asterion,
For once he does not let the anchor of his duty keep him home; for once he closes his thoughts even to Cirrus and ranges out, alone, the way he once used to every night.
Once such solitude had only given him time to tell himself stories of all the deeds he would accomplish, and an aching-sweet kind of loneliness, the kind that came always with youth and folly. Now it grants him a kind of peace, and for that he is grateful.
He had not expected to come across anything strange; only himself and the sky spread above him, a map of stars he has once more learned to read. But it is daylight still, daylight that makes bare the trail before him of broken and dead things, blackened by some unknown touch. Asterion shivers in the summer light, and pauses to trace his muzzle just above clover like ash, and then continues.
Now he is hunting, too.
Even so he does not expect the pool. Does not expect the brightness of it that sings against his eyelids even when he closes them tight; does not expect the firebirds that arc overhead and sing like no other creatures he knows. Most of all he does not expect the way that this strange pool reacts to him - not to his water-magic, but to something like his blood.
When he tries to shape it, tries to raise it, it seems to laugh at him and spill away as through his fingers - but even so it is laughing I know you, I know you. The mystery is enough to make him draw nearer yet -
and that is when he sees the girl.
She breaks from the golden pool like a new god birthed of ichor, dark crimson with the wet; he recognizes her at once from the meeting, but it is that deeper recognition - the lightning stripe that cleaves her narrow face, the scythe of her tail - that has him catch his breath and hold it. I know you, I know you, sings his blood like the water, but Asterion will not go in.
He has heard enough tales of the riftlands, and he has always listened to those well.
Be careful! he wants to cry, but what harm there may be has surely already been done, and he remembers the way she had looked at him, at the meeting. Like he was no stranger but an enemy.
And so he says nothing, and only watches, and disobeys the way the water begs him just to touch, just to taste.
king of dusk.
@Thana | notes: a response to her random event post
