asterion,
Her eyes catch and hold him, bright as fireflies but not half so warm - not the spark of summer but a cool autumn gold, still as a life caught in amber. Asterion envies her stoicism even as he distrusts it, here in the strange cold hours between midnight and dawn, when magic and trouble both were stirring dread shadows across Novus. But there is a part of him glad for it, too - fiercely and shamefully glad for anything to distract him from the ink still wet in his rooms and the ache still tight in his heart.
The bay’s gaze flicks to her wing as she folds it again to her side, and the faint glow of lamplight and stars do nothing to disguise its proud size; here is a woman, he thinks, who might give even Marisol a run for her money in the Halcyon training ring. (How quickly his thoughts turn from love to war, how strange that the latter hurts less!)
When she speaks again, steady-voiced in the winter-breathed wind, Asterion is tempted to arch a brow. They, she says, and it is more than duty that makes him want to ask but what do you call yourself? But he well understands the need to keep some secrets, here beneath the watchful moon, and instead he only returns her nod. “Then I will call you the same.”
What she says next surprises him, though perhaps it should not. He had said nothing of searching - but has he not always been too easy to read, his feelings writ across his face like lines on a well-worn map? He has never been good at hiding; he wears his emotions like an ocean wears waves.
If only he knows what it is he is looking for - other than a clear head and a steady heart and space enough to breathe. Other than the answer to a riddle of a girl for whom his affection is too much, or not enough.
“Like me,” he echoes softly, and considers her for a long moment. His breath clouds the air between them, a small plume of silver, when at last he sighs and shakes his head. “Then I hope you have better luck than I in finding, Forseti.”
Now he steps forward again, not content to linger when each muscle begs to move and fight both the cold kiss of the wind and the cold tide of his thoughts. He half-wonders if she will stop him again with her wing, but as he moves past her he glances back, bolder now in meeting her bright gaze. “It is a lonely hour. Will you search with me?”
Maybe he should press her for answers more satisfying and less vague; for all he knows she is Vespera wearing another disguise, come to test his court again with deadly tasks.
Well, let him fail them. He is no stranger to it.
king of dusk.
@Forseti | <3
