This time, when she shivers, he puts a comforting muzzle against her shoulder. It is easier, when she is not undefended, to beat back that awful urge to hurt; he writes it off as an effect of this place, this dark magic.
But as soon as she steadies again, he’s quick to step away.
His mouth is a grim line as she speaks, but there is something like wry humor in his voice when he says, “It is not the only hungry thing here today.” When he reaches down to touch the depths of his magic, he wonders if this is at last the day he will test its limits.
Then there is just the singing of their feet as they race into the courtyard of the castle, beneath a portcullis with iron sharp as a wolf’s jaws. Asterion doesn’t know (and doesn’t like) why he thinks of the castle like a heart, why it is so easy to envision something beating and beating at the center, something they must uncover…
It is only her yes that could draw him back.
He listens, rapt, and though he still watches the way ahead out of the corner of his eye he sees her dip her chin toward her chest, to touch something there. The bay has to suppress a flinch; there is something in him that is suddenly hateful, something in him that wants to recoil from the star-colored liquid that swirls in that vial.
A plague.
Friends into monsters.
Tainted magic…
But then? he wants to ask, but Asterion already knows the answer. Gabriel had told him, when he’d met his father at last. And he’d seen what had become of that world for himself - all its beautiful, terrible magic, all its rotting and becoming, its dying and being reborn.
For a time there is silence between them. They wander the hallways, and Asterion does not call his magic, not even when the armor turns to watch them, not even when they pass room after room after room that has been bewitched. Not even when they enter the throne room, and he sees the figure of Tempus.
Asterion does not approach as she does. He has had enough of the gods of Novus to last him a lifetime. Instead he only watches, tensed for action, as she approaches the idol. It’s only after a moment that he notices the gleam of the pool at its feet, and he still pays it no mind until Mephisto steps back, and the liquid flows forward.
Then the door slams shut behind them, and he startles forward, until they are standing side-by-side once more. He nickers warningly, neck arched, eyeing the room for another way out.
“Fly if you must, Mephisto,” he says, and nods toward the dais, above and beyond the pool. And then he reaches out with his magic, to see if there is anything in the strange liquid that will listen to him - oh, but he already has an idea that it won’t.
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?
