in sunshine and in shadow
It is late summer and the city is in full bloom, the boulevards thick with flowers, the markets full of wares, bright color and bright sound. For once Asterion does not miss the lazy drone of bees, or the sigh of the breeze in wildflowers, or the sun full and hot on his skin with the sea to his side; for once he enjoys the full-throated joy of his city.
As always he wears no sign of his station, no crown or circlet or intricate braids; he walks unadorned along the streets, drifting like a hummingbird from bouquet to bouquet of bright summer scenes. He buys a sweet roll from a beaming filly at a market stand, he compliments the myriad of richly colored rugs at the weavers, and when he heard the sound of a lute being tuned he turned to find the source of it.
Music had been one of the strangest and most wonderful things he’d discovered in Novus, and he rarely missed an opportunity to listen; now the bay is drawn to the player like a moth, too curious to notice when his path took him perilously near another equine doing the same thing.
Luckily she stops just before he sees her, and he stumbles back a step in turn, feeling a sheepish grin take shape on his own mouth. The king shakes his head at her apology, his forelock spilling dark across the star on his forehead. When he looks at her his gaze catches first on the flowers she wears, and then her silver eyes.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be used to them,” he answers her, and both his voice and the curve of his lips is wry. How long ago it seems he slept beneath a river of stars, with nothing but crickets and wind for company.
But the lilt of her voice continues, and now that there is some space between him he takes her in with his dark-eyed gaze, his smile lingering (however faint) when she continues her apology.
“So it seems,” he answers her with a raised brow, indicating her injured wing. His voice is light in jest, but as Asterion more closely studies her he can feel the sorrow pooling again within him. Ah, he wishes he were not so skilled at learning such wounds; he has seen so many, now, with Moira and Flora and Aislinn and Theo.
And now this stranger - he is careful not to touch her again, even admit the bustling crowd, but he gestures with his dark muzzle toward her snowy bandages. “Somebody did a good job binding that,” he tells her, but he does not ask who, and he does not ask why.
She may be in his city, but it is not yet his right to impose himself so. This does nothing, of course, to stop his wondering - and perhaps his gaze asks the question that his tongue cannot.
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