Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
It is a wonderful thing, to be a child at a festival without supervision. Aster has eaten her fill of sweets, and the tang of spiced cider is still on her tongue; she has run wild through the marketplaces, and carries with her the smell of bonfire-smoke. At some point she has lost her brother, but she is unconcerned; though they have never been around so many people, tonight feels safe. Not like the island. Not like the wilds.
Maybe it is inevitable that she has come to the maze. Since the relic, when her heart beat a frenzy against her ribs, nothing has made her feel quite so alive. Here, though, this wide and whispering field with the stars just emerging overhead, and the rows and rows of corn that tower high above her - well, it makes her as curious as the cheetah at her heels.
It is dark in the maze. The shadows are thick and purple. She walks quietly, unheard amid those other sounds; she skirts others each time she hears them, tired of hearing you shouldn’t be out here alone. Sometimes, there is laughter. Sometimes, there are screams.
When she sees the boy, she follows him. Like her, he is young and alone. Aster stays a few turns behind, following the gleam of light. She might never have let him know she was there - until he speaks.
For a moment, she considers staying silent. Or telling him that she is a ghost, with the bone-colored white of her coat and the flat gold sheen of her eyes in the growing darkness. Instead, she only steps forward with her head high, her hooves soundless over the packed earth of the maze. The corn is still sighing in the breeze, dry leaves rustling together, an endless and toneless kind of music.
“Only me,” she says, and stands before the boy backed up into a corner, just beyond the light thrown from the little orb floating next to him. She regards him the way a deer might, or a wolf: with her head tilted just-so, with a kind of alien curiosity. “And my companion.” Teak winds between her legs, silent, watching the boy and his monkey with the same kind of interest.
Aster thinks that he does not look very brave, no matter what he says. There is a part of her that wants to scorn him, or scare him.
But she remembers what it is to be afraid (on the island, on the strange black-glass moat, with the relic flickering like a dying star and the scarlet juice of berries running down like blood and the bear with butterflies where its eyes ought to have been). Compared to that, this maze is nothing - an empty field she could fly over, if she were just a little older. No enemies but field-mice running small-footed over fallen stalks. Yet this boy with his monkey and his magical light might not know that.
“Which way were you trying to go?” she asks, trying to sound kind, the way a mother might. But still her eyes regard him like a wild thing, deciding.
@Kibou | <3
