[AW] This grand show is eternal

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* That grin catches him by surprise; it’s open and it’s kind and he is helpless but to match it with one of his own, still a little shy. He wants to ask more – a single day of summer? – but before he finds the words the stallion has turned away and the wind would snatch them from his lips, anyway. After a breath or two of uncertainty, he follows the stranger (if strangers is still the right word for them – perhaps it isn’t, perhaps it’s companions) into the sea. It is the first time he’s been in the water since Novus. He gasps at the cold even as he waits for the familiar magic to seep into him like the tide, the saltwater tingle in his veins. There is nothing, nothing, nothing and all at once the loss crashes into him like a wave. What was this place, that it stole his magic? And what had his magic meant to him, anyway, that it had been as much a part of him as all the blood in his body and yet it took him so long to know, to really know, that it was irrevocably vanished? He shivers as the stallion laughs, stopping with the water lapping his knees, and is grateful the grey’s eyes are turned away. A gull calls, shrill, just above his head and he crow-hops in the waves and silvers himself with spray. Maybe it’s alright – it always has been before. Maybe the losing doesn’t matter so much as the finding, and there’s been plenty of that. When the grey calls back to him Asterion falls still, dark-tipped ears shifting forward. Solterra – the desert, he remembers Florentine saying. His only memories of a desert summon a god-fire, raging and starving, his golden twin running for its hungry mouth – Fear and heat and shame, all of it searing him as he tried to dredge up all the water in him to save her, at least long enough for someone who could better help – Asterion’s wide, dark eyes are far away for a moment, and when he comes back to himself the water is once again startlingly cold. He hunches against it like an old man. “Why do you stay?” he asks, knowing the question might be fearsomely rude. It is quiet enough that it very well may be lost among the waves, the gulls, the wind. @Eik <3