[P] give us a little love

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   At once he regrets the word, lovely - while each individual line and the image they conspire to create might be so, as the full image takes shape it is clear it is anything but. I could have put that fire out, if only I were there, he thinks, and tonight there is no Cirrus to rebuke him, to stir his thoughts away from where they carve down and down into the bedrock of his heart. Oh, he must be in love with guilt, he must long to play the martyr - but he thinks of what Eik had asked him, about the responsibility that came with power. What good had his done? What use, when it lessened no suffering? He can feel his magic churning in him now, a Charybdis fed on his sorrow and shame, and if he is not careful he knows his body will begin to weep like Niobe. Instead he only sighs as she turns the page. It feels strange, to watch her as she writes - like spying on someone’s thoughts half-formed. And so he turns his attention to the room, soft and cozy in the dwindling light, and on the window outside, where the sky is quiet and bruised with dusk. Only when her pen falls silent does he look back and read. And smile, too, though his heart pangs at the word father. What might his have taught him, if the man had stayed to see him born? No studying, surely, and no art - until Novus he was a feral thing, a creature of nature in a world with no buildings, no roads, no art but what the earth made and magic wrought. He cannot quite miss that world, not now, not when he wonders what voice Fiona might have had there, with no pen and paper to make clear her words. “He sounds a wise man,” Asterion says, and the curve of his own lips surprises him with its sincerity. “And what did you study? All my mother had us learn was the pattern of weather as it swept in over the ocean, and the wonder of the stars, and to dream.” The bay might have said more, but he closes his teeth on the words, almost abruptly; all that dreaming and dreaming, and where had it gotten Aridela? For all he knows she is still alone on her beach, happy perhaps, building a world of wishes. As for his twin, oh - dreaming had done nothing for her but show her all the things she could never reach. And he, in all his years of telling stories to himself, had never once dreamed himself a king. @Fiona <3