I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
Asterion could no better answer the question of belonging than she.
Oh, he knows he is no thing of water - even all the stories he stuffed his head with as a boy taught him better than that; he is not so much a fool - but there has always been in him a desire to wander. What, whispers his heart, lies beyond that next ridge? What path below that crescent moon? What might the waves tell you, on the shore beyond this one? And yet, and yet, home became an anchor, each new person he loved a stone. They weight him down, they beg him stay.
For now, he listens.
She catches it, that little phrase, and a smile flickers across his mouth. “Myself,” he says, a little embarrassed, and when he looks at her his gaze is boyish, eyes gleaming bright and dark hair tousled. “When I first recovered my magic, I…couldn’t control it in moments of high emotion. It gave me a tendency to, ah, condensate. Happily I am beyond that now.” Asterion isn’t sure he’s mentioned it to anybody before; it strikes him as funny, now, to be telling a near-perfect stranger. Now she has a piece of him, knowing something nobody else does.
“I believe all stories,” he answers, and his voice is solemn even though that little gleam of laughter still lives in his eyes, a pearl inside a dark, cool shell. The king makes a note to ask her more of those stories - in particular, the mention of glowing had caught him, and he envisions a world where the horses shine like little stars in the dark.
“They’re lovely here,” he says of the seasons. “My favorite are the late-spring storms - a gentle thunder, and scouring rain.” It’s one storm in particular he remembers as they walk, the one that had broken like a dam on his second day in Novus, the day he had met Florentine. Learning he had a sister had felt like the first brush of the hand of fate across his back; now it had him fully in its palm - if one believed in it.
He looks back to her at the sound of her laughter, smiles himself at the way it touches both sets of her eyes, and the way the sunlight gleams off the soft gray of her horns. “I’m relieved to hear it,” he says, grinning back. The easy expression lingers as she continues to speak, even as he focuses his attention back on the fields ahead of them, and the jut of the keep as it rises like a cliff above the plain. Yet it is her kingdom he thinks of (that he knows already he will dream of) and not his own. “I take it you escaped,” he says with a laugh. “But that all sounds…beautiful. I should like to see it, someday.” Impossible, of course - but Asterion wonders, all the same.
@Below Zero <3 do you mind if we wrap up in the next post or two? they should thread again (and soon!) but I'm trying to close up what of my list I can with all the swp stuff happening
Asterion.
