Sometimes it is easy for him to forget that they are social animals - that in his beating heart, the thing of blood and sinew and not of seawater and dreamstuff, he craves touch, craves togetherness, hungers to belong more than he does for food or for drink.
He does not think of it now, either, but his heart knows, and it sighs as their tails entertwine, as their shadows mingle, as they walk together into the night.
For a long time there is only silence, and as it is with Eik, Asterion feels no rush to fill it. It is not an empty kind of thing, after all, but a breathing one - filled with shadows and starlight and flickering flame, with the tide of their breathing and the tide of the sea. Still, when she breaks it he leans in, bending toward the start of her story like a bloom to the sun, and he sighs, content, too quietly to hear.
As she speaks he looks down, and such is her magic and his dreaming that the path does her bidding: it changes beneath them to the river-course of a galaxy of stars, to a hundred unnameable constellations, and then to a dragon with flashing eyes and mica teeth. Over them drifts the smoke of a dozen bonfires, only strengthening the illusion, and the bay king dares not interrupt the net her story weaves.
(He remember now, though dimly - his thoughts had been so full of other things, frosting on cheeks, a girl dancing - the story that the unicorn had told in Delumine. There were dragons in it, too.)
In no time at all they are at the doors of the castle and Asterion stands before them and marvels. They are nothing like Terrastella’s, cypress wood from ancient swamp-trees gleaming dark and dutiful.
He has never been inside them, but when his gaze drifts down to find hers watchful on him he pushes away the weight of the past the way he might push back a wave with his magic. Asterion listens to her words, lets them settle in his heart, and thinks oh how her people will love her. There is no envy in it, only awe.
And then he follows her inside, and says “When I first came to Novus I was afraid of nothing at all.”
It sounds like the beginning of a story, but he never offers more. What are his words after hers? A boy playing a tin whistle after listening to a musician whose songs could make the clouds weep rain.
His curiosity rises in him as the great hall swallows them up and it feels like a friend from childhood he can hardly recognize. The king wants to drink everything in like he has never wanted wine or mead, wants to study each room full of pooling moonlight like he could never study a book. And when she speaks his gaze goes to her, soft and full with wondering, forgetting for a moment its sorrow, and he studies her, too.
“Not like I was,” he says at first, and then tilts his muzzle toward his chest with something like boyish shyness and admits “but yes, always, lately.”
and hardly ever what we dream
@Isra
