Asterion wanders the city in something like a trance.
He doesn’t remember how he came to be here. Had there been a bridge - had he walked on the water? If the waves had washed his feet and belly, all is dry now. He doesn’t remember the descent, the cleft in the rocks, the dim glow from a sun that could not be a sun, here below the outer world.
He’s looking for something, (or the thing within him is), but he doesn’t know what. Maybe it is only to not be alone - but in this, so far, he is unsuccessful. Here in the outer rings of the city, there is only his reflection in dark glass, in still pools of water. He doesn’t take the risk of tasting these to see if they are saltwater or rain. He doesn’t go into any of the shops, or call out into the strange daylight. Asterion only walks, winding downward and inward, the path of a gruesome shell, his dark eyes searching for movement among the flat shadows, his black-tipped ears twisting. The only voices are far away enough to be indistinct.
She is the first living thing he sees. He’d be afraid, by now, if he were in his right mind; instead he feels nothing, numb, except for that pull like the moon on the water. Nearer he comes, and nearer yet, and his eyes are narrowing, and he licks his teeth -
And then she turns, and speaks, and he recognizes her.
“Mephisto,” he says, blinking in surprise, and for now his reverie is broken. He is relieved to see a familiar face, even as new worry seizes him. There had been deaths on the island before, and this version of it feels stranger, more dangerous, than the first.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” he says darkly, slanting his gaze toward the shop. Within, he can just make out rows and rows of windchimes, of bone and clay and wood, and they make a faint music in the wind that stirs them through the open door.
through the first gate,
into our first world, shall we follow
the deception of the thrush?
into our first world, shall we follow
the deception of the thrush?
