asterion,
If he had not seen her at the meeting, if their eyes had not met (hers so cutting, so bright) then he would think her a dream as she walks up and out of the water.
It streams from her like molten gold and he thinks again of something being born, of something beginning. Even for his recognition he is not sure that this is not a vision, some fever-illusion that the unnatural steam off the water has given him. In his head echo all of Florentine’s stories from the Rift: pools like this that gifted or cursed, and forest glades full of silent stone animals, and always monsters - monsters with riddles, monsters with songs, monsters like anything else with teeth and hunger.
(Which is she?)
Asterion does nothing to close the space between them. He is glad and sorry for the grasses that whisper between their feet, for the breeze that does nothing to tremble their shadows. He is too busy trying to place her, and failing; all the parts of her add up to a picture he hasn’t seen yet. Maybe it was shown to him, once, while he slept.
She smells like ozone, like hot metal, like the beginnings of death. Asterion startles at the sound of her voice, a rusty blade against his throat. Still, he is bold enough when he meets her eyes. “Why?” he asks, and it is less eager than desperate, though it is soft enough not to startle the little-phoenixes from their flight.
He wonders again if he is dreaming, looking not at the light and gold of magic that clings to her but the carved path of lightning on her face and her neck, at the half-moon scythe on her tail. “Why do you look like-” my friends, he almost says.
But if Calliope and Raymond were ever his friends (he is not so sure, when he thinks of them) that is not a word he would use for them any more. The bay shakes his head like he might clear it, but when he looks up again she is still there, the pool behind her bright enough he has to avert his eyes.
There is a part of him that wants to touch every piece of her he recognizes, and a part that wants to run, and a part that longs with the thirst of a dying man to close the distance between them and drink the last drops of golden water from her horn. But there is something in her eyes cautioning him that to do any of these things would spell his death.
“Who are you?” he asks instead, the question like a ripple of that golden water, and Asterion arches his neck so that his chin hovers near his chest, as though he knows she hunts his heart.
king of dusk.
@Thana | <3
