asterion,
For a few moments he is alone in the cold. The frost glows beneath the moonlight like the inside of a shell and the stars on his coat are as numerous and faint as the ones above, dimmed by moon and firelight. Even in the city he can smell the sea and oh, he is grateful for that; Asterion blinks his eyes slowly closed, inhales a draught of air cool enough to burn when it reaches his lungs. It feels like forgetting, like burning a word to nothing.
Then he is moving again, his feet swift and sure on the cobblestones, the ringing of his hooves fleeing after like his shadow. Asterion knows each road and alley, each garden secret and shown, and each route from the city to the sea. Only when he is alone like this does Terrastella truly feel like it might be his.
And the king is not alone for long.
He is not surprised to be stopped. What does surprise him is that it is a stranger who does it, snapping out her wing like a lifted hand, and Asterion, ever obedient, falls still. Still enough, anyhow, although everything about him still looks poised for flight - his hooves dance and strike against the stone, his nostrils are wide and shivering, and his eyes are full of starlight and smoke.
If she were a friend he might have brushed past. But because does not recognize her (and he knows so many, now) he straightens, and turns his grieving, angry gaze on her, and tries to assess whether she is a threat. She looks certain in a way he would normally be envious of, and her eyes spark like autumn bonfires toward midnight, and there is a pattern of pale marks on her face that make him think of the Ilati and their bone-masks.
But no Ilati would ever ask where they are, or what the purpose of their king in his own city.
“We are in Terrastella, the capitol of the Dusk Court, in the country of Novus.” The words roll from his tongue smooth as the tide; he has said them often enough, always with the same quiet measure of pride. He offers her no smile, yet, but the pace of his heart is slowing, and his eyes no longer look with longing to the treeline dim at the edge of the moonlit meadow. “My name is Asterion, and my purpose tonight is yet my own.” He watches her, wary now, though the only reason he had answered her thus is because he is so very tired of saying I do not know.
After another beat or two, when she does not move to strike, he settles back and regards her. He is not quite wholly present, but he is beginning to be; yet his heart is still half in his room, burning like thin paper, and half in the wild wood with a chill wind off the sea raking fingers through his hair.
But there is enough of him now to smile, wry and faint as a ring around the moon. “Now, if I may question you in turn - who are you, and how have you come at so late an hour to a place you know nothing of?”
king of dusk.
@Forseti | never apologize. I'm so glad to be writing with you again!
