He had been afraid to leave the island.
There everything was still a dream - surely it was no waking world where stars were born in great clouds of rose and violet and the ground was the smooth cold of glass. Even Thana was not a true creature of Novus, or a tame one; there, in that swirling darkness and galactic light, she had been more like a harbinger than a horse.
It had still felt like the kind of dream where you might wake up and all the wrongs would have been imagined, where drowsy morning found you safe in your bed with the sun at the window and everything as you left it.
But Asterion has not been such a foolish dreamer for a long time, now. And at last he came to the thick, strange mist that curled at the edges of the island, and stepped through.
It is the kind of summer day he’d learned to love in Novus, the sun warm on his back and the wind cool against his face and neck. Asterion walks along the shoreline the way he always has, and the cold foam rushes up to kiss his hocks, and the seabirds cry and clamor overhead. The bay can’t help the way he listens for one gull in particular, or the way his heart feels heavy and hard as a stone when he doesn’t hear her voice, either in the wind or the pathways of his mind. Perhaps Cirrus is only traveling, too. Perhaps they will both find their way home, accidental wanderers.
A petal tumbles past him on the breeze, as pink as the inside of a shell. For a moment his dark eyes follow it, brow softly furrowed, and when he looks forward again he sees the figure on the beach, a silhouette of a pegasus at this distance. The stallion’s heart stumbles in his chest, more uncertainty, more little-fear; does he prefer to meet a stranger, is he ready to meet a friend? What if, what if - those words have always threatened to swallow him whole, but he is tired of their teeth.
He walks forward, and the figure resolves into a mare with a crown of flowers (minus at least one petal), the color of rich earth, gold marking her like rare treasure. Samaira turns, and he can see the moment when she recognizes him, too, and then the distance between them is eaten up by each until they face each other amid the sun and the surf and the deep blue of the sky.
Are you a dream? she says, and he shakes his head even as he smiles, an expression soft and worn as driftwood, thinking of other conversations treading similar paths.
“Samaira,” he says instead of answering, with all the soft warmth of a summer’s dusk. “No. I am…awake again.” The small dark smile slips from him, drawn out by the next wash of incoming tide. He doesn’t move to touch her, but something in the dark of his eyes suggests he wants to - nose to cheek, shoulder to shoulder. And when he speaks again it is in a low voice that knows it is speaking something the first of a hundred times. “I am so sorry I left.”
@
hold me amongst all your cards;
