[P] I had a dream,

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   “I don’t see how it can get much worse,” he says dryly, but oh! he knows there is always worse. Eik does, too, and the knowledge of it lies dark as a pool in Asterion’s gaze when it goes to his friend’s. What is one more obliteration, to a god? Still, his mouth lifts into a faint smile, a cloud-shadow on the sea. “So yes, I think it is.” Perhaps hope would have been a better word than think, for the two are a fair amount different - but Asterion is tired of only hoping, and the way it never seems to be enough. When Eik first pushes his words into Asterion’s mind, at first gentle as dandelion wisps on a June breeze and later more insistent, the bay look to his friend with surprise, with wonder. Quickly, though, he closes his eyes, lets those waves of thoughts (for they are something like words, something like the gray’s familiar voice, but unformed, or maybe that is just the way things are said when there is no wind to blow them away and no forms for them to echo off of) wash over him. His heart beats harder, kicking up a rhythm like a man running down a hill, but it is not fear and it is not anxiousness - it is something else, some reaching, nearly-there memory. A familiarity that he at first thinks is the gods (had they sometimes spoken this way, in Ravos? he thinks they had) but then realizes with the certainty of a sunrise is his twin. No wind, only warmth, all sounds muffled but the slow current of their mother’s blood and the steady waves of their mother’s breathing and a vague sense of the world beyond. A place he shared with someone he hardly knew and yet loved. And as with all his thoughts of Talia, now, sorrow and loss colors this memory - and that too extends to Eik, for Solterra is so distant, all the world too big and strange and sometimes a specific kind of lonely that the gray man eases. Asterion pushes the thought away. It is foolish, he thinks, to miss his friend as they stand together, only just reunited. ’Thank you for sharing with me,’ he thinks, imaging the words blown toward Eik with a breath, a boat borne on a current flowing - where? His lashes flutter against his cheek as he opens his eyes. Maybe it is good that Cirrus interrupts, for the bay’s dreaming, adventure-hungry mind is stirring, woken by the knowing that there are more worlds to explore than the one they stand in. The way he and the gull share one another’s thoughts is different from Eik’s newborn magic; they are so different, horse and bird, and despite the distance their words can carry the only waters they splash in are shallow enough to still be sun-warmed. He stands, watching Eik watch Cirrus and feeling her webbed feet on his back, the little pin-pricks of her nails, the shadow-light weight of her.   As for her - he doesn’t make it easy, she thinks in response, wondering if this other horse can hear - though his words had reached her well enough to make her ruffle her feathers, tilt her head. Cirrus is not sure she cares for the intrusion of yet another alien voice, but she is a curious thing, too, almost as much as the king she stands on. At Eik’s next thought she turns her dark eye back on him, would smile if a bird could smile, thinks only yes. And then she tugs at a strand of silver in Asterion’s mane and flutters to the railing, where she closes her eyes against the cold breeze off the water. Asterion is still grinning, though it fades into something far quieter at the word king. When he curls his chin to his chest there is something almost sheepish about it, though a matching mischief is in his eyes as they meet Eik’s, and he laughs outright as the man bows. “I prefer friend,” he says, “and you look as ridiculous as I feel, when you do that.” As the gray straightens again, the bay reaches over and nudges his shoulder like a shove between boys. But he sobers at the mention of his magic. Now it is his turn to look out to sea, as the breeze pulls at their hair, tasting of salt and coming spring. When he does glance at Eik, it is to raise a brow, an offering to his thoughts, but only if the man wishes to hear. I can draw back the water from the shore until the length of it is bare to the sun, he thinks, and pictures it as he does. I can make a wall of it high enough that we wouldn’t be looking down on it at all. I can call up a storm of driving rain. But Denocte has suffered those things too recently for me to bring them again, however harmlessly. Yet- At first they look like nothing more than sea-foam, the white crest of a roll of waves; but slowly they begin to take shape, a group of creatures that rise like naiads from the shore. Spray becomes wings, foam becomes feathers, the gleam of water the gleam of an eye. A flock of terns that rise from the water and cast no shadow over it, that dart and dive and weave among themselves, a dance as graceful and swift as a current. There is no sound; even the true birds fall quiet, cowed or awed by the strangeness of it. And when at last they dissolve back into the sea, Asterion’s face is wet with salt and water, sea-spray or tears, and even he cannot say which. @Eik hi yes I'm genuinely sorry for the length of this but I can't restrain myself with you, apparently