I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
Even now he cannot turn to rage; even in the face of this newest disaster nothing like fire burns in his bones. Oh, there is anger there, large and looming, but it is as deep and low as shifting earth, as cool as a lake in the heart of the mountains. It moves slowly, building like a storm. Higher and higher it towers - towards the gods, and toward a kidnapper-king, and toward all things cruel and evil in their world, all things that might seek to hurt.
For the first time in his life it is hard to cast his long gaze down to the empty beach and imagine the one he grew up alongside. It is hard to picture anything peaceful and safe. But maybe he’d been telling himself a story even then, remembering all of the violet sunsets and none of the driving rains.
Isra’s shoulder is warm against his, and there is only comfort between them when he leans into her touch. The king’s eyes do not stray from that black cloud like a press of ink marking the sin of the world. But there is still the water below it, eternal, reflecting the sky. It is a strange kind of comfort to know how much of it he could draw up in their defense, how it would obey more effortlessly than any soldier of Dusk to their king.
When she says that they could change the world he almost believes her.
Asterion smiles as though he does, and at last flicks his dark gaze to her, studying the sea-green and the sea-blue of her eyes. He isn’t sure he’s ever noticed, before, how reminiscent of the ocean they are. Somehow the fading sunlight makes her even more mysterious, glittering on her brush of scales. “I look forward to dreaming of that new world with you. Though I think my court would cast me out for it.” The king’s dark lips quirk up, wry, at the thought of a people so loving and so stubborn. No born Terrastellan would allow court lines to dissolve for the notion of harmony; they were as sturdy as the oldest trees in Tinea, with roots reaching further than even the branches that comb the air high above the earth.
But it is good to dream.
She touches his cheek and the smile fading there and her words fall on him like soft rain. “And I you,” he says to the unicorn, sure as a pledge, and turns to see the way that ash and water strikes her but seeds roll off. The ground is growing heaps of them, to be washed away or blown into the wind and settle, and take root, and grow - what a marvelous creature the unicorn queen is, ever remaking the world around her. “Come what may.” There is a note of fierceness in the last, of ocean floor far beneath the surface waves. A certainty that does not shift.
And though it begins to grow prematurely dark, with that threat of annihilation blotting out the sun in a way not even a dragon could dispel, Asterion is not afraid.
@Isra I hope this works as an ending? <3
For the first time in his life it is hard to cast his long gaze down to the empty beach and imagine the one he grew up alongside. It is hard to picture anything peaceful and safe. But maybe he’d been telling himself a story even then, remembering all of the violet sunsets and none of the driving rains.
Isra’s shoulder is warm against his, and there is only comfort between them when he leans into her touch. The king’s eyes do not stray from that black cloud like a press of ink marking the sin of the world. But there is still the water below it, eternal, reflecting the sky. It is a strange kind of comfort to know how much of it he could draw up in their defense, how it would obey more effortlessly than any soldier of Dusk to their king.
When she says that they could change the world he almost believes her.
Asterion smiles as though he does, and at last flicks his dark gaze to her, studying the sea-green and the sea-blue of her eyes. He isn’t sure he’s ever noticed, before, how reminiscent of the ocean they are. Somehow the fading sunlight makes her even more mysterious, glittering on her brush of scales. “I look forward to dreaming of that new world with you. Though I think my court would cast me out for it.” The king’s dark lips quirk up, wry, at the thought of a people so loving and so stubborn. No born Terrastellan would allow court lines to dissolve for the notion of harmony; they were as sturdy as the oldest trees in Tinea, with roots reaching further than even the branches that comb the air high above the earth.
But it is good to dream.
She touches his cheek and the smile fading there and her words fall on him like soft rain. “And I you,” he says to the unicorn, sure as a pledge, and turns to see the way that ash and water strikes her but seeds roll off. The ground is growing heaps of them, to be washed away or blown into the wind and settle, and take root, and grow - what a marvelous creature the unicorn queen is, ever remaking the world around her. “Come what may.” There is a note of fierceness in the last, of ocean floor far beneath the surface waves. A certainty that does not shift.
And though it begins to grow prematurely dark, with that threat of annihilation blotting out the sun in a way not even a dragon could dispel, Asterion is not afraid.
@Isra I hope this works as an ending? <3
Asterion.
