asterion*
Like it is magic, he can feel the change in both of them at the sound of her laugh: worry easing, shoulders loosening, maybe hearts sighing softer, too. Asterion only has time to be grateful for it, and none to think deeper, none to wonder if their hearts beat the same rhythm, if their dreams reached for the same things.
Any of these things he might have thought of are forgotten when her eyes turn to his own, when he searches for the sunlight in her bright and burning gaze. There might be no snow falling, then, and no Night Court and no Novus at all - only the two of them, frosting on a cheek, stories given to the wind to carry out to sea.
Moira Tonnerre is a promise that everything will be well, for her story could never end here. Not in blood, or rain, or sorrow. She is made for something else.
I am nothing like you deserve, he might have said, but Asterion has learned well from his sister not to protest against girls with starlight in their eyes and flames in their heart. Instead he says nothing, only breathing in the scent of her, only listening to the lull of her voice as she unspools a tale heavy as peridotite. Still her words are bright as diamonds.
“To try is all any of us can do,” he says, and when he blinks he sees bodies of his own, drowned and muddy or battered to bits or suffocated beneath black dirt. Asterion’s sleep is no more easy; he is a dreamer no longer, not with nightmares chasing him beneath the thin smile of the moon. “At least you beat them back.”
The bay doesn’t answer her again until after she pulls away - unless the look in his sea-dark eyes counted as a response, the spark of a summertime memory there despite the grim line of his lips. The cold finds him most boldly in the place where her shoulder had pressed against his, and he shivers as he follows her to the golden halos of lamplight. “Too many tales, maybe,” he says, matching his steps to hers. Already he misses the nearness of her, though there is still little room between them.
“It rained for weeks, until the hills gave way from mud above and tunnels below. We saved dozens from the currents, but were not without our losses either. You already know the sickness that follows such a thing.” A sharp inhale; he welcomes the cold that burns in his throat, then, for it is a brighter feeling than such dark memories. “At least we had no birds of storms. Our strange beasts were gophers, oversized but not, luckily, violent.” One of only a few blessings in the strange turmoil since the Summit.
He inhales then, gaze moving to her softly, almost tentatively. “And Florentine was injured. She will recover, but…she named me sovereign in her stead.”
It is only the second time he has spoken it out loud (and oh, how different it feels from when he told Raymond in the solemn quiet of the Terrastella throne room). Asterion had been so nervous to tell her -
but now he realizes that, for him, it changes nothing at all.
@
