asterion*
Asterion understands now -- that she does not fit in this room, in this castle, in this court.
She is a like a lion in a library, a wolf in a rose garden. She is too big for the walls, for the soft firelight and laughter that arcs and echoes over them both. Calliope is a creature from a story far older than this one and oh -
for the first time he is afraid for her.
It is almost enough to send him trembling like something newborn, and his gaze rakes anew across the blood dark on her coat that glistens like rain. The bite of her words, fierce as a strike from her horn, steadies him.
“I remember,” he says, and it is almost a whisper even though it seems to fall hot as a coal from his ash-dark lips.
His eyes when they find hers again are burning, too, with such an intensity that nothing so sea-dark and secret should have. Now he does move closer, so that it is only the two of them, the rest of the world forgotten (oh, but not really, not when they all weigh on his heart heavy as a castle on sinking soil).
“I don’t know what to do,” he says, and maybe he, too, is ready to repent, for it is nothing but a confession. “I have never known what to do, Calliope.”
He says nothing more - for surely she knows it already. That her sureness, her cold fire, had been the reason he needed her and followed her. That it had been the reason he had loved her, too, the way any boy who dreamed of being a knight could not help but love a queen.
How far away it all seems now, when a boy saw a unicorn practicing for war, and she told him how the world could be.
@Calliope
She is a like a lion in a library, a wolf in a rose garden. She is too big for the walls, for the soft firelight and laughter that arcs and echoes over them both. Calliope is a creature from a story far older than this one and oh -
for the first time he is afraid for her.
It is almost enough to send him trembling like something newborn, and his gaze rakes anew across the blood dark on her coat that glistens like rain. The bite of her words, fierce as a strike from her horn, steadies him.
“I remember,” he says, and it is almost a whisper even though it seems to fall hot as a coal from his ash-dark lips.
His eyes when they find hers again are burning, too, with such an intensity that nothing so sea-dark and secret should have. Now he does move closer, so that it is only the two of them, the rest of the world forgotten (oh, but not really, not when they all weigh on his heart heavy as a castle on sinking soil).
“I don’t know what to do,” he says, and maybe he, too, is ready to repent, for it is nothing but a confession. “I have never known what to do, Calliope.”
He says nothing more - for surely she knows it already. That her sureness, her cold fire, had been the reason he needed her and followed her. That it had been the reason he had loved her, too, the way any boy who dreamed of being a knight could not help but love a queen.
How far away it all seems now, when a boy saw a unicorn practicing for war, and she told him how the world could be.
@Calliope
