asterion*
Divided we are weak, she says, and he might have protested - might have told her how unity with another court need not come at the cost of their own - but now is not the time. Not when the branches overhead are whipped with wind and light, not when her star-fire scatters white light across their bodies and the dark liquid rippling in the bowl, not when fate waits for them across still water. How to speak to her of togetherness, this girl who stands alone and proud, holder of her people’s secrets? Together, she continues, but he can only think together we danced.
She might have found him anywhere, he wants to say; the great hall and the castle wrought with Isra’s magic had been the last place he’d gone, that night. A long evening had stretched before - the lake, the maze, the markets, all of them dripping in light and music and song. A great rejoicing, winter’s darkest hour passing in revelry, a song of survival.
Asterion will not apologize for that night. It had done too much to heal his aching soul (no matter the grief that came of it, with Raum, and Acton, and Isra. He cannot bear blame for all sins, he is only a man).
“And I am home,” he says, his voice a mirror of her own.
She flinches at his touch (must all girls, he wonders, who speak to him so passionately, who burn him with their gaze?) but she does not draw away; a part of him wishes he could take it back, a part of him is fiercely glad he can’t. Her whisper is hot on his cheek; it is close and dense in the forest, all the trees and the stars themselves leaning in to listen, pressing down on them with the weight of centuries.
In one I have too much and in the other too little. He is stung, too stung to do anything but laugh, and withdraw, and shake his head. That laugh (however ash-rough, or grief-low) breaks the tension that has been roiling down his spine, between his shoulders, around his heart; no longer does he feel like lightning might strike him at any moment. The forest is too warm, too thick. Asterion wants to return to the sea, where there are no more answers but at least room to think, to breathe.
“Then there’s nothing to worry about,” he says, and his smile is as stark as a bare branch. “Thank you, Leto.” He looks once more over his shoulder at her, long and well, and then the king is gone through the forest the same way he’d come and the wind sighs like a long-held breath at last let go.
@Leto | an ending for you <3
