over the mountains of the moon
down the valley of the shadow-
down the valley of the shadow-
H
e does not feel the eyes upon them. For Asterion, in this moment, there is only one pair of eyes he pays heed to, and they are as silver as the moon, as brimming as the sea. Where they touch his skin it burns with star-fire. Around them as the sun sinks low the evening things begin their singing, the crickets and the bullfrogs and the owls, a symphony unseen.
And yet the only music he hears is her voice. Oh, he is caught up in the mystery of her, unable to resist the shadow of the stars in her eyes, the runes painted so delicately upon her skin. Beneath the heavy limbs of the story-tree, the solemn tales of a thousand years of woe, he is ensnared by this girl of earth and of sky. (Some part of him knows he is too easily swept away, that he has always been a ship unmoored searching ever for new waters - but oh, there is a charred hole in his heart where a phoenix burned him, and he wants nothing but to forget.)
“And are you sure now?” he asks, a laugh in his smile and in his eyes at the set of her jaw, the flash of her gaze. He studies her still for another sign of that starfire in her veins, like lightning set down each capillary path. Does it burn her?- might it burn him too?
They are warm together in the cooling night, and yet she shivers and her bells toll soft and low. He wants to move closer still, wants to press his shoulder to her shoulder and his hip to her hip, to count each bell and feather and bone she wears and ask how she won them. Before he can do so much as draw a breath she speaks again, and names her death.
I will die at sea. Oh! Asterion feels touched by a winter tide, then, and it when it rolls out it steals his breath with it. His heart, too, freezes in his chest, caught suddenly by ice. How will it happen? How do you know?- Like fireflies in summer the questions rise to his lips but Asterion is still, neck arched and smile gone to a taut line. Not until she draws away (and how cool the autumn air feels then, rushing in to fill the space between them), not until she makes her request of him, does he look up again into her eyes.
It is impossible to look at her and think of death. Even after all she has just told him of her people, their tragedy written into skin and bark and bone, passed like an inheritance down and down. Does tragedy trace her veins the same way light does, then? Is it yet another birth-right?
“Can’t you just - avoid the sea?” It seems a child’s question, a boy’s, but he is not sorry for it, no matter how soft it is voiced on the chilly evening air. It drifts like a dead leaf, down and down to crumble to dust, before he shakes his head. "Of course I will teach you, if that is what you want.” But his heart still cries out, begging his tongue to warn her away from the ocean that he so loves.
@Leto
