asterion,
He tells himself that it is good for him, to see a place in Novus he never has before - somewhere without history, without memories stirred up like muddy water with every step.
He tells himself that it is good for him to be so far from the sea, which has been whispering strange things in his sleep.
And for the most part Asterion believes these things. Beneath the midday sun, with winter (as he knows it, anyway, cold and white) a memory kept beyond the desert, he feels more himself than he has in weeks. Here he need not worry about being recognized, and anyway the Solterrans are so busy with their own business that hardly any glance his direction. So he is left to explore on his own, wandering beneath the thin shade of brightly colored banners, curiously eyeing the wares displayed on silk-covered tables, listening to the call of birds he doesn’t know the names of. And in each alley, beside each well, he imagines Eik, and smiles.
Eventually he arrives at a statue, a stallion with his forelegs flung to sky, head twisted, eyes defiant, each strand of hair too realistic to have been carved by any hand but a god’s - or a monsters. Asterion’s dark eyes drop from the stone to the white marble beneath, and skim across the poem there. At the end - That peace for what they paid - he sighs, and turns, and feels the sunlight fall like a warm hand across his back.
And there in the winter light is his friend.
Asterion doesn’t hesitate before crossing the hard-beaten path between them - not even long enough to study Eik’s expression, or look for new scars. He presses his forehead against the gray’s, and exhales a breath that surprises him its shakiness; when he withdraws and shakes his head his lips are shaped almost like a laugh.
“I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” he admits, and the expression in his eyes is more complicated than the one his mouth wears.
And for now, the thing that lives within him that is not him stays silent and still.
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take;
down the passage which we did not take;
@
