asterion,
When Asterion comes home, he does not realize it at first.
It feels like just another flicker of the Rift, a sea-change that washes away everything before. He still doesn’t know how he feels about that world, though now his heart is anchored to it; there was the sickness, true, and then emptiness, and the feeling that nothing was solid and nothing would stay. But his family, they were there and real and permanent, and no part of him could ever hate or fear the magic there.
But he had always planned to come back. Too much of his heart was in Novus.
Yet this is not the world he knows, and at first he wonders if Florentine had sent him through the wrong portal. He is surprised to find that he is breathing, that there is something solid beneath his feet (though it is smooth, and cold, and his hooves echo strangely on top of it). At first he doesn’t try to walk at all, only stands and looks up and drinks in all the stars and comets and worlds that dance (and sing?) far overhead, the stars on his coat a pale imitation of their majesty, a ghost of a ghost. Asterion is alone beneath the nebulae; there is no seagull in his mind, no landmark, no scent of anything but the dust of ancient stars and the cold black emptiness. With nothing else to do, he begins to walk.
After a time (though there is no time), he hears the world shudder with thunder. It sounds like stars sparking against one another, like meteors colliding in a violent dance, like a booming echo - until he recognizes it for hoofbeats, racing across the glass-earth. From how far away do they echo? Asterion can see nothing but color and light, a slow-dreaming show of a universe’s birth, but he knows now he is not alone.
So he tracks that sound, and only stops, frozen in wonder, when a nebula birth light and form before him. He can feel tears stinging at his eyes, now, summoned by nothing more than awe; and then, with a little drawn breath, he sees a figure race through that cloud of star-stuff, trailing dust and light in her wake. And he finds that he knows that figure.
And he calls into the trembling, echoing stillness (that is not at all empty but full, full, full of everything),
“Thana.”
Tho' much is taken, much abides;
@Thana
