asterion,
Asterion does not expect her to come after him. He has forgotten that she is no dappled doe but a phoenix who burns from within, whose eyes snap with sparks and whose heart is a hungry thing like fire wanting wood. His days are filled with quiet, with the scatter of the stars and clouds furrowed into patterns by wind and always the soft hush of the sea. The king does not burn; he is not sure if he ever has.
But there is still heat in his gaze when he turns his head toward her, their mouths a whisper apart. He meets her eye and sees himself reflected in the black around her bright iris. “Many woeful things have happened since that day,” he says, and his thoughts run over them like a stick ticking along the slats of a barrel. The Summit, when the gods trapped them, bickered, and left. The plagues (had he ever believed in miracles?) of rain and flood and collapsing earth - and that for Dusk alone. So much sorrow, so much death. And now? Their positions seem little better. A queen missing, and one dead; Dawn’s borders closed.
At what point was seeing to your own people simply hiding yourself away? Like the world might not reach him, if he does not leave the forests and cliffsides and city he knows.
Now Moira is here, beating on the gates of his heart, but Asterion has had too much practice defending himself.
“I’ll endeavor not to frown for you,” he says, and schools his expression into something neutral, though he turns his head away. It feels too easy to stand beside her again, too easy to imagine a smile beginning in the far corner of his lips - the king claims a glass of deep amber mead from a passing tray and drains half of it with one breath. Then he regards her, steady despite the tight ache of his heart. “I will,” he says, and his voice drops soft and low enough for only her to hear. “But only if you explain some things I can’t seem to understand.”
Again he turns away from her, but this time it is to return to where she was painting; the pathway is narrow enough that his shoulder brushes against hers as he does, and Asterion is grateful to step away. It’s easier to breathe when he is not so close to her, easier to ground himself in the laughter and noise of the hall without her voice like smoke in his ear.
No games, he reminds himself, and casts an eye over her unfinished painting as he takes some paper for himself. He has never seen himself depicted before; it feels as unsettling as standing far out enough from shore that the water begins to pull, to suck the sand from beneath your feet, to urge you to give in. He stares down at his own dark eyes, the small star that marks his forehead, the smatter of dusk that traces his cheekbones, his neck. The care in the painting is as clear as the skill, and there is something like surprise in his eyes when he looks back to her.
“Don’t ask me to paint you,” he pleads. “It would be an embarrassment for both of us. Not even I can tell a boat from a bird in my attempts.” And maybe her fire is melting him - maybe it is inevitable - for at last he smiles.
king of dusk.
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