asterion*
It is, perhaps, his favorite thing about battles - the way everything happens at once, the way there is hardly any time for thinking and everything unfolds as instinct and action.
One moment he’s lunging into action, the next there is barely time to pray the meeting of hooves and skin does not hurt Po too badly. One moment Po is rising up and up and their breathing is a hazy rush in his ears and there is the pressure of body-to-body - and the next he is being caught, snared like a fox or a hare.
Switchgrass and cord grass, bluestem and rye: all reach for him, braiding themselves together around his legs, and if he paused to look he would find them blooming like the flowers in Florentine’s hair, unveiling color like popping fireworks. But Asterion is not looking. Though he is still pulling and thrashing against the vines, though his eyes are on the other stallion, what he sees is water. A great and churning sea, bubbling and thrashing and building, far away in his mind’s eye (and in his heart, or his veins, or wherever it is the magic grows and changes and makes).
Dimly he is aware of blades of grass with the strength of hands wrapping around his knees, climbing toward his barrel. Asterion inhales deeply (soil and springtime air, a sharp grassiness and the tang of magic) and the pool he pictures falls still. He breathes out (a trio of vines anchors his left hind leg) and thinks rise.
The water obeys. Up and up it comes rushing from the deep earth, where springtime rains have swelled the water table. The ground beneath him grows spongy, and Ipomoea’s roots lose purchase as the soil is flooded. At the same time (now leaves are tickling his belly, now a thick stem touches his shoulder like a hand) there is water being drawn from the grasses and the leaves and the air itself, wrung out of everything living and inanimate to collect at Asterion’s feet. Liquid collects on his own body like sweat, rolls slowly down his back and shoulders and the bridge of his nose. Without water in their cells the grasses become brittle and dry, autumn chaff; when he heaves himself again, sending up a great spray of water and mud, they do not so much fall away as shatter and dissolve like they have been a thousand years without rain.
Only then does he look up, chest heaving, to see what the results of such a dehydration are on Ipomoea. The king had flung out the attack in a wide range, acting on impulse alone, but he has never pulled water from the cells of another creature - would his friend be dizzy, fatigued, muscles cramping, organs failing? The bay doesn’t know how long it’s been since those vines first wound around his hooves, seconds or minutes or longer.
Now he stands in a pool of water rapidly soaking back into the ground, watching the appaloosa, his body trembling from exertion but the magic in him rejoicing.
@Ipomoea
Summary: When the plants begin to seize him, Asterion uses his magic to draw all the water around them out and to him. It soaks the roots of the plants and squeezes out of the cells of the grasses themselves (and Ipomoea, if he is close enough), leaving them brittle and weak enough to escape from. Once he does, Asterion looks up to see what the effect of his magic has been on Po.
Attack Used: 2
Attack(s) Left: 0
Block Used: 0
Block(s) Left: 1
Item(s) Used: NA
Response Deadline: 7/30 (or more as needed)
Tags: @Ipomoea, @Sid, @inkbone, @Sparrow, @nestle, @
