[AW] nothing as lucky, as easy, or free;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   Of course it is Calliope who comes to him in the storm. He is stripped down, made new (or perhaps old again, perhaps taken back to a world before castles and walls and candlelight) beneath the water and the wind, and when he opens his eyes to find her there like a goddess in a vision he smiles. It does not matter what he might have been; maybe if he shared Florentine’s power to twist the future and change the past it would. But the only thing Asterion can change is each present moment, and in this one he only feels the drum-beat of his heart when she brushes his cheek. In the storm they aren’t in Novus; they are alone in a new pocket of the world, one carved out for only them. It smells electric, metallic – a charged weapon. It smells like her. At her question he casts his dreamer’s gaze skyward to where the lightning threatens, but it could never linger there when there’s such a storm beside him. Instead he traces the scars along her shoulder, her neck. It is not a hopeful lover’s touch; it is a grounding one, a remembering one. When he comes to the scar across her eye, he pulls away. “I think of a righteousness that would burn down the gods,” he answers her. “I think of what it felt like, to promise to be something more.” He remembers that sureness, passion like a fire that ate away his doubt. “I think of you,” he finishes, and it is the truth and nothing more. There were so many things Aislinn and he had kept from one another, made blind by starlight and fireflies, swept into a softer current. He had only just learned of this other side of the Stormsinger; he is learning it still. Asterion is a slow study, he knows it now, but he will always come around in the end. He wants to ask her, as another flash of lightning gilds her skin, what she had ever seen in him that day beneath a dreaming tree. But the bay is not so sure, anymore, that it matters. It is cold beneath the driving rain, and steam rises from their backs. The edges of the world are worn soft with it, except when lightning paints everything stark. Asterion leans against her, tucks his nose beneath her throat, a lamb to a scarred lion. There are a thousand questions that press against his teeth, a thousand more that wait within his heart. But there is only one he thinks he can ask in this moment alone. Any other, and it would be too much a weakness – but here, cocooned by lashing rain and the low threat of thunder, he does not feel weak at all. “Oh, Calliope,” he says, and though his voice is soft against the storm, it is strong enough. “Have you ever been afraid at all?” @Calliope