stars hide your fires
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What irony is it that they are both caught in the wonders of their memories? Of a land that was once, but is no longer beautiful. They yearn together, each leaning in, pulled together as if by a tide of memories that drifts them on and on in Terrastella’s story of woe.
Her love for the Ilati swamp is something instinctive, it thrums with the beat of her heart, it sings with the sound of leaves rustling in her ears and strokes away her anxiety with the brush of the wind… Her love is something intangible and yet felt, so deeply, so completely.
Leto stands before Asterion, a girl torn, split between stars and terra firma. It is a bitter irony that she does not have wings to fly, that the pull of earth was enough to overcome the lift of the stars. So she looks up, as she always has, the Ilati girl with a flyaway mind. The creature with stars in her eyes and stardust in her soul. Her sigils glow, as if lit by the sun, glittering in idle candlelight like the stars twinkling in midnight’s lull.
He stands close and like a tree in the wind, she bows away but all about her is a changing cage of bodies. She is a star – used to a thousand legions between her and any other being. But here she cannot be that lone star. So she stands with muscles held taught beneath her skin, her slender neck a graceful, subtle, polite curve away from his, even as he watches her and thinks of home, even as she too sees him and dreams of what her home was and what it might never be again.
Have you been watching me, Leto, to know what is precious to me?
How quickly her gaze returns to his – enough to set her bells chiming and they are clanging cymbals in her surprised ears. Light sends shadows pooling in the orbits of her mask and from within their sunken depths her dark eyes glitter like embers catching light.
“Yes.” Leto confesses, though to her it is no confession at all. She watched him indeed. She watched as his lashes fell to fan across his cheek . She watched as joy smoothed the lines of pain etched upon his face. “I watched you enough to hope…” The girl then adds, momentarily doubtful, uncharacteristically so. Her gaze sweeps like moonlight to the tiled floor beneath them.
The bodies about them jostle and the music is still a drumbeat, so close to tribal that her heart begins to beg, that her body aches to dance – but this hall will not do! Not when the stars of Denocte and the trees of Terrastella call to her like sirens.
Her heart begins to ache and she begins to feel anew the uncomfortable press of bodies, the majesty and ostentatiousness of Denocte’s Grand Hall in this night of celebration. Leto was not made for palaces or grand events and so, when her king finally speaks of what he saw (when his eyes closed), it is both a balm and salt upon the wound of her discontent.
Then Leto stands, as still as the moon looks within the sky; so still but moving fast, fast, faster than one could ever begin to comprehend. She gazes at him as wild and silver as the light the sun casts upon its sister moon. Within that light she seizes him as though he were a saving rock in the sea-foam of his own gaze; she was not made for oceans either. (Leto was not made for many, many things).
Her eyes do not close as he speaks, but within the dark of those skull orbits she sees all he speaks of. It is a memory for her too and it traps her breath within her lungs, setting her heart pounding in the slim cage of her chest. Yet still she does not move (even while she spins and spins and spins).
Leto hangs upon the longing of Asterion’s voice and arches her nape at the fear creeping into his gaze. He asks of their home and silently Leto drinks in her Terrastellan King (his skin of earth and night and the stars that scatter across his torso and hair). He is as any shed-star would be yet there is water in her eyes and it is a terrible, terrible whisper into her soul, an omen in her ears that she does not understand. Leto does not recoil and instead says as bold as sunlight shattering night, “It is time you came home, Asterion.”
For she will not tell him, not when he has eyes to look. Leto moves past him, already they were close as shadows and, like night, the black of her compliments the stars of his skin. Her body curves a graceful arc around his, close enough to feel the heat of their skin, close enough to imagine what it might be to touch and yet far enough to never touch at all. “The imagining is always worse than the seeing.” The starfire girl offers as she steps past Asterion and it is an invitation – as if the whole night was, as if her presence at the ball was only to invite him home.
Then she moves on, weaving through the crowds like a dance of planets. Bodies shift close, but of course, they are never near enough to touch - for Leto is grace and she slips as quick as water from where they might have met. Then, she pauses, her bone mask tilting to cast a look at him, to see if he might follow.
@Asterion
