stars hide your fires
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Above the stars are keening, their siren cries falling away beneath the thrum of drum music. The girl dances upon the earth that beats like a heart and the earth that echoes with revelry and wonder. She does not look up now, not since she saw the stars falling, not since her white blood began to warm - more sun than the star itself.
The king comes with stars upon his skin. He moves below streaming banners that pour out like the ichor of gods, bathing their worshippers in a thousand colours. Upon his face his mask is pooling, curling silver. Though Leto dances, she watches him come bearing the reflection of her white-bright eyes. Asterion arrives as stars might, resplendent and commanding, planet-struck and comet-bright. Beneath her gasping throat, her heaving sides, those painted sigils he watched shift like water and magic. They glitter as fresh snow beneath a newborn sun and how stark they are upon the black, black of her skin.
His gaze is a fingers touch upon them and she shivers for each is sacred, each has made her skin sacred and also nothing of worth compared to the value they hold with her god. Leto is a canvas to the art of her people and the space for stars to hide their fires. Stars fall to her, summoned like rain upon the desert and though she watches the Dusk king she listens to their starfires shift.
Her skull mask tilts, pearls and bone gleaming, illuminated in the sea of candles and nebulae light that makes up the grand room. Feathers atop her mask sway as rushes might, pointing like clock hands, counting down the seconds she holds him in her silver-fire gaze. Her smile curls eternal and delightful across her lips. It is as sharp comet tails and wicked with fierce promise. But it is gone like a clap of lightning and the girl, black as night arches her nape with pride.
“They shall not break us.” Leto means of the gods and of her home so recently sunk beneath water, rife with disease and only just recovering. Her starfire eyes are full of ghosts, of those Ilati who did not survive, of the multitudes of drowned Dusk citizens who now walk its moonstruck lands as trapped souls.
Leto smiles again, a black star swallowing light. Her sigils shine like splits in the very fabric of her skin. But oh how those runes bind her together with liturgy and religion. She does not tell him of her shed-star blood (though that is the reason she stands beneath the Night Court sky this eve), not when he asks of the Ilati.
The air is rich with alcohol, the hum of it is in his veins, in the glimmer of his eyes beneath his mask. Leto might ask of the joy in his blood, the taste of liquor upon his tongue, if not for the tide of revelry-filled dancers that push and pull at the king and his subject.
“What wonders have you seen tonight, Asterion?” Leto asks, betraying that she is a girl of the fringes who knows nothing of how to address kings when stars are upon her tongue and earth-magic in her soul.
@Asterion
