A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
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.
@Raymond
