asterion,
Something has changed - must have changed - for the way that she embraces him before his shadow can finish falling across the scuffed wooden floor.
For a moment he is taut, startled, but as soon as her wing folds over his back he loosens into her, cheek against the arch of her neck, heart to heart and skin to skin. The throb of her heart makes him think of the ocean against the rocks when the tide comes in, insistent and steady. He hadn’t realized how strung tight with worry he was until his breath comes out in a rush and his muscles relax beneath the arch of her snow-down wing. He says nothing, thinks nothing but the brief relief of this is something survivable and does not yet wonder why she stills smells so strongly of brine, of salt, of copper.
And then she steps back, and they are once again Commander and King. But the fear that had been snared in his throat like jetsam is gone.
Marisol claims she can’t accept the book, but his dark gaze has swallowed up the way she looked at it, and he knows it will see more love and care than it would on his own shelf, joined by a dozen other slim titles, nothing but an artifact of fading ink (he should read them some day, he knows, but - life always intervenes). As she goes behind her desk he sets the volume there, softly, and then he prepares to listen.
Asterion smiles at her offer of tea, inhales the sweet curling steam, but he can no more drink it now than he could swallow saltwater. Instead he waits, neck softly arched, dark ears forward, trying to keep his gaze from wandering the angles and curves of her body to search for damage. He would rather watch her expression, or nothing at all but the whorls and patterns in the dark wood of her desk, sigils ancient and incomprehensible. It is a strange comfort to know there is meaning somewhere in those markings, if only to the tree.
And then she begins. And Asterion finds that he is unprepared.
I went to the ocean. I met a man there.
I died.
The king’s head jerks up like a thing flayed, and his eyes are the eyes of an animal caught. Asterion shakes his head, scattering his forelock across the star on his brow. Died - but here she stands, whole. He had felt her heart beat against him, felt her breath stir the hair of his coat. He does not interrupt, though he wants to - but anything he might say would be superfluous, empty words, shock and sound. Instead he bites his tongue, and waits.
And he showed me his teeth-
He remembers asking her, on a morning just after dawn when the shoreline was still shrouded by mist and the sea breathed like a great beast just out of sight, whether she had ever seen a kelpie. Now the thought of his wonder and wanting scalds and shames him.
Oh, and he is angry. It begins even before she shows him the marks (he does not need to touch them like Thomas to believe) and like everything it manifests in water: silver limns his eyes, wells in his throat. More than either it churns deep in him, the magic rising, a wrathful sea. Asterion thinks I will drain the ocean and find him. He thinks I will drown him from the inside. He thinks We could make him suffer-
But Marisol, his Commander and confidant, is still speaking. Her own voice is choked, her own eyes glassy mirrors, and he hopes that what horror she might see in his own she knows is not for what she’s become but what has been done to her. Forced on her. And you were there, she says, and he braces himself for blame (already he’s weighing himself with it, that old sin of inaction familiar as a friend). What she gives him is worse.
“No,” he says, with another shake of his head, and his voice is hoarse and insistent. “I wasn’t there like you needed, I should have been-” Been what? Cirrus would tell him he can’t be everywhere, can’t be expected to take responsibility for every wrong done in the borders of his court. Can’t take the blame for choices and circumstance and random awful chance. But it is all too wrong to absolve himself. Still, he does not say he is sorry, not that she was alone, not for what happened. It would be empty and hollow and no use to either of them.
“No,” he repeats, gentler now, and reaches across the desk to touch her cheek. “But I’m here now. For whatever you need.” When he swallows he finds the lump in his throat is gone. The king pauses, and searches out her gaze to hold with his own. “When we find him, do you wish to decide his fate?”
king of dusk.
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