[AW] This grand show is eternal

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* Asterion waits to let the stranger join him, letting the slow-rising sun warm his coat against the autumn breeze made cooler yet by its trip over the water. His ears are forward, head cocked just slightly (little enough he doesn’t realize he’s doing it), wondering at the stiffness in the stallion’s muscles. When they do begin to walk, he is careful to match the gray man’s pace. Age is almost as foreign a thing to him as courts and castles and keeps. He has led a strange, charmed life so far, among young and wild things. He does not break their long silence. He lets the gulls call fiercely to each other, and watches the sandpipers bob between the shore and the sea-grass that grows course at the edge of the sand, and searches himself for any trace of the tide-pull, the water magic that had once been within him. There is nothing, and though he feels emptier for it, he does not yet feel sorry. At the sound of the stranger’s voice he almost startles, nose jerking away from the coastline. He’d been lulled by the day, the sun on the water, the sounds of their feet in the sand. Really he ought to be more vigilant; it might cost him, someday. “Ah,” he says, and a smile crosses his dark lips, fleeting as sea-foam on sand. “I am the wrong horse to ask.” He glances at his new companion, searching for irritation but not expecting to find any. The stallion had come at his invitation, after all. The boy is a pilgrim on his way to any number of wonders, each unnamed and unknown until he finds them. If he’d known where he was going when he left Ravos, he certainly wouldn’t be in Novus. As for what lay further up the beach…well, he was still as new here as the dawn was to the day. “Do you know what lies ahead?” @Eik