asterion,
There is no thinking too long, not between the two men who walk like old friends, like brothers, and let the forest breathe around them and between them. Maybe their thoughts are like roots, tangling, choking, above the surface and far below, tying them together with good things and bad.
They walk and Asterion lets his gaze wander, wishing for the first time that he could paint, that he could capture all these images and wonders and keep them with him. It is a bittersweet want, verging on full discontent - he can’t help but think he was happier, when he never wondered whether anything could be made permanent. Once he only accepted the world as it was, and lived each moment without regard for the next, and made no plans beyond where to bed down at night, where to drink from, whether to fight or to run what monsters he met.
(Of course he was not happier, but to think of simpler things always feels that way. There is no ache so seductive-sweet as nostalgia.)
When Eik speaks at last the bay only nods, though he isn’t sure whether his companion is watching, anyway. Shadows and sunlight slip over his skin, barring him with patterns of leaves, and the king thinks that he could walk here forever - always hunting but never catching. It is a shame and a blessing both that it is only and island, an ending in every direction. “That would be a good world,” he says, softly, and thinks of Florentine and the news she had told him, the way it lit her up to share it, the life of the baby she carries -
His breath sighs away from him as Eik speaks again. But a smile follows after, curling his mouth and softening his eyes. “If it didn’t, it might not be worth dreaming at all.” In the silence that follows (silence, as though the trill and chatter of the birds and the hum of insects and the wind rattling and soothing the leaves and the branches bending around them are nothing consequential) Asterion is glad that his friend had not turned the question on him. What does an ending mean, anyway?
And then, apropos nothing (nothing but all the wonder around them, and that they have this moment of peace and magic and wildness at all) Asterion says “I hope the island stays.” It feels a foolish thing as soon as it leaves his mouth - it had felt less so as a half-formed thought - but he thinks of the magic and the strangeness and the way it has brought them all together, in a way, with outcomes good and ill and yet to be seen, and he does not feel ashamed when he turns to meet Eik’s eye.
king of dusk.
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