of the wind & the waves & the caves;
Caspian has never been so far from the sea.
He doesn’t miss it tonight, walking inland and climbing upward, the low-mountain air burning clean in his lungs, absent the taste of salt. There are other horses nearby, dimly audible and only shadows in the growing darkness, but so far Benvolio is his only companion. The bat skims the air overhead, feasting on mosquitos, returning occasionally to cling to the boy’s mane.
Are we close? asks Ben in one such moment, long after moonrise and well before dawn. Caspian huffs a laugh and shrugs the bat from him again. I have no idea, he thinks into the space where their minds nestle close. Why don’t you go find out? With an indignant, mouse-sized squeak his companion vanishes into the darkness, and the paint pauses to stretch.
Most of the Terrastellans had gone to the festival earlier in the day, or were waiting for the morning to make the long trek to Denocte. But Caspian had been a creature of midnights and moonscapes even before he’d met his companion, and the Night Court’s parties were famous for going all night, anyway. Still, he stopped only long enough to catch his breath before loping ahead again, eager for new sights, new faces - perhaps new customers. It’s high time he expand his business, or else be a poor Dusk-dweller forever.
Benvolio returns to him just before he sees the arch. We’re close, he says, clinging to an errant salt-stiff curl. Caspian only smiles, refraining from asking if his companion is tired - he wasn’t the one having to climb uphill for hours.
Just then he sees the archway, and any teasing remark vanishes. With it goes the ache of his legs, and any errant thought; its beauty is the kind that calls even himself to the present. Caspian has never seen a structure so grand, higher than the walls of his court’s castle, near as high as some of the cliffs along the sea. It is easy, in that moment, to picture a dragon swooping over it and burning the forest to ash, or a beast tumbling the gate that preceded it to rubble and dust; before then such things had been only stories to him. He is ready to live his own part of them.
He steps below the arch and into the light just as another equine does, and he watches the way the colors paint her in indigo and rose and gold, colors so rich they can’t just be from the glass. Caspian thinks she smells like the sea - but maybe that’s just him.
“Nobody but myself,” he says at once to her question, and he can sense Benvolio rolling his eyes. “But maybe myself in a year or two,” he amends, and it is easy to imagine himself richer, and widely known, and used to such wonders as these. He wonders if his grin looks blue in the light, as the rest of him always does. Caspian looks at her curiously, beginning to pick out her lean and elegant features. “Why, who else would you be?”
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