THE ARCHIATER.
Above the flat, grassy steppe, the sky roils with newborn clouds. They dissipate into nothing as fast as they appear, there and gone the next moment. Stars still glimmer faintly in the deepest parts of the known universe. Fall is here, and it sinks its chilly teeth into the dawn; under the swath of pink and orange that lines the rising sun, Marisol’s dark skin shivers and shudders against the claws of cold wind.
Oh, but she is built for war, and even the most bitter weather could not stop her from serving her purpose. So it is with bone-deep pleasure that the Commander finds her spot at the edge of the steppe, back to the cold sun, and cements her position with her hooves dug deep into the soft dirt. She raises her head; the breeze kisses the soft part of her throat. It is the only thing she trusts enough to touch a place like that.
Now the light is cascading further down the mountains, and it washes all of Novus in ethereal painterly shades of coral, warm blue, buttercup yellow: still as a statue, Marisol’s near-black coat becomes no more than a vehicle for the beauty of the dawn. It swirls under the touch of light, shifts like the phosphorescence of an opal. And though she is forever loyal to the slow tones of dusk setting in over Terrastella, and the way their anthem sounds played on the soft strings of a harp, she is, for this brief moment, entranced by the magic of the rising sun.
She tries not to think of what it means, if it means anything at all.
Asterion should’ve known she’d be here early. They have been promising each other this fight a long time - too long to waste any more time waiting. Marisol wants to say that the desire is borne only from respect for her king, a need to prove herself to him, but she is not a liar; no, part of it, too, is the disapproval that has been festering in her since Asterion first moved them to Denocte, now rotted too deep to ignore. Their beautiful boy-king is so full of mistakes.
And because Marisol loves him as much as she loves her country, she has to tell him.
The song of a bird she does not quite recognize warbles over the steppe, sharp and bright enough to make the Archiater screw up an eye in response; she cannot catch sight of it over the tufts of dying grass, and in that the creature is lucky. She thinks she can hear it flying away in a rapid beating of wings as she unstraps the throwing spear from her side, and in that it is smarter than most.
Marisol twirls the weapon above her head in an easy arc. After so many years, wielding the thing is easy as walking, like it is no more than an extra limb to her. The wood is smoothed from eons of careful handling and the steel tip lovingly sharpened: as she dips it toward the earth it slices the tips of overgrown grasses away like they are no more substantial than water.
Finally the sound of movement hits her ears, and the Commander freezes.
In one swift movement, she reholsters the weapon and widens her stance, splaying her legs slightly to hold more ground. Another step echoes from beyond. Then another. She smells him on the breeze - yes, Asterion - and huffs it out again.
Raptor-like, deadly and efficient, Marisol slowly starts to unfurl her wings. They open like a poem. Like a book: in the prismatic light of the dawn, her usually snowy-white underfeathers shift from yellow to pink and back again as they uncoil from her sides.
The spear is hidden, now, behind the partial expansion of her wings. Marisol ducks her head closer to her chest. The short-cropped hair of her mane bristles blithely, glimmering in some places with gold.
“By Her hand,” snarls Marisol under her breath.
@asterion
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