The outskirts are a haven for Asterion, too.
How long, now, has he made himself a life in Novus? A year, at least, of sun and rain and love and pain and most of all of learning. He knows, now, what it is to belong to something other than yourself - how it hurts to give, hurts more to have the things you offer turned away. How the ash of things past will always be bitter in his mouth, no matter how bright and fine they once burned.
He is a dreaming boy no longer.
But today he lets himself pretend. Today he slips from the citadel and all his duties, from the bedside of the injured Florentine, from the thoughts that circle him more doggedly than black flies. Even Cirrus, his familiar, he sends away, and the gull’s thoughts fade to a murmur as she wings out over the endless blue sea.
The bay stallion is as ever unadorned, his dark mane twisted by wind and the twilight bridling of his coat faded under the daylight. For now he is no one, and he is grateful for it.
This is how he finds the stranger, a shadow amongst late-blooming wildflowers, his scent disguised by their bobbing heads. “Oh, hello,” he says softly, his dark eyes tracing over lines dark as pitch, and wings with the faint iridescent sheen of a raven’s. At last he follows the stallion’s gaze upward and over the spill of foliage, the reaching branches of trees. “What do you see?”
@tsuyu
if you'll be my star*
