asterion,
There is a quiet shoreline, far away - worlds away - where grew salt-grasses, and a little further back from the water cedars and madrones, and further than that a wide windswept plain. That is the place where Asterion was born, but it would be a mistake to say he is from there.
What is home - the place you stay the longest, the place you give the most to? Both of those, for him, would be Terrastella. And yet he can claim it no more than Eik can this desert. Where, then, do they belong?
“I hear it’s a dry heat,” he says, with a smile that passes for a laugh. It fades only a little as Eik continues, and the bay pauses to brush his muzzle again against his friend’s shoulder. “The first thing Isra said to me was an offer for me and any others of Terrastella to stay with her - after the floods,” he says, his voice soft with memory. He says nothing more as Eik shows him, and for a moment those lovely versions crowd out everything else in him, including the creeping darkness that is not his at all.
“I was thinking of going to the mountains myself. I’m sure I can find you there.” It is a pity, almost, when all his attention returns to where they stand in the Solterran capital.
He likes to hear Eik talk about his daughters. He likes to hear the smile in his voice, the bright gleam in his dark eyes, the sound of his laugh. Asterion notices others look up at that, such simple joy, one without cost. It makes him glad enough to forget his shame (never mind no children, never mind the quiet longing, the what-if - he should have been there for Leonidas, for Aster).
“I’m happy for you, Eik,” he says, and smiles at his friend as the mares pass. And for once he does not think of wars, or gods, or men or magic as they pass into a world of stalls and noise and color. For a moment, he lets himself feel only hope.
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take;
down the passage which we did not take;
@
