asterion,
It takes him a moment to notice the way that everything she touches withers away to black.
For at first there is nothing for him but the carving of white along her face, a pattern he wants to trace - and the amethyst of her eyes, so like and unlike his sister’s - and the spiral of her horn which points and points at him.
At last his gaze drops to her feet, which whisper over the dawn-light grass and burn it like parchment. Asterion cannot guess whether it is the pool that is doing it, dropping golden and deadly from her hocks and her leonine tail, or if it is her own magic, wicked and poisonous. He is not sure which would be worse - that sick magic has come to Novus, or that some new reaper has, wearing a body so familiar to him.
Still he does not back away, though it would be the only wise thing to do. Her question keeps him rooted, and her eyes, and the need in them both to know.
“You look like the unicorn Calliope, with lightning on your skin,” he tells her. “You look like the warrior Raymond - you wear his blade on your tail.”
Now she is close; now he can smell the dead grass, a whiff of decay thick and too sweet on the summer air. It is not the smell of the pool at all, and Asterion wonders why he is not afraid - he knows he should be, he is wise enough for that. But ah! Maybe it is because of what he realizes, with a sureness like a sun, even as it draws up a thousand other questions that catch in his throat like burrs and burn on his tongue like a mouthful of golden water from a god’s pool.
“You are from the rift.”
He does not ask her Why have you come? the way he might have, once - for he knows more of how the magic works, now. It does not seem like much of a guess to think that she was taken, and not sent. But there is another question that he has no answer for.
He asks it without trembling, the way she does despite the golden heat, and he asks it without taking his gaze from her own, bright and needful as it is, like watching a dying star. “Why do you look at me that way?” Like you want my death.
king of dusk.
@Thana | <3
