and they've been changing the sound of my name;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   There is a whisper in the back of his mind that tells him he should be going home - but Asterion forces it to stay there. Just for now, just for a while longer, just until he can see a little more. It’s a dangerous impulse, but the Dusk King is hardly the only one to follow it; numberless other horses are gathered with him on the beach, in pairs and threes and a few, like him, alone.  He was not always alone. Somewhere, he knows, is his sister, and Isra, and Juniper and Samaira and others, so many others (Moira, too, and at the thought of her his gut clenches with guilt and worry, by now a feeling familiar enough to ignore). But like him, they had each been seized by this place, driven to quiet by wonder drifting off to explore it in their own way.  The island is not what he had expected. Since the eruption, that first tremble that cried wrong, wrong, wrong, Asterion has been braced for war. His magic is still a roiling thing beneath his skin, though his control of it is advanced enough that it no longer shows itself in little rivulets down his shoulders, or along his throat; the only thing to give him away is the sea in his eyes, wild and dark. But even that is softening, a summer-night sky after a storm, as he walks on the gleaming beach and listens to the foreign birds and lets hope tremble in his heart, and it feels as unfamiliar as their wings, as their peridot eyes.  The bay knows better than to follow a bejeweled bird further into the brush of a strange island like a child in a fairy tale - but oh, hasn’t he always wanted to be part of a story? The sun is just beginning to set as the king moves deeper into the jungle. It is cool and dim beneath the trees, filled with whistling, with rustling, with breathing he has never heard. He pauses to touch his muzzle to a bloom as black as ink; he lifts his head like a startled buck when one of those fire-birds (had they been the ones at the golden pool? he cannot recall; the rest of Novus seems so far away) dips overhead before vanishing with a song that sounds like a laugh. Up ahead there is a gleam through the trees, low and smooth, like water.  And it is still wonder and not fear that pulls Asterion deeper, and deeper yet.  @Ipomoea