Y
ou may soon enough,” the starry stranger says, and Tsuyu has near forgotten the slow train of conversation, anyway. Still, he blinks, crooks his mouth in the shape of something hopeful, and glances away – thoughtful. “Then I think you do, too.”
Truthfully – and he dare not utter it, not to the spangled stranger, not even once – he just yearns to belong. It could be here: or it could be the emerald beaches of Tartuga, or the burnished fields of Ferraden. It could be in the peaking top of an ancient, cobblestoned castle, entwined beneath emblazoned green covers. It could be where his svart pojke is, black like night, encompassed under the knotted fingers of a Peachleaf tree – touching. Adulating.
Though – and he turns towards the citadel now, it’s summits striking and proud – there is something. A beauty that tugs at him, tender. A rumble of commotion at his feet, louder at dark, the guffaw of activity that comes with bustling night-markets. Certainly, it’s worlds away from the doorstep of Mont Nuit – where he lingered so long in the slopes of old ruins that his timeworn body became them.
Once, he had loitered in a palace just like it: dripping with gossamer, emblazoned placards, streamers of white and gold. He had clung to Gael with a fearsomeness, trembling with expectancy, fearful to dawdle too close to golden tables lest he knock ancient, priceless heirlooms off them. He felt alien to its marble corners, a hundred rooms each ornamented with ivory candles and lustred Egyptian sheets.
He imagines he’d feel just as alien amongst the covenants of Terrastella’s castle, a dark shadow breaking the sanctuary of an otherwise holy, scintillating place.
“Asterion,” he repeats, tasting the sound of it: is it familiar? Is anything familiar? He searches for a face but unearths instead a sea of strangers, melancholy and shadowed. “Oh – Thank you,” he finishes, soft, an addendum, turning towards him and in his expression is something like gratitude.
The day wanes, slow, pink and gold ribbons turning to dark navy and peacoat: it turns to dusk amid them, bathing them in warm blue. In the distance, the yellow glow of lanterns bloom like lilies, lit one by one.
“I don’t know where to begin,” he admits – too socially ham-fisted to recognise he’s speaking in hazy riddles, threads of wispy and lucid things. “It’s so different – here,” he finishes, eluding to duskier things, darker places: forests of black that stretch endlessly and snare you in them, smiling.
TSUYU.
