He is no longer a dreaming boy with starshine in his eyes but a man, weary, uncertain of how best to bear the burden thrust upon him. Asterion hardly recognizes himself, not even the private rooms of his thoughts, and so perhaps it is not strange that he is half-numb to the wonder of the Night Court and its new queen.
Little of her marks her status as she makes her approach, but for the bay stallion the horn on her brow is sign enough. What surprises him, catching his eye, is a shimmer like moonlight on the sea, and he looks to her scales, to her rusted and winding chain.
Asterion has never known a unicorn to be weak, and already he feels that Isra will be no different. It is not difficult, then, to picture her penning the words she’d replied to him with: she walked with the same kind of grace she wrote with.
When he dips his slender head to her, it is not as a king but as a man that he gives his respect.
“Even if we’d been able, we could never refuse a letter like that.” He had not wept, as he’d read it – but even in his bone-weariness relief and gratitude had carried him like a tide, there in the quiet of a castle turning cold with winter. Asterion finds that some of the feeling is still with him, pulling his lips into a lean smile that has been all but absent since the summit.
When she steps nearer and he smells something of the salt and promise of the sea, he thinks of home before anything else. This surprises him enough that he does not move away, shy as a deer, from her touch, but lets his shoulder almost-brush against hers, lighter than a shadow as her people wind forward with blankets as warm and welcoming as their smiles.
Oh, how strange it feels to let his misgivings wash away like mud carried to sea by clean water.
Her name draws him back, verifying what he already guessed, and he thinks that he could never come up with enough pretty, earnest words to show his heartfelt thanks. It was never his strength.
“I am Asterion, and already in your debt.” His gaze touches her, soft and dark, and then turns away when the velvet of her muzzle finds him; his weariness, his sorrow, is replaced by a new wash of nerves, swift as a stream in spring.
Around them their citizens mingle, tentative greetings between strangers and warm ones between old friends, and Asterion blinks away a limn of silver from his eyes. It stings in the cold, and he prays it is lost in the deeper shadows between the firelight.
Welcome home, she says, and again the scent of brine and sea washes over him, and he meets her eyes that shift in the semidark like the waves beneath a storm.
It is not home – it is a betrayal to think of it so. Even to think of his childhood shores makes guilt twist, small and dark in his stomach. But Asterion cannot find it in himself to be sorry when he holds her gaze, and the bonfires flicker and dance behind her. “I’d heard it was beautiful. I see why it is so beloved.”
And yet he does not take another step – he waits to follow her, wondering what else might be nothing like he’d imagined.
and hardly ever what we dream
@Isra
