asterion,
How many times has Asterion wished for things he doesn’t have - for arching antlers, a horn as sharp as a sword, most of all for wings? But with Eik he does not feel lesser-than, or discontent. With Eik he dreams, but the dreams don’t feel impossible.
They speak but their words are like the wind, sometimes steady, sometimes absent, sometimes little more than a hum or murmur of wonder there below the trees. And sometimes their words slip into Eik’s language of magic and thought, though it felt so natural the bay could never say later what he’d said aloud and what only in his head, in pictures, in fragments.
But when they speak of the island, for a long moment the king doesn’t say anything at all. Until now he hasn’t been able to voice why the island makes him feel the way it does - a little more alive, a little more free - but now he looks around him and realizes he doesn’t recognize any of the trees, none of the ferns, none of the vines and bright flowers. And maybe that is part of it - maybe in the strangeness, this wild untamed country, all his duties fall away but survival. There are no castles to care for, no stockrooms and gardens; there is only the ones he loves, and the magic, and the island itself. It is easy, in a way. It is how he’d always pictured his life, an endless line on an endless map.
And yet he’d also thought he’d always love a unicorn with a lion in her bones. And he would have died for a twin who asked him only to stay away, suffocating beneath the weight of his love and suffering beneath her own sorrow.
Novus is nothing he could have imagined, but it has given him his family. Cirrus and Eik and Isra and Marisol and Florentine and others, more than he can count. It has given him love, and a castle to live in, like any fairy tale that ends in ever-after. How could it be anything but home?
“It doesn’t belong in Novus,” he says, by way of agreeing, and it feels like an admission.
He senses it as soon as Eik stops, and when he turns back his expression is already alert, eyes wary - but there is wonder on the grey stallion’s face. A different kind of wonder than anything the island could coax, a wonder that has Asterion already smiling, thinking back to Florentine’s news from only days ago. What a surprise, what a gift life is.
“Congratulations, Eik,” he says, and he’s grinning as he presses his nose to the stallion’s shoulder, huffing a breath onto the silver scatter of hairs and scars. The bay is drawing back already as his friend continues speaking, and he forgets the forest entirely, his senses ceding to the joy that rises in him like the sun. “Of course,” Asterion answers in a rush of breath, and it doesn’t feel enough for the weight of it so he adds “it would be an honor.” The king laughs, then, shaky with disbelief and happiness, feeling brand-new as a boy. “Between them and Florentine’s child we’ll all have our hands full.” After a moment’s hesitation he reaches for Eik’s cheek (how strange, to pause more before showing friendship than when they had traded bruises and blood on the battlefield) and touches his nose to it before turning away, now grinning again.
“I guess we’ll have to survive the island, then.” He’s still laughing when he says it, buoyant with love, even as his thoughts turn to more serious things - to Raum, and feral magic, and a woman of silver with golden scars. And to Moira, somewhere below these same trees, and the thought of her with the news of children makes something delicate tremble in his chest, stretching wings within a chrysalis.
Onward they walk, in sunshine and in shadow, and Asterion can only wonder what other wonders this world will open for all of them.
king of dusk.
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