[AW] promise something good for me;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* He ought to have placed her from the meeting immediately, but Asterion’s head had still been stuffed half-full of dreams and cobwebs, that morning, and he had felt so terribly new. New, and out of place in that strange courtyard made of materials he’d never seen before, towering like a mountain and hollowed by rooms. To these people, Asterion surely must be barbaric - he has never seen a book, can certainly not read, and before standing in that semi-circle of strangers had never thought a horse could do so very many things with their hair. Suffice to say, his mind had been preoccupied. It’s not until her vividly green eyes turn to him that he remembers, and chides himself for his forgetfulness. “I’ve not been here before,” he says thoughtfully, looking down his dark muzzle at the ripple of the waves, “but I may have to start.” A quiet smile creases the bay’s lips, and his eyes shift over to the pale filly. She reminds him at once of the earth-horses in Ravos; there is something kind, curious and gentle in her that sets him in mind of the earth-goddess he’d known. She even wore similar antlers to Maaemo. He wonders if the gods were still at Ravos, or if they, too, had leapt into the rift. What did a god do when their world went empty? Far below them, the waves rush, ravenous, against the stone. He can’t yet see it, but he knows the sound. “But I left my gods behind,” he continues, stepping up alongside her, and there is something soft and sad in the shape of the words, though his smile remains. “I don’t think they thought much of my prayers, anyhow. Who do you pray to, here?” For a stallion who had met his gods, he has always been frightfully lackadaisical about religion. But she had been at that Dusk Court gathering, and he assumes (wrongly, evidently) that she is a native. She seems too young to be a refugee - at least in the eyes of someone who has been more or less fortunate in the events that had led him to this cliffside. As he glances over her again, though, Asterion wonders. With the golden light slanting on her, the pearls between her antlers look like dewdrops caught in a spider’s soft-spun web and it makes her look like a magical thing, old-and-young, some sort of cliffside nymph. Then he shakes his head, and the vision dissolves into sea-mist. @Maude