in sunshine and in shadow
Asterion, too, loves the sea.
Never only the danger of it - though that is always a part. Asterion, born a dreamer on a quiet shore, has always loved the mystery of it. The constant sameness and constant change, the way it is like the moon, always there but never alike from one night to the next. Sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar - sometimes still and sometimes ravenous.
The sea is his confidant and his courage, and now it is within him, too, in that that secret place where magic lives.
Tonight the king descends the path down to the shore in the dark. He is not afraid of missing his steps; he knows each one by heart. Already he can hear the sea and it is a hungry thing, sucking at the rocks, pulling at the sand, wanting and wanting. Asterion is not afraid of this, either; he wants, too, though he does not know quite what. That is why he comes - he has always found his answers somewhere in the pause between waves.
But the waters are too rough to step into; even in the starless dim he can see the white caps, pale as arctic wolves, all froth and hunger. So the bay follows Euryale’s footprints (though he does not yet know it) back inland, into the knotted, twisting roots of mangroves and jutting limbs of cypress, the outer reachers of the swamp. The smell of salt does not fall away but thickens, and sheltered from the wind it is almost warm, still damp - it feels to his half-slumbering mind like living in a monster’s mouth. Still he is unafraid, still he knows his way. Asterion has spent nearly two years untangling Terrastella’s secrets, though he knows (and is glad for the knowledge) that there are many more.
It is her laugh that alerts him to her: the bay stallion freezes, one dark ear twisting, his breath falling soft as he listens. It is not a laugh he knows, and neither does he know why it raises a strip of hair down the nape of his neck.
Still he turns toward it, stepping carefully now over the tangling limbs (he does not know them so well as the salt-spray rocks of the cliffs). When he sees her it is only because of her color - so bright, so strange, even beneath the shadows and the boughs and the starless night. Her face is as pale as a skull, and he tilts his own, his dark-eyed gaze steady on her, his breathing like the sigh of waves on a quieter beach.
“Hello,” the king says softly, wonderingly, into the heavy, briny air between them.
Maybe he ought to be more bold (or maybe more afraid), but that was never his way.
@Euryale hello!
