He can still sense Cirrus’s unease as they move further away from the shoreline and the sky begins to be closed out by the crowding green canopy. The hum of insects is overtaking the sigh of the waves against the shoreline and it is warm and close beneath the shadow of leaves and trunks. But worry is ebbing away from the bay king, helped in part by the clear ease of his companion.
Corr’s optimism and good humor is infectious - a way of looking at the island that Asterion hadn’t realized he desperately needed until now. Most of his other conversations had been fraught, taut with tension from the first bloom of smoke over the island. Worry was as constant as his heartbeat, to think of his people subject to any number of horrors, from the gods to Raum. But as he walks beside the dappled mare, his worry remakes itself into wonder with each strange, small glory they pass.
Not that he can fully let go his apprehension of the gods. “I hope that’s true,” he says, lightly enough, but he is remembering that fatal autumn, when the rains would not stop, when the ground gave beneath their feet, when their goddess said they failed a test she set with oversized gophers. He listens with more interest to her mention of her magic weakening, and pauses to return her smile with a nod and a shadow of his own. “It took mine, too, when I first arrived,” he says, and the magic that lives in him now ripples reflectively, a stone being thrown down into the deep of a well.
Her next words make him laugh, even as he shakes his head. “If I do, I’m doing a poor job of implementing it,” he says, and settles his weight back, watching her reach for the fruit. There is a part of him that wants to stop her, wants to caution don’t - but he holds his tongue, only holding his breath as she takes, as she eats. He only releases it when nothing happens save for the bright tang of it scenting the air, and the roll of juice down the fruit’s skin.
Now he eyes the branch, still heavy-laden, and not even he could say why he doesn’t reach for his own. Not yet.
“I suppose we will.” His gaze drops to her again, soft and curious, wondering at this woman he’s never had a moment to meet before. Confident, laughing, brave; though he knows nothing of her but what he’s gleaned in these minutes on the island, she makes him proud of Terrastella. Even if he cannot quite agree about the intent of the island, or who is behind it.
“Ravos,” he repeats like a sigh of wind through the ferns, and begins to walk again when he sees she is finished. Asterion is still looking for signs of the dragon (though what would they be? A piece of seaweed snagged and drying on a branch, a few grains of sand that were so recently scales?) but he lets his mind range further, back in the reaches of his memory. “I was only a boy then, though I didn’t see myself that way at the time. There were four kingdoms, divided by their branch of elemental magic, ruled by two gods: fire, water, earth, air. And then there was the rift - godless, wild magic. Nobody could control it, and it was growing.” How well he remembers seeing it for the first time - that long canyon, deep and quick as a river, lurid and living and strange. How all the hair on his body seemed to rise when he was near, how the air hummed and tasted burnt and bitter and rich. And how it felt at last, alone, to plunge into.
“As the power of the gods and their followers grew,” he continues, “so did conflict in all directions. Skirmishes broke out. Lands were burned. The horses who claimed no religion planned to rise up against the gods themselves. And all the while the rift was growing. Eventually horses began to…jump into it.” He had never found out how it began, but he is sure that Calliope was the first to leap. It was like her, to rush full-throated into the unknown. How long he had waited; how afraid he was of both going and staying.
Even Cirrus is silent and still on his back when he glances back at Corr. “When I braved it at last, it led me here.”
How strange it is, to wonder if Novus will ever be so distant a memory.
@Corrdelia I think she's good for him, haha.
if you'll be my star*
