a briny freshness, and its gentle rhythm painted the backdrop of a canvas colored with the songs of strange birds and insects. When his friend speaks of the marvelous world (which seems to swirl around them in sound and shape and color, as though the two of them were suns around which all else revolved) Eik simply nods.
"I don't trust it," he admits. "It's too beautiful." He still expects all the colors to melt away, all the birds to grow sharp teeth, all the trees to crumble to dust. But he's here, despite this nagging feeling of impending Doom, and so is Asterion. He has no idea what it all means, if it means anything at all (and of course it does, it must... right?) and he is not optimistic about them finding out. But of course they must at least try.
Eik draws away, and he begins to walk. Some direction. Any direction. No destination in mind, just... wandering. He does not ask Asterion where he would like to go, or if he would even like to wander in the first place. Again, we realize, such is the company of a kindred soul.
They walk a thin, barely-trod path that leads deeper into the forest. He wonders who first walked it, and how many others have walked it since. And eventually his thoughts come back to dreams. He found thoughts were often cyclical like that, and each time you returned to the start with a little better understanding, even if you could not put that understanding into words.
"What are your dreams like?" A bird flies past, cloaked in brilliant shades of yellow. It has two sets of wings that look sharp as razors, and it chirrups a song that sounds like laughter. "Mine are nowhere near as nice as this." His tone is dry but cheerful-- as cheerful as the stoic grey can manage. Which is to say-- not very, at least on the surface. But for a man so subtle, the slight humor in his tone might well be expressed as booming laughter by most any other creature.
Asterion hardly notices the birds that escape, flaring up like sparks from a fire, in favor of the sound of his friend’s laugh. For this moment the island doesn’t concern him, and his worry retreats like the tide to sea, for to him that laugh means all is well. Or at least well enough.
Oh, how he is grounded by that touch, the press of warm and salt-smelling skin. Eik is one of only a handful - Florentine among them, and maybe Isra - for whom the physicality carries no weight of expectations he can’t quite name, no tension to make out a meaning that may not be there. For the space of a few heartbeats there is glad comfort, and the steady feeling within him when he pulls away only makes him realize how unquiet he was before.
The king smiles into the air between them, flicks an ear to the trees, with all their mysteries. “I wouldn’t trust it if it were ugly, either,” he says, tempted to laugh again, but he holds a breath instead as something laughs from the woods (likely a bird, only a bird) in a voice so liquid it sounds brand-new. “But you’re right. We’d best be on our guard.”As if, his faint, wry smile says, we aren’t always, nowadays.
He follows the gray man without consideration and without words, content to wander, strangely pleased not to lead. It reminds him of the first time they met, their aimless stroll and meandering talk, and he wonders how long their footprints lasted in the sand before the waves vanished them. In his mind, sometimes, they are there still.
But this is no known beach, and the bay’s gaze is a cautious, curious thing as it scans the trees, rests in the little hollows of darkness between the trunks, glances briefly at the sky. He should be more unsettled, maybe; but Isra is here, with her magic and her dragon, and Seraphina is here, alive, and Eik is here, beside him. And Florentine, somewhere, with her wild joy and a baby in her belly, and -
wherever they are going, they will all be there together.
Asterion tips an ear forward at the question, and his lips press into a line. Leaves and branches brush his sides, and stickers and burrs try for his coat; instinct makes him startle at the bird, but he is glad to place the sound of that earlier laugh.
“Full of all kinds of adventure,” he says, half-wistful, half-wry. “A hundred different coasts to explore, a thousand mountains to climb, monsters that I slayed or saved. When I was a boy I dreamed of being a hero.” Out the corner of his eye a spot of scarlet catches him; without stopping he turns his head to spot a spider as wide as his hoof, weaving a thick web that looks hung with stars. It makes him want to stop and look, and also to shiver; he does none of these things, only continues. There are more wonders ahead, he knows. “But lately,” he continues, his gaze traveling back to his companion (are there new scars, on that pale pelt? Was he always so thin?) “if I’ve been dreaming, I don’t remember it by morning.” A blessing, he thinks.
He still wants to ask if Eik thinks this is a trap, or a trick, or if there’s any reason at all - but would any answer alter what they’re doing now? He wants, too (and maybe more than he ought) to linger in this in-between forever; how it feels to him like they’re exploring, boys playing at being heroes. But they are not boys.
And so, though he is sorry for it, and his gaze stays on Eik with his dark eyes soft (forgive me, forgive me) he speaks steadily, carelessly, and tries not to wonder if the island is listening.
“I have seen Isra, and Seraphina.” There should be joy - somewhere in him, there is, but he doesn’t know what he’ll see as he watches his friend’s back, the fall of his white hair - but it is worry that snags in his throat, to wonder what the gray man knows. “And I am told that Raum is here. If I see him…I will try to kill him. Will you help?”
He remembers, a lifetime ago, Eik asking him as they stood in Denocte overlooking the sea whether their gifts gave them responsibilities. There was never any answer but yes.
king of dusk.
@Eik | <3 soooo the last couple paragraphs, I'm happy to edit - not sure if you had plans in mind for what Eik knows and how he knows it, so please let me know! I don't want to encroach.
He had gone somewhere, when Isra was kidnapped by Raum. He went further, when he learned Seraphina had fallen in battle, and further again when Rhoswen burned.
Eventually he came back, or at least he thought he did. Everything felt a little different, like some core part of him was present but the rest was struggling to catch up to the here and now. Still grieving, or hunting, or grieving some more. Isra was safe (for now), Seraphina was alive (for now), and Rhoswen was--
He didn't know with any certainty where or what or why Rhoswen was, but he hoped it was a better place than here. It was the only comfort he could find in such tragedy, although it did little to ease the discomforts.
In the wake of her death, Eik’s dreams returned to being full of fire. Flames and charred flesh and everything burning, just like everything burned in the place he was born. He knows he did not bring the fire to Solterra, but he wonders sometimes… oh, how he wonders…
“Sometimes it is better to not remember.” He pauses. “or to not dream at all.” Even if he did have beautiful dreams, lush and wondrous and full of every hue except red and orange, he thinks he would prefer the cavernous darkness of dreamless sleep. Oblivion, is the word for it. He would prefer oblivion.
“I have seen Isra, and Seraphina,” Eik smiles despite himself, despite the worry in his friend’s voice (worry he feels too) and the uncertainty of past and future. How precious it is to be reminded that Seraphina still lives, and to hear her name spoken once more– it did not seem safe to say that name in Solterra, not yet. And Isra, of course– those four letters fill him with a joy that verges on incomprehensible.
“Raum is here?” He stops walking. Body and voice draw serious and tense, and a calm kind of wildness enters his eyes. “I did not know,” he says softly, thoughtfully. “I have been waiting very long to meet him again.” He had spent countless hours stalking the streets of Solterra, searching the minds of every stranger for any scrap of the snake who called himself Raum.
There was what they called unfinished business between the two stallions.
Eik doesn’t want Asterion to become tangled in this mess, but it really isn’t his mess to be deciding who will or will not be involved in. This stems beyond vengeance, beyond anything personal. He remembers once again that his friend is a king. It is so easy to forget that, when they amble along the sandy path like boys beyond the touch of time. They could not just be boys exploring a magical island, not anymore. Responsibility made men of them. Responsibility and love.
“Of course I will help you.” He wishes (not for the first or last time) that his magic was stronger, more powerful. But he has Asterion by his side, and Isra, and Seraphina, and he thinks that between their magic and their might they are a force that would cause the gods to tremble– and to wonder, what have they made.
The steel in his eyes promises: I will always help you, until the end of days.
Sometimes, the king agrees, but he does not say the word aloud. Even without Eik’s gift, the sentiment would be clear by the way the silence unrolls between them, the curve of Asterion’s neck, the way he blows out his breath. One day, he hopes that they all might dream again - the same dream, a thousand roots reaching back to one marvelous tree, up and up to fill the sky, to bear sweet fruit. Such a dream of Novus as could never be felled.
But they cannot rest so easy yet.
It is his friend’s body, before his voice, that tells the bay to slow, and he steps to the side where there is just enough room in the narrow trail for a column of sunlight to slant between them. Within it motes of dust or leaf or magic seem to hang suspended, golden in the light, invisible in shadow. With one ear he listens to Eik’s voice, low and easy, but Asterion is not fooled: he knows what depths such calm currents bely. With the other he tracks the interminable conversation of insects and birds, though he has given up trying to distinguish which is which. There is only which danger is immediate, and which is not.
Each time the thought surfaces (like a body just beyond the shore), it surprises him how little the idea of killing makes him flinch. Neither is it hard to picture how he might do it; he can feel the magic in him the way he can feel his lungs expand with breath or his heartbeat shift, and he knows it will obey as easily as his legs do when he thinks run. He catches Eik’s dark-eyed gaze and thinks of drowning Raum with the water in the ghost’s own cells, a backwards kind of baptism where there would be no rising reborn.
If only it had been done before. Before Seraphina, before Isra. Years ago, on a midwinter’s eve, when a gypsy king (long gone, now, though Asterion can still remember the way it felt to meet him, like an alternate vision of himself, made bold and careless) and his band of crooked thieves made a bloody angel of Lysander in the snow. How far the consequences of that night had echoed, how many it had encircled, like ripples on a lake. He wonders if all life is just a long line of ifs.
For a long moment he says nothing, just meets his friend’s eye. The forest around them lives and breathes, real and not-real, as improbable as the magic in them both. At last Asterion nods and steps on down the path that no horse had made.
“Tell me,” he says, as easily as though they still speak of dreams, “what a happy ending is for you, after all of this.”
Now knowing that Raum is here on the island, Eik should want to run. He should want to cast his magic wide and dive through the thoughts of the waking world until he found the skinchanger, and then he should want to hunt him down. And he does want these things, very much so. But instead he walks, slow and steady, and reigns in his far-flung thoughts. It felt like he was always hunting, these days. Always sulking around in one shadow or another, waiting for the ghostly sovereign of Solterra to show his face. He wanted to enjoy his present company-- their time together was always too brief.
What does a happy ending look like?
Eik wanted, on first instinct, quiet and simple. Period. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed that attaining quiet and simple would not bring him happiness. It was the longing that made him happy, the wanting and not the having.
It meant Asterion's question was impossible to answer, for there was no such thing as a happy ending.
But this was not the sort of truth that could be spoken out loud. This was a secret truth, and it must be agonized over, in the quiet corners of the back of the mind; forgotten and then remembered, tumbled down the river until the rough edges wore smooth as a pebble. He did not have the right words for this truth, he did not know how to say it in a way that did not sound miserable-- for it truly was not miserable. It was just different. And it was very beautiful, in the way only melancholy can be.
Does he think for too long? He would say not long enough (it is a thing he could ponder forever, happy ending. hap-py end-i n g) but courtesy would disagree. “I think,” he pauses. Oh, to speak like the birds do, to let words flow without thinking, overthinking! What a blessing that would be. “For me, it would be just to live in a world where children do not die.” He thinks of the slat-ribbed girl he saw not very long ago in Solterra. She had dead eyes, dead eyes that looked at him and saw nothing. He thinks of Isra and how her innermost thoughts are painted by the memory of drowning. He thinks of the day the Davke attacked, and the bright-red of the knife he pulled from a dead boy’s body. “And no one knows what the word ‘war’ means.”
(And to be always near Isra, and the sea, and to rear children that were pure and wild– but that is a secret desire, and like a secret truth it must be kept close to heart, refined to perfection before it could be revealed to the world. To share it too soon would be to ruin it.)
It strikes him suddenly what a great shame it is that they should have an island to explore, a magic treasure to find, and yet it is such serious, solemn things that consume their attention. He focuses on their surroundings for a moment, feels the salty air wrap around him and smells the lush heart of the jungle. He shoulders the limbs of a sapling aside, continues to push deeper into the island, and returns to his thoughts. “Why does that seem like an impossible dream?”
There is no thinking too long, not between the two men who walk like old friends, like brothers, and let the forest breathe around them and between them. Maybe their thoughts are like roots, tangling, choking, above the surface and far below, tying them together with good things and bad.
They walk and Asterion lets his gaze wander, wishing for the first time that he could paint, that he could capture all these images and wonders and keep them with him. It is a bittersweet want, verging on full discontent - he can’t help but think he was happier, when he never wondered whether anything could be made permanent. Once he only accepted the world as it was, and lived each moment without regard for the next, and made no plans beyond where to bed down at night, where to drink from, whether to fight or to run what monsters he met.
(Of course he was not happier, but to think of simpler things always feels that way. There is no ache so seductive-sweet as nostalgia.)
When Eik speaks at last the bay only nods, though he isn’t sure whether his companion is watching, anyway. Shadows and sunlight slip over his skin, barring him with patterns of leaves, and the king thinks that he could walk here forever - always hunting but never catching. It is a shame and a blessing both that it is only and island, an ending in every direction. “That would be a good world,” he says, softly, and thinks of Florentine and the news she had told him, the way it lit her up to share it, the life of the baby she carries -
His breath sighs away from him as Eik speaks again. But a smile follows after, curling his mouth and softening his eyes. “If it didn’t, it might not be worth dreaming at all.” In the silence that follows (silence, as though the trill and chatter of the birds and the hum of insects and the wind rattling and soothing the leaves and the branches bending around them are nothing consequential) Asterion is glad that his friend had not turned the question on him. What does an ending mean, anyway?
And then, apropos nothing (nothing but all the wonder around them, and that they have this moment of peace and magic and wildness at all) Asterion says “I hope the island stays.” It feels a foolish thing as soon as it leaves his mouth - it had felt less so as a half-formed thought - but he thinks of the magic and the strangeness and the way it has brought them all together, in a way, with outcomes good and ill and yet to be seen, and he does not feel ashamed when he turns to meet Eik’s eye.
Shadows play across the back of the two stallions as they weave their way across the island.
They walk like brothers indeed, as though they’ve always known each other. Each accommodates the other without thinking about it, without even realizing it; sidestepping to allow more space, reaching out with telekinesis to hold aside the branches and bushes ahead. Bumping shoulders every so often without a second thought, each touch a silent message. Banded in the canopy’s dancing shadows they almost even look like distant brothers reunited, Eik’s skin storybooked in scars and Asterion’s in stars.
And who’s to say they aren’t brothers? Just because they had not met until a few years prior, does that have to mean they haven’t always known each other? Look very closely to the shadows that dance across the forest floor. If sometimes they blur with magic, or splay oddly as though the sun itself was moving and not the leaves of the trees, is that not an impossibility made real?
They speak of dreams and the future, of course they do. If they do not speak of that, they speak of the past. They are deep sea creatures, and even so soon after reuniting they cannot help but take a deep breath and dive.
Eik appreciates his friend’s words, although he responds only with a grim smile and a bump of the shoulder in understanding and gratitude. “I hope it does too.” He thinks foremost of his country, although technically, it was soon to be not-his-country. (It would always have a bit of his wandering heart, although not as much as Isra.) There was food here, and water. Shelter and an uncertain kind of peace. “But doesn’t something about it feel… off to you?” Maybe it was just the shadows he saw twisting at the edge of his vision, or the unfamiliar humid heat of the air. Eik wanted the island to stay, but he also wanted it to be right. And something… something about it was not right.
The grey stops suddenly, hit by a thought. “I’m going to be a father.”
(That faraway look on his face: two girls, little stars, with oceans in their eyes– I can see it already. I can hear their voices, little gods. I will give them the world.) He does not know why he did not share the news sooner. Perhaps the thought was so brightly emblazoned on his mind that he forgot it was not written above his head in letters for all the world to plainly see.
“Where I was born, there is a word- önke. It is like… a family member, but also the guardian of a child if something should happen to the parents.” He had not come across a translation in the common tongue, not that he was actively searching for one. “Would you be the önke to my daughters?” Eik appears as though he is completely uncertain how Asterion will react. He knows he needn’t be so serious among bothers, but it would be easier to wash the scars from his skin than to not be fully earnest about everything, always and forever.
@Asterion eee they make me so happy <3 we can end this any time! just... fade out as they explore together
How many times has Asterion wished for things he doesn’t have - for arching antlers, a horn as sharp as a sword, most of all for wings? But with Eik he does not feel lesser-than, or discontent. With Eik he dreams, but the dreams don’t feel impossible.
They speak but their words are like the wind, sometimes steady, sometimes absent, sometimes little more than a hum or murmur of wonder there below the trees. And sometimes their words slip into Eik’s language of magic and thought, though it felt so natural the bay could never say later what he’d said aloud and what only in his head, in pictures, in fragments.
But when they speak of the island, for a long moment the king doesn’t say anything at all. Until now he hasn’t been able to voice why the island makes him feel the way it does - a little more alive, a little more free - but now he looks around him and realizes he doesn’t recognize any of the trees, none of the ferns, none of the vines and bright flowers. And maybe that is part of it - maybe in the strangeness, this wild untamed country, all his duties fall away but survival. There are no castles to care for, no stockrooms and gardens; there is only the ones he loves, and the magic, and the island itself. It is easy, in a way. It is how he’d always pictured his life, an endless line on an endless map.
And yet he’d also thought he’d always love a unicorn with a lion in her bones. And he would have died for a twin who asked him only to stay away, suffocating beneath the weight of his love and suffering beneath her own sorrow.
Novus is nothing he could have imagined, but it has given him his family. Cirrus and Eik and Isra and Marisol and Florentine and others, more than he can count. It has given him love, and a castle to live in, like any fairy tale that ends in ever-after. How could it be anything but home?
“It doesn’t belong in Novus,” he says, by way of agreeing, and it feels like an admission.
He senses it as soon as Eik stops, and when he turns back his expression is already alert, eyes wary - but there is wonder on the grey stallion’s face. A different kind of wonder than anything the island could coax, a wonder that has Asterion already smiling, thinking back to Florentine’s news from only days ago. What a surprise, what a gift life is.
“Congratulations, Eik,” he says, and he’s grinning as he presses his nose to the stallion’s shoulder, huffing a breath onto the silver scatter of hairs and scars. The bay is drawing back already as his friend continues speaking, and he forgets the forest entirely, his senses ceding to the joy that rises in him like the sun. “Of course,” Asterion answers in a rush of breath, and it doesn’t feel enough for the weight of it so he adds “it would be an honor.” The king laughs, then, shaky with disbelief and happiness, feeling brand-new as a boy. “Between them and Florentine’s child we’ll all have our hands full.” After a moment’s hesitation he reaches for Eik’s cheek (how strange, to pause more before showing friendship than when they had traded bruises and blood on the battlefield) and touches his nose to it before turning away, now grinning again.
“I guess we’ll have to survive the island, then.” He’s still laughing when he says it, buoyant with love, even as his thoughts turn to more serious things - to Raum, and feral magic, and a woman of silver with golden scars. And to Moira, somewhere below these same trees, and the thought of her with the news of children makes something delicate tremble in his chest, stretching wings within a chrysalis.
Onward they walk, in sunshine and in shadow, and Asterion can only wonder what other wonders this world will open for all of them.
king of dusk.
@Eik | thank you my friend <3 calling this a closer
