I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
If they knew one another better, more than names and faces seen twice - once in the candle-lit dark of a long-ago festival and once in the magic-lit dark of a collapsed clearing on a god’s mountain - then they might recognize the monster opening its wide mouth within them both.
Or maybe it is easier this way, when there is little familiar between them but their names and the rumors that surround them like vultures or crows. For all his own ignorance, for all his boyish uncertainty, Asterion has always recognized power when he sees it, and he sees it now in Seraphina the way he had from the first in Calliope. No matter how still she stands, no matter how poised with her half-loose hair billowing around her like roiling stormclouds, there is a kinetic energy he can feel as he nears. And there is a similar thing in him, yawning like a vortex, pulling like a whirlpool, asking to be fed or freed (he is not sure which).
When she answers him, her smile is as familiar as his own, for how often he has worn a similar one. But he doesn’t wear it now. Instead he only regards her, shifting his weight back, feeling the way the waves tug and tug at the grains of sand beneath his feet. “And who’s to say this shouldn’t be?” he says, quietly. For if she still holds to the gods of Novus, then she must accept that it is Tempus’s will for the island to exist; and if she does not, then she, like him, must know that for magic there is no should and should not. That the only law is what is, and what can be.
But Asterion knows, too, that whatever journey she has taken - whatever has changed her, put that half-wild look in her eye and those golden scars on her cheek and took her country and gave it to a killer - is not something he can understand. It is not his story.
Though he may yet help with the ending.
At her congratulations he wants to laugh, but instead he only touches his muzzle to his chest, smiles in a way that does not reach his eyes. “I’m not sure the circumstances are worth congratulations,” he says, “but thank you. It’s an honor to serve such a people.” He makes no comment on the other; she doesn’t need told that he is doing only as well as he can, that every decision has frayed something new in him, that no matter that Terrastella has at last recovered from the floods he still feels as though a sinkhole might open beneath him at any moment. That sometimes it would be a relief, to be swallowed up. Maybe she would understand.
There are no gulls, on this stretch of beach; anything that has called in a tongue he would recognize has long since fled, leaving only the sounds of the sea, and the wind, and their breathing. No, she says, and he is glad. He does not shy away from her gaze - almost finds comfort in it, for he has felt that same pulling for so long - and if there is anything left of the dreamer in him now it is beaten back, far from the shore, somewhere the waters are not so cold, and cruel, and hungry.
“Of course,” he says. And then a confession, his only concern (not for the blood to be on their hands, not for the wrath they may face): “I don’t know how to keep everyone safe. In the meantime.”
And perhaps there is some part of him that is still a boy, still a dreamer - for he should know by now there is no such thing as safe.
@
Asterion.
