[AW] Strangers in the night

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

It is easy for Marisol to forget that there is anything else but Terrastella, and Novus, and livelihoods stretched thing by the tensions of the solar courts. She has never known anything different. From childhood the world has looked exactly like this - marked and sequestered on maps, rough around the edges, and utterly familiar - she is more realism than imagination, and it is near-impossible to think of what Mephisto could be hiding under those vague answers.

She doesn’t trust it. She wouldn’t trust any stranger at a time like this, when there is a new rift in the world every time she turns her gaze sideways. But they are a land of healers and Asterion is no typical king, and she knows what she said at the meeting is true, that they are won’t for any bodies they can find now, on the brink of war.

(Mephisto doesn’t have to know that.)

It is with gritty acquiescence that Marisol turns toward the Citadel, familiar as a constellation against the black of the sky, and falls into step on the outer edges of the trio. Summer keeps the breeze hot and heavy, and the way it digs its fingers into Mari’s cropped mane is less a comfort than it is a reminder to be wary, even uncomfortable. She tucks her wings self-consciously against the slat of her ribs and watches the way their strides mark the soft earth, making dark half-moons in a line of three against the bent grass.

God, the Commander corrects in an absent response to Mephisto’s question, the word so familiar she does not even think about muttering it. Vespera. Praise be. And she is careful to keep her gaze away from Asterion’s, remembering with a sick kind of wonder the day She had descended and the awful things she had wrought; she knows that faith is unpopular now, but it is ingrained in her as deeply as the need to fight with a spear.

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