THE ARCHIATER.
The slow spread of her smile feels almost like defeat. Marisol knows how it looks on her face, has seen it in mirrors and glass just once or twice. She knows the way it sort of melts her hardness - the way it makes her look human, for once - and loathes the way it sends cracks through her stone exterior.
Yet she does not work too hard to hide it. Asterion is as much her friend as anyone can be, and in the darkness it seems a waste to hide such a small flash of teeth. As much as it pains her, she lets the smile overtake her for that one brief, grim second, and then, as it fades, she feels her heart still again, her blood cool again, her dignity regained. Once more the night is omnipresent, and something is comforting about how fully it drowns them.
The citadel looms just ahead, and Marisol draws to a stop at its wooden doors. In the dim light she is oil-slick and serpentine, head drawn to her chest and neck bent in a smooth arc; with her wings drawn tightly to her side and legs squared underneath her, she seems almost statuesque, only the quick flicker of those gray eyes giving away the violence, the intensity, that is always living and moving inside her. From overhead, torchlight turns her skin dark-gold.
You invoke them like no one else I’ve met here. A frown crosses her lips. Momentarily she is confused - them? here? - until she realizes he is questioning the one name Tempus, a name so familiar, so common to her, that Mari hardly remembered saying it at all. Her brow lifts in quiet surprise. Asterion is their regent; how can he serve their Court sans an ounce of religious conviction when so much of Terrastella exists only in Vespera’s name, when even now they stand in the shadow of a temple covered in Her tapestries and statues?
Marisol’s dark head tilts, and she meets Asterion’s gaze with gentle curiosity. What they are - repeats the Commander. Her voice is low and strangely soft. Something akin to addiction? Although that makes it sound involuntary, and it is not. I is easy to be reliant on a god when they have never failed in supplying you. I have always thought of them as - a plane of existence just above ours. Invisible, but not inaccessible. Some part of her is pained by explaining it like this: so simply, and so incompetently.
Still. To say anything more might be blasphemy.
@asterion
