A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
He dips his head in response at her thanks, saying nothing and instead only settling in to help. So often in the past weeks had he put the strain on his magic and his courage; it feels almost strange to work his physical muscles, to lift and hold and carry.
When she tells him she is new an expression of surprise glances across his face, brief as a shimmer of sunlight on the sea. “It’s doubly kind of you to help, then,” he tells her, and thinks that not many newcomers would so readily help a court they knew nothing of.
Initially he’d intended to do most of his work today replanting and watering, as he’d done in Ravos so long ago, but as she finishes with her load he finds a pile of yoked baskets along a stretch of the wall. Soon he, too, is piling stones, using his telekinesis to place them in the wicker baskets.
But he stays nearby - close enough to catch her question, and let his lips twist in a wry smile as he considers how to answer it.
“So many things,” he says, finally. “If you mean the gate, that goes well before my time. It was only recent that it was torn down. Before that, at the end of the last regime, the gate was closed after a few….incidents between Denocte and the other courts. It must have been Queen Isra’s decision to tear it down.” He should ask the unicorn about that, he thinks; he admires the decision, but he also wonders if she has had any resentment from it.
There were many that did not like to see traditions abandoned, much less dismantled stone by stone.
“If you mean the disasters…all that is known is the gods appeared just before they began.”
Asterion glances back at the draft, admiring again each line of her muscle, the way she bore her burden with grace. If she had been a wanderer, then Night Court was lucky she’d arrived when she did.
This makes him wonder just where she had come from - he can’t remember the last time he heard news from another world. With the weight of his own baskets now balanced across his shoulders, he turns to follow the stranger, his glance skipping over her features like a stone on a quiet sea before settling back on the uneven ground at his feet.
“How did you come to be here? I doubt you expected this is what you’d be doing, first thing in another land.”
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