[P] I had a dream,

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   When Eik first begins to answer his question, a slip of a smile crosses the bay’s face. Oh, how he recognizes that uncertainty, the way there is no easy response, not anymore. Too much has happened, is happening still, and there has been no time to sift himself for answers. Feelings had been pushed aside for needs - for sleep, for food, for medicine, for just a little bit of faith. Maybe it is a luxury, to be able to stand somewhere safe and ask how are you, and answer truthfully. Maybe it means they will be alright. But his smile is gone again as Eik speaks of Solterra. He ought to have written, he thinks, but he had been so caught up in the survival of his own people, and the clouds were too heavy and dark to see what was happening over the desert. There is no time to say anything, no time to offer sympathies that could be nothing more than words - when Eik speaks of himself, Asterion’s focus sharpens, his muzzle dropping as he listens. Not once does he imagine his friend is mad, much like Eik does not suspect a trick of himself; he thinks instead of the gods. Of the changes in himself, a magic returned. “I have wondered,” he says, each word careful as though he is just trying out the idea, “with the return of the gods, if they brought magic with them.” It sounds foolish when he says it, but he does not feel abashed in front of Eik as he might have with Marisol, or Israfel. All he knows is his own magic appeared after Vespera did, as though the gods’ coming left room for something else to slip through, too. These thoughts scatter like light on water at the gray’s offer, and Asterion meets his gaze again, unable to help the way his own smile is at once shy and eager as a boy’s. “I would like that.” There is no world, no spate of disasters, no evil or danger or gods that could change the way he feels about magic - a wonder that verges on awe, even at his own. It is a miracle and a gift and a mystery and he thinks all these things, and wonders if his friend can catch any of them (and what they might look like if he can, if thoughts and feelings look like color or smoke or the sea). When Eik asks Who is it? - naturally enough, as they are standing now at the edge of a balcony that overlooks the sea and the crumbling stone beneath - the king only grins. “A friend,” he says, and thinks Cirrus, come meet Eik. Perhaps the gray can see her already, in Asterion’s mind, the big gull with her dark head, her beak vivid against the black. They don’t have to wait long, either way; she has been close, drifting along the slate cliffs and leaping spray, indistinguishable from the other sea-birds. But now she sweeps toward them, angular wings wide, laughing her throaty gull’s laugh as she passes close enough overhead for the gust of her movement to stir their hair in the salt-smelling breeze. “This is Cirrus,” Asterion says, grinning like a boy even as his heart tightens with nerves (oh, he is silly, wanting them to like one another like anyone introducing two people they love.) By now she has landed on the bay’s back, and she turns a dark eye, gleaming like a smooth wet pebble on the beach, to the gray stallion and thinks Hello. @Eik <3