It was never belonging that Asterion sought. Heroes, in his boyish, dreaming mind, did not belong - they were solitary figures, always wandering. They sought adventure, and quests, and so he did too, always looking for something over the next rise.
Giving his heart to the Dusk Court had been an accident as much as a choice, but it isn’t one he yet regrets.
His name is still a surprise to hear on foreign lips, though he was the one who gave it: it’s a wonder to him how it always sounds a little different, the way each mouth shapes the syllables. The bay does not mind that no name is given in response; in how many meetings has he been guilty of not sharing his own? But there is nothing he can say to those words of gratitude when he feels he’s given nothing to earn it.
Well has he learned that words could mean no more than mist, however sweetly spoken.
It’s so different here.
“I thought that too, at first,” he says, and his smile is softer than dusk, softer than sea-foam. In that smile is a memory of himself, new on these shores, and thinking how soft it was in comparison with Ravos. How tame, how safe. And oh, how he has been proven wrong – yet that smile lingers. “And I suppose in many ways it’s true, depending on where you’re from. One surprise to me, for instance, was the castle.”
He looks toward it then, the seat of his court, the soft way it comes alive as the darkness gathers around them. Even from here he can smell the slight iodine cast to the air, and pictures the seabirds all settling in to sleep on their cliffside nests. When he glances back at the stranger (a black rich as velvet in the growing night) a question colors his gaze.
“If you wish to begin there, I could show you.”
@Tsuyu
if you'll be my star*
