It is peaceful in the garden. The festival-goers who pass between the carvings do so quietly, almost reverently. Asterion, too, feels the holiness of them, these rough statues of driftwood wolves and gleaming bone hares. It’s the soft darkness of the night that hides their roughness, the flickering glow of their eyes that makes them real. A gyrfalcon with wings tilted in an imaginary wind seems to watch him fiercely; he could swear a fox he passes has its ear cocked, listening.
If so he must disappoint them, for Asterion is silent and slow as he winds through the carvings. Dew clings to his legs and colors them silver and he inhales the crisp scent of turning leaves. He tries to keep his thoughts close but they want to wander, back to Denocte, back to a girl with the curtains blowing around her, veiling her face. Maybe it is alright to let them. There are worse places they could go.
In time he finds himself at the center of the garden, another hungry moth to the bright lantern-glow. There is nothing in Asterion that says create; the only shaping he does is of waves and pools, temporary things. There is the pull to add to the story - but oh, he feels separate from it, more of a ghost than the carved figures with their living-light eyes. He might have moved on then, further into the night, but then he spots Ipomoea.
He says nothing by way of greeting, so that the paint is the first to speak. And for a moment more Asterion is silent, considering, thinking how it is only another echo of the question that Marisol and Moira had both pressed him with, a question he has never been able to satisfactorily answer. What do you want, Asterion?
“A second self,” he says softly, “to make all the choices I did not, so that I might live them, too, and see if they were the right ones.” His smile then is what is so often is - small, wry, almost self-deprecating. And then it is smoothed into something genuine when he turns to catch the king’s eye.
“And what you would make, Po?”
@Ipomoea <3
hold me amongst all your cards;
