This keening soul;
Fury sings in her veins. It surges, visceral, splitting, energizing through her veins. It mixes with magic, a potent blend that has every particle of her being humming. There is no part of her not lit with rage. Asterion turns his gaze from her but she does not stop looking at him. Over his cheek, his lashes, the curve of his lips, every place her sight rests is hot with ire. She thinks she might burn him, if she did not torch herself first.
But there is something more in her wildfire gaze. There is something that sparks like electricity and soothes like whiskey. He makes her feel godly and more so when she makes her star fall. He looks and oh her starfire flares white in the dark of his eye. There is a part of her laughing, there is a part of her despairing. She should be on her knees before him – he is the king and she is no goddess, no matter his gaze. Yet if she were, Leto would bless him as an acolyte and awaken every star across his skin until he glows, glows, glows.
How fickle she is!
A shudder ripples through her torso. She is no goddess. Though, in his gaze, the taste of divinity is sweet. The bringing of vengeance upon the gods who abandoned them all consumes her, delights her. Her heart no longer thuds with the wet lub-dub of mortality but resounds like stars with each supernova beat. In her eyes galaxies twist and turn and widen, widen. She burns the pattern of them into the curve of his jaw, across the expanse of his eyelids pressed tightly shut – oh, can he see the galaxies she presses there? Can he count their stars like she does the ones across his body?
The king’s words awaken her. They rise from his tongue as hard as hers, as blank as hers. They push through the haze of her ire, her transcendence. But they do not quash her. He is a king and in his gaze she sees the pieces of him galvanized by his crown. Gone is the soft of his gaze, the way he watched her dance beneath a ceiling of stars and silk. With the magic burning in her veins she illuminates the king in white, white light. But she is a kingless girl and now a godless one too… Her beauty, black as a raven’s wing, bright as shattering stars, is the wild of the earth and the incomprehensible art of universes. Across her body is earth in pearls and gilded leaves, bones and dirtied plaits, in her shed-star blood is starfire and in her soul is the eternal sway of the ocean.
Her mind is full of a kelpie’s smile. The silver of his skin, moonlight bright, the shiver of violence clinging to the corner of his lips. The draw of the ocean that had her stepping closer, closer, until the sound of his blood was the roar of the ocean in her ears.
Upon her tongue is the ocean. Salt-filled, star-filled, magic thrums through his skin, it burns upon her lips. His skin is still a ghost upon her lips – was she still a phantom upon his throat? They hold each other’s gaze in a sea of stars and light and water and divine bones. Her knees are aching for where she does not bend them and his gaze feels like a reprimand. She tips her chin up like a goddess, like a girl who has no god or king (no matter how close she longs to step to him, no matter how much his gaze brings a tremble with each sigil it studies) – she was wrong to ever think otherwise.
“Was it for the good of Terrastella when you left the first time – with only half of your people?” Her voice is bold and bright, unwavering in its challenge even as it comes like a whisper shouted between universes. Her bells chime as she tilts her head, still holding him tight, still tasting his magic upon her lips – oh because she is burning, burning. She wets her lips that glow white, white but it does not erase him.
Leto finds his final answer unsatisfying. Her nape arches, the curve of the sun made black. “So you will leave us again.” She breathes - though she smiles, hard like bark, loud like comets. “We survived here, loyal to the land, our home…” Scars, scars, poverty, rising floods and a land turning to waste – each is a whip upon her soul. “- whilst you danced in lavish halls.” And oh her eyes close to remember such a night. Her cheeks remember the touch of that white mask. She smiles as she trembles, as her limbs beg to remember the way they danced then, with him, beneath the banners and moonlight. Torn, torn, torn. Leto is not one thing, but many, many.
She is burning and trembling. Her magic wild, made divine by Asterion’s gaze. Ah, she rocks and realizes how he has not touched her, how she hoped for it, how she needed it. His magic, his magic, him, him, stars, kelpies, water – all glow in the smile that curves her lips, in the twist of pain that flickers like starlight in her gaze as she steps from him and down, down down into a pool that turns to steam as she sinks to her throat.
Was this how a goddess felt when she made the world burn?
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
