Though he retains his composure as the doors swing shut, enclosing them, his skin still shudders as it might beneath a fly. And when the god speaks – though Asterion has expected it, though he has spoken face-to-face with gods before, who after melted into mist or vanished into the sea – he still flinches.
He has seen stranger things, but not for some time, and his senses still try to deny the truth of it.
An ear twitches, uneasy, at the god’s questions. Invisible but accessible - that is how Marisol had described Tempus, but now Asterion wonders so many things. Does the god not know the cause? Does he not wonder that his most devout are the quickest, the proudest, to sin?
He is not the only one to wonder. He only watches, dark-eyed and still, as first Bexley speaks, and then the others. Their words stir his blood (hers especially), a palpable anger he imagines he could taste. Each of them speak in generalities, saying nothing specific of recent events, until Eik.
He is glad to follow after his friend, though he does not smile as he looks from the pale man to Reichenbach. The memory of his admiration lives in him still, curled in the hollow of his lungs. For a long moment his gaze lingers on the Night King, though the way his heart stutters and trips is not for him but for the gypsy girl who stands beside him. He cannot forget that wicked curve of lips, how different her voice sounded now from the times it had shaped his name.
He sees no need to tally sins; all those gathered know, and if the god does not, surely he is no god at all. Asterion turns his attention back to the statue of Tempus.
What is the cause of these squabbles?
“It is hard to forgive when a transgressor will not acknowledge their wrongdoing.” His words are slow, and quiet, and seem to him to be caught like gossamer in the tight circle of trees and earth and too many bodies.
He thinks that it would not matter where they stand; any place would be stifling in the presence of such a god, such a gathering.
“But I don’t think there’s anyone here who does not desire peace.”
Especially, he thinks, if the world is to change.
Asterion has seen changes before, strange things the gods of Ravos themselves had not understood, and could not control. He knows, now, what those changes had led to – a land sick with magic, diseased with it. Dying and starving and ready to take.
Almost he shivers, but he thinks of Florentine, of Calliope, of Cyrene and Raymond and Eik. Of all the horses he counts as friends, fierce and brave, and he among them, unafraid.
ooc: mm yes long and pointless rambling
if you'll be my star*
