asterion,
Somehow, in all his years in Novus, Asterion has never stepped beneath the boughs of Viride Forest. His only foray to Delumine was a spring festival two years past; if he lets himself he can still see the lights and lanterns hung between the saplings in the meadow, can hear the music he danced to with Florentine, can taste the icing Moira smudged on him.
He is not sure when he became a man of memories instead of dreams; he’s less sure that he cares for it. They weigh more than thoughts of the future, sweet and gone. They ache like the beauty of an autumn tree, and Asterion is tired of aching.
Maybe that is why he walks until the dark wall of forest becomes individual trees, and keeps walking until he is swallowed up between them. The bay needs something new, something unknown - a new path to focus on where his mind can’t wander, lest he trip over the root of a century-old cedar. He is not afraid of what he mind find there (or rather, what might find him); after the island, after the riftlands, Asterion isn’t sure he has room for fear. Not for predators or monsters, anyway, not for shadows on the trunks or high up in the canopy.
So he wanders with no particular direction, passing through patches of ferns whose wide palms brush his sides and out into sudden meadows where the last of summer’s wildflowers still nod in pockets of sunlight. Eventually he finds a stream and lets it guide him, and the chuckle of the water keeps him company until he rounds a bend and there, across the brook, is another horse.
He recognizes her at once, or thinks he does; it seems so out of place to find her here, in the middle of a forest in the Dawn Court, but then, the island had been no less strange. Her back is turned to him, and she is dappled by shadow, but there is the familiar shape of Hasta on her back.
“Corrdelia?” he calls, and despite himself he’s already beginning to smile.
Tho' much is taken, much abides;
@Corrdelia
