A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
“I came to Velius,” he whispers against her skin, “but you were not there—” and his voice is as fierce and rough as a boy’s, and as close to shameful tears of frustration. But he bites them back, and shakes his head, and puts on a smile like a man might wear. It is a little sad, and a little sorry, and old and young all at once. But it keeps his memories back, those sharper things, memories of mazes and fires and magic so thick you could taste it.
He eases back from her, then, relinquishing his eyes of the sight of her; he looks instead to his sister, and wonders if she remembered the day they met, they day he asked if she had met that lion from the rift, the one her mother followed.
And then Asterion chastens himself not to live in memories. He has no need of them, after all, not when it is no memory that stands before them now but living flesh, scarred and dark and poised as a ready blade. With her here, the present has become a fairytale, and the bay listens to his sister talk to the unicorn, and walks just a little behind them, and wonders if the world of Novus trembles, knowing it holds Calliope.
Why are you here? It is a question he longs for the answer to, too, but Calliope had bid them tell her of this place, and oh! There is so much more to tell.
“There are no gods here,” he tells her, because he knows the unicorn (at least a little, at least as much as a man like him can), and he remembers what her purpose was in Ravos. His heart remembers what it was to sing with it, all her power, all her promise. “Or if they are, they are nothing but ghosts. The men act as gods instead, and built walls to keep each other in and keep each other out, and few of them are righteous.” His gaze, dark with apology, slips to Florentine; it is a story he will only hint at, for it is not his to tell.
“It is so strange here, Calliope,” he says, as though they had not come from a world where beasts roamed, and gods gave quests, and mazes rose up out of bare ground and tested each who dared to enter.
Novus is a test, too, but Asterion is not sure that there can be a winner.
@Calliope @
