in sunshine and in shadow
The salt is always in his blood, even when it is not worn on his dark lips.
Asterion’s breath is the sigh of a slumbering sea, and his veins are only currents, pulling inexorably down to his dreamer’s heart. The moonlight has long ago left its mark on his skin in the strands of silver in his hair, the dapple of dusk on his shoulder and hip. The king carries with him the sea - but oh, is that cold, thrashing darkness within him, too?
Against that backdrop of crashing waves, dulled but not diminished by the tangle of root and leaves behind them, Asterion watches her approach.
The bay is not familiar with a danger such as hers. He has faced monsters, he has faced snakes, but he has never faced anything where such intentional beauty and danger meet. Her laugh, her smile, the blood on her breast (which first he’d taken for only moonlight on another shade of red across her foreign hide) - all of these encourage his heart to beat faster, his eyes to be wide and wary. Yet Asterion does not give ground; he only tucks his chin nearer to his chest, watching her with a gaze darker than the space between the stars.
He may yet be a dreamer, but he is not so foolish a one as he was a year ago. Girls under the moonlight are not so tempting as once they were, especially when they smile sharp with iron, with blood.
Who are you?
Her words are like jasmine, sweet and dark and soft at the edges like petals. One of his slender ears flicks back - the pulling, rough-throated sound of a wave retreating from a cave in the rock, the cry of a shore-bird. He thinks it is strange, to hear a gull after dark. But his eyes never stray from her.
“I am Asterion,” he says, as simply as he has always given his name. He is no king, in this moment; just a man alone beneath the moonlight, his footprints swallowed up by the waves. Even Cirrus is sleeping, her thoughts apart from his own.
Euryale, she names herself, and he tilts his head. It is not a name he might have expected form her; it puts him in mind of a songbird, yur-a-lee, and he wants to try it out on his own tongue. But she has come nearer (though he does not remember her taking a step), and though they are of a height something about her, perhaps the bone-pale of her face, the blood on her chest, makes her seem to loom up out of the dark.
Asterion has heard the legends, the tales of horses who live in the sea, who change once within the waves. The ones who do not eat oat-cakes and sleep in the city. And he wonders, oh he wonders, if he has finally met one.
Even so he cannot summon fear. There is still a boy in him, a boy who dreams of being a knight, and that boy says adventure when the rest of the night whispers run.
Instead he extends his neck, his breath spilling warm between them, and says “Are you one of them - the kelpies that come to shore beneath the moon to feed?”
@Euryale
