A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
There was somebody there, but she was hardly in a position to speak to the boy with fish-scales on his belly and adventure in his eyes.
Cirrus was among the other gulls along the cliffs, riding the summer breezes and letting the salt-scented wind blow through her feathers. She was hunting, a bit, but she was also watching the way she often did, her eyes bright and unnaturally keen against the dark of her face.
She heard the boy cry out, and swooped nearer to watch him. On white wings she circled, curious as he flipped through his book, as he finally bed down to nap. Oh, he was careless! As soon as he was asleep she was gone with a few flaps of her wings, already calling down the bond between her and a bay stallion with dusky stars on his skin.
Asterion (who was near the sea as often as he could be, now they were back in Terrastella) came at once, but not only because Cirrus told him of a lonely boy along the cliffs. It was her description of him that had him loping through the summer grasses, the wind in his hair. There were memories stirring in him, ones as old as ashes of a dead fire, and the more he wondered the quicker his heart beat, a hopeful bird against his ribs.
Ravos was so long ago, and his time there spent only as a wanderer - but he remembered meeting a boy, beside the sea, dusted with scales and alight with adventure.
The king slows to a walk when at last the boy comes into sight, a pale lump among the wildflowers nodding their heads. Cirrus perches on a rock not far away, but for a moment the bay only stands, watching the colt breathe, and there is something like slow sorrow in his dark eyes.
They had been of an age, the last time he’d seen him - and it is growing more difficult to remember the boy he had been, the one who dreamed of being a knight, the one who wanted to save the world. Now the years have slipped by him, touching him with their cold hands, changing him -
but not the lost boy. He looks the same.
At last Asterion steps near, and he smiles in spite of himself, at the sight of the boy dozing heedless in the grass. He wishes (as he often does) that Florentine were with him. At the thought the gull looks up at him, and there is something a little sad in her eyes, too.
“Pan?” the bay king asks softly, and waits for him to wake.
@Pan <3
