asterion,
A dozen times Asterion has scrawled I’m sorry across a new sheet of paper, black ink like the shadows of limbs across a snow-white page, and a dozen times he has scratched it out again. He shouldn’t waste the ink, he knows, or the paper - such precious things, words captured and put down - but he can’t stop. No more than he can stop looking at the letter she wrote him, the one ending in love.
He doesn’t understand.
What had he done?- except kiss her when she’d already kissed him twice, and assume the way she looked at him (the same way he looked at her, through dark lashes with hope trembling in his breast like a bird) meant it was what she wanted. What had he done, except tell her he did not believe love was a game, and try to put an end to whatever it was they were playing with their glances and their touches and their careful words?
More than anything he feels like a fool. A fool - and oh, how familiar that feeling is, how many times it’s been beaten into him again and again like the flat of Raymond’s blade. Always Asterion feels like not enough, or too much. When he closes his eyes the fire in his room becomes the fire eating up the mountain pass, and the sigh of the sea outside is familiar enough he can picture Aislinn, standing before him, and again he watches the hope in her eyes turn to blame (it was only fair, it only echoed the path of his own heart).
Perhaps Florentine was right - Dusk was not meant to chase after Night. He is a king; what business has he, dividing his attention from his people? What business has his heart, chasing after a phoenix in the dark and leaving soft and sensible evening behind? And it was clear she wanted no chasing - only hours after he’d left her one of the Dusk pages had told him, sheepishly, about the smashed teacup, about the way she bade them never speak his name. All for a kiss, he thinks -
well, there would be no more of those.
Cirrus opens one dark eye, regarding him from her perch near the window. It is late - hours before dawn, hours after midnight - and cold, with the wind creeping in through the imperfect places in the panes and stones. Asterion shakes his head at his companion and she opens her bright beak and closes it again without a word. He does not need her in his head - he already knows what she will say (that there are more and better things to worry about than a bruised heart or a girl who doesn’t know what she wants). He already knows it’s true.
As he goes he feeds the paper to the little fire, and does not watch it eat it up until it is black and flaking and gone.
And then he slips out into the night without cloak or crown, to wander the streets of his autumn city, a dusky ghost across the frost.
king of dusk.
@open | just wanted to get down his Mood (and his mood is Keaton Henson)
