He wants to cling to her like the last warmth in the winter mountains, like an acolyte to the feet of the priestess that might save his soul or damn him. Asterion doesn’t know which he wants - to fall and sin and lose all fear, or to be forgiven. Either way is absolution. It’s the tension between them that’s killing him.
The stallion does not want to speak of soft things, not with the heat of her skin against his and the bite of the cold stinging his eyes to tears. He can’t think of the stars without remembering the way they fell on the island, when he returned, and each light so violently and exquisitely extinguished felt like a little death. Even so, his expression softens when he thinks of Aridela.
“They came from my mother,” he says simply, and thinks of all the stars she bore - enough to make his look like a simple constellation.
But that mother, and those stars, and that sea, are all so far from him now they sing to him only in memory. And he pushes those memories away, roughly, when she presses the bone-white of her face against his with a whisper. It is difficult to picture her soft, even for a moment. He almost asks her what she would wish for; instead he only presses his teeth against her skin.
“So I’ve learned,” he says, low, and he would have begged her for those bloody kisses then. To mark him in scars and not stars, to leave his blood on the snow as proof he is something more than a dream or a dreamer.
The snow is beginning again; the clouds are creeping higher, swallowing the blue. Soon it will be cold enough to kill. His dark eyes far again to her sword; he wonders what she brought it for, what thing she hoped to slay this high above the world.
He could ask himself the same question.
“My magic,” he repeats, then withdraws enough to look at her. At once the wind finds the space between them and sets its fingers in. She is the most vivid thing in the world; he wants to lose himself in all that color. “Follow me, Euryale,” he says, and his smile is as brief as a breath of mist before he turns and winds further up the mountain, away from the precipice.
The stallion does not want to speak of soft things, not with the heat of her skin against his and the bite of the cold stinging his eyes to tears. He can’t think of the stars without remembering the way they fell on the island, when he returned, and each light so violently and exquisitely extinguished felt like a little death. Even so, his expression softens when he thinks of Aridela.
“They came from my mother,” he says simply, and thinks of all the stars she bore - enough to make his look like a simple constellation.
But that mother, and those stars, and that sea, are all so far from him now they sing to him only in memory. And he pushes those memories away, roughly, when she presses the bone-white of her face against his with a whisper. It is difficult to picture her soft, even for a moment. He almost asks her what she would wish for; instead he only presses his teeth against her skin.
“So I’ve learned,” he says, low, and he would have begged her for those bloody kisses then. To mark him in scars and not stars, to leave his blood on the snow as proof he is something more than a dream or a dreamer.
The snow is beginning again; the clouds are creeping higher, swallowing the blue. Soon it will be cold enough to kill. His dark eyes far again to her sword; he wonders what she brought it for, what thing she hoped to slay this high above the world.
He could ask himself the same question.
“My magic,” he repeats, then withdraws enough to look at her. At once the wind finds the space between them and sets its fingers in. She is the most vivid thing in the world; he wants to lose himself in all that color. “Follow me, Euryale,” he says, and his smile is as brief as a breath of mist before he turns and winds further up the mountain, away from the precipice.
The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices
many gods and many voices
