There is something almost familiar in the way the black stallion turns to him, all sharp angles and shadows-on-shadows. At first he searches his memories of Ravos, the first time he has considered that old and ravaged world in some time, but his thoughts surface with nothing.
He would remember this stranger if he’d met him before; he is sure of it. Perhaps it is only the look in his eye, the way it does not anticipate kindness. Asterion thinks of all those he has known from Before, and all those he has met from the mad and sick riftlands, and he wonders –
but he is still unused to the slow games of fate, and the stranger speaks before his thoughts can converge into anything more than dreamstuff thin as cobwebs.
Snow, he says, and if the bay thinks anything strange of it, he shows nothing. He only shifts his weight among the ferns and wildflowers and tilts his muzzle into the breeze.
“You may soon enough,” he says, that something in him always seeking to soothe, to thumb away the creases of foreheads and the corners of eyes. Usually it is he who steps back, and it feels strange to watch the stranger stumble; Asterion ducks his gaze away under the pretense of once more studying the sky.
It tells him nothing he doesn’t know: a break in the rain, the promise of evening. How long has it been that the clouds aren’t another threat among a hundred? Not long enough to feel safe.
His dark-eyed gaze turns back when the stranger speaks again, and for a long moment he is surprised into silence by what is said. Of all the things he might expect, it is not this – that someone could be so certain, to give voice to such a thing.
He is just a little jealous, but mostly he is glad.
“Then I think you do, too,” he answers at last, and now a smile curves the dark corners of his lips. “You’re lucky – it took me the better part of a year to figure out that much.” A year of dare I and can I, a year of learning a hundred lessons of loss and love and bitter regret.
Still, he thinks, he prefers to bed down in the saltgrass and the cedar than in any of a dozen perfumed rooms in the citadel. But that is hardly something he can hold against his home.
Now he holds the stranger steady in his gaze, as though by committing each line, each errant newborn feather to memory he can make his home as much this man’s as his own.
“I am Asterion, and I welcome you to Terrastella, the Dusk Court.” Maybe there is something he should add then, but the bay says nothing of who he is to this place. It is too new a weight, too fresh a bruise. Better by far to be simply himself, a man who finally feels he fits the name he bears.
Asterion still knows how to be a boy much more than a king.
@Tsuyu forgive this terrible jumble of words and YAY DUSK COURT
if you'll be my star*
