asterion,
“Perhaps there is,” he tells his companion, and thinks that maybe it isn’t such a bad thing, to have mysteries yet in the home he’s made. He is not so arrogant to think he knows all of Dusk’s secrets, and if there is some great eye, watching from the sea - how is he to see it?
They walk together toward the heart of the court, and the grasshoppers make their summer music, and the wildflowers nod their heads as the two pass by. The king is open to talk, and as content to travel in amiable silence; if the cast in his dark eyes is curious when he looks her way, he says nothing of it. He’s glad for the company, glad for the assistance in these riddles - even if it means he must ignore, for now, the concern and disdain that had colored Mariol’s voice when she mentioned all the strangers sure to descend on Terrastella.
Cirrus is off somewhere, hardly a wisp of white amid the blue, but her voice cuts clear across their connection. The volcano looks a little like an eye.
They are walking southwest, and the cliffs are beginning to level into beaches, and the inner continent is a map of green rolling away from them all the way to the swamp. But the stallion pauses, to look out over the water, and there in the distance is the green smudge of island, the shoulders of a peak a dark suggestion and nothing more. I’ll take your word for it, he thinks back, wry, but his heartbeat quickens just a little at the thought his guess might not be so far off.
Soon (too soon, as he normally when coming in from the fields and cliffs to the maze of the city, though the hunt has him more eager) they reach the borders of the capitol. The roofs make their own rough line against the sky, and the sound of the sea is not far away, quiet as a sigh.
Asterion pauses, and almost touches Camillia’s shoulder - instead he offers her a little smile, and nods toward the city. “I think we’d best split up here,” he says. “I can begin at the keep - if there’s anyone black of heart they’d likely be there, where the politicking happens.” For a moment his expression slips into a grin, but when he meets the mare’s eye then (so dark, those eyes; a void) he wears nothing but sincerity.
“Good luck, Camillia. I hope I’ve not led us too astray.” And with a last nod he turns away, running at a smooth canter until he’s swallowed up by the sun-drenched, sea-smelling buildings of his court.
king of dusk.
@
