He remembers (though the memory is hazy, the glimmer of a tower through a thick night fog) standing in the dusky rainbow light of the archway in Denocte, talking to a stranger.
The stranger was a king, a golden man from a golden land, and his name was Orestes. Asterion remembers the tone in his voice, the raw hardness of it, when he said You left Marisol. It was hard for her.
Marisol has always been strong, he’d said in return. But he’d wondered, sharply - thoughts like little brambles, pointed at the tips - who this golden man was to the mare he knew, that she had let him in enough to show even that much vulnerability.
Would he have found it an irony bitter or sweet, to know the situation now?
Maybe he would have asked her, in the end, whose leaving was hardest?
Again she says his name. When he looks at her now, there is a kindling of something like warning in his eye. Has she ever said it so much? Has it ever been so earnest on her lips? And why, why is she treating him like a feral thing - skittish as dry leaves in a high wind - dangerous, even?
How dare she be weak - how dare there be the threat of tears in her voice like a seam of water in a cavern - now?
His queer little smile begins to curve into something else without him knowing it.
And when she asks that question - the question he’d wanted to hear, oh, months and months ago, on a bright foggy day on the beach, before everything fell to pieces - he closes his eyes and sways on his feet, and his heart is full and swollen but oh, not with the right things.
He almost looks like himself again, when he opens his eyes and drops his head and steps, carefully, down to her level. Within him his magic is a wide yawning chasm, a trench deep and deep into the belly of all things, a black well where water pools. Within him, something else has taken his place, because Asterion is below those waters, fallen in that well, head far below the surface of sorrow and regret.
Something else looks out at her from beneath a fan of dark lashes, and reaches out to touch the curve of her neck. Its teeth ache with wanting, but it knows power, and it knows it is not strong enough to fight her. And so -
”I will if you show me the way,” he says, softly, barely more than an exhale against her cheek.
And then two things happen at once: greedily his magic reaches for her, pulling the water from her body, a weed choked by drought finally given rain - and Asterion shoves against her, hard, toward all that dizzying space.
The stranger was a king, a golden man from a golden land, and his name was Orestes. Asterion remembers the tone in his voice, the raw hardness of it, when he said You left Marisol. It was hard for her.
Marisol has always been strong, he’d said in return. But he’d wondered, sharply - thoughts like little brambles, pointed at the tips - who this golden man was to the mare he knew, that she had let him in enough to show even that much vulnerability.
Would he have found it an irony bitter or sweet, to know the situation now?
Maybe he would have asked her, in the end, whose leaving was hardest?
Again she says his name. When he looks at her now, there is a kindling of something like warning in his eye. Has she ever said it so much? Has it ever been so earnest on her lips? And why, why is she treating him like a feral thing - skittish as dry leaves in a high wind - dangerous, even?
How dare she be weak - how dare there be the threat of tears in her voice like a seam of water in a cavern - now?
His queer little smile begins to curve into something else without him knowing it.
And when she asks that question - the question he’d wanted to hear, oh, months and months ago, on a bright foggy day on the beach, before everything fell to pieces - he closes his eyes and sways on his feet, and his heart is full and swollen but oh, not with the right things.
He almost looks like himself again, when he opens his eyes and drops his head and steps, carefully, down to her level. Within him his magic is a wide yawning chasm, a trench deep and deep into the belly of all things, a black well where water pools. Within him, something else has taken his place, because Asterion is below those waters, fallen in that well, head far below the surface of sorrow and regret.
Something else looks out at her from beneath a fan of dark lashes, and reaches out to touch the curve of her neck. Its teeth ache with wanting, but it knows power, and it knows it is not strong enough to fight her. And so -
”I will if you show me the way,” he says, softly, barely more than an exhale against her cheek.
And then two things happen at once: greedily his magic reaches for her, pulling the water from her body, a weed choked by drought finally given rain - and Asterion shoves against her, hard, toward all that dizzying space.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
See, they return, and bring us with them.
