“And I was there,” he echoes, and his voice is low, a thing almost like a shadow that creeps along the ground. It feels now like another lifetime, though perhaps he is just a different man; he had been confident, then, in the stallion he was certain of becoming. Magic had given him no foreboding, and he did not fear the gods – but his time in Ravos had been spent drifting, looking for a way to moor himself.
He had thought it the unicorn, but now that foolish, boyish thinking seems distant to him, too. He wonders at that – that he could be a stranger to himself. He wonders who he might be a year from now.
I wish I had been there, she muses, and at that he chuckles. “You would have liked it. You would have caused havoc, I’m sure,” he says, and smiles to picture it.
But his smile fades at her question of the gods. He steps away from her, the better to catch her gaze. They are surrounded by people, by merriment; a thousand scents and sounds drift by on the easy summer wind, and most of them were foreign to him not so long ago. Asterion forgets Delumine, forgets the summer sunlight, and thinks instead of No and Selke, of Maaemo, of all the mortals he considered his friends. (He does not think of Lysander, as he had not known him in his time, and perhaps this is for the best – it would open too many questions, it would unsettle so many things).
“I never loved them,” he says, “though others did. I considered them…friends. Some of them, anyway. But they were different than us; their powers seemed limitless. I suppose I never thought to wonder what made them gods, because their differences were clear, then.”
He thinks of Calliope, then, and her talk of justice, of righteousness, of tearing down the gods. The bay had not known them to be cruel, the way that she had; certainly the water-gods had done nothing deserving of an uprising. But they’d had power, and the ability to give it and to take it away. Maybe that had been enough for the unicorn. Maybe it should have been, for him.
“I would ask them what gave them the right to judge us, I suppose,” he says, and then he shakes his head, and looks around, and remembers he is at a party.
“Come on,” he tells her, and tugs at a section of her golden mane. “We’re supposed to be merry here, I think, and this is surely not what they had in mind.”
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if you'll be my star*
