asterion,
When Asterion sees Eik, pale as mist through the deeply green trees, the feeling that stumbles his heart is all wonder.
“I often wish I was,” he answers, and somewhere there is a laugh in it - born of happiness and weariness but also that call back to the night he met Aislinn, his first in this world, the way she said I don’t wish for this dream to end. He understands the feeling, he lives in it now, wandering this island thick and strange with magic. It does not feel like Novus. Asterion had wondered (briefly, with guilt) what might happen if the bridge sank back beneath the waves, if the island kept unfolding like a map, if all the courts could be left behind like the things you couldn’t carry from a fire. How free he might feel then.
By now he has sewn up the distance between them and is reaching out his muzzle, his cheek, offering all of himself in greeting. Maybe through touch they could prove to one another their realness, but what was truth, anyway, in a world of magic? Maybe the gods were like Isra, maybe they had all been dreamed to life from stones. Then, at least, they could not be blamed for falling.
For a long moment he doesn’t speak. Or rather, he says nothing - but Asterion thinks (feeling a little fervent, a little foolish) I have missed you, I have missed you, I have missed you and hopes Eik with his gifts can hear him, and doesn’t mind the repetition. The bay closes his eyes as he breathes in the scent of his friend, and wonders if grief smells like salt, too, like sweat and the sea, or if it smells iron like blood or dark soil.
There is too much to tell him, and too much of it is apologies - how sorry he is for his uselessness, for his absence. For all that he has missed. Asterion gives voice to none of it, and only hopes the grey man understands.
At last he steps back, and as he does he remembers the world they stand in. When he shrugs it’s almost sheepish, the roll of his shoulders, the almost boyish look in his eyes at the surreal world around them with its wet warmth and foreign birdsong. His expression says look at all of this, isn’t is a marvel, and his head is guilty for his excitement.
For surely this is not the end, and if it is, it isn’t a happy one.
But for now he pushes those thoughts away, down into the dark where they will wait until he’s alone (they are patient things, his fears, almost loyal). He smiles and there is nothing false in it, even when he regards Eik with a gaze heavy as the press of a palm on his back. “I’m so glad you found me.” A pause when he swallows, inhales deeply the scent of ripe fruits, of sun-warmed leaves, of magic like something hot and elemental waiting just below the leaf-litter. “This is a change, isn’t it?”
king of dusk.
@
