[P] glass slippers.

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* He no longer feels the cold, as soon as her lips shape his name. She is resplendent, a creature fashioned out of dreamstuff. Upon the vanishing of his own magic when he arrived on these shores, Asterion assumed that Novus was devoid of such strangeness, such beauty, but looking at her now – oh, he believes. It takes him a moment, then, to even notice the paint across her skin, dark cousin to his own. He is surprised at the gladness it gives him, the fierce sweetness of belonging – he had expected regret, expected worry, when finally he made his pledge. Not this…peace. Always. His lips curve into a grin; his heart soars. Aislinn pulls him into her wake and the world parts for them, for her, for her stardust and silver and sureness. He is blind to them, blind to the bonfires and blind to the music, caught only in the blue of her gaze, in the burning trail her whisper-kiss leaves across his cheek. He wants to capture her mouth, seize it with his own; instead he settles for pressing a kiss again to the constellation along her neck, his guiding stars. It is not enough – but it is also more than he remembers. “There’s something different about you,” he murmurs, voice soft with wonder, and pulls back enough to run his gaze over her like a hand. Then his lips turn up in a boyish smile and he laughs. “Other than the paint, I mean, though that is lovely too.” And oh, it is; galaxies on her skin, stars across her hide, all the colors of midnight traced upon her. But there is something else, something he can’t place. Some new spark in her stormstruck eyes, some energy that hums just beneath her painted skin. Asterion knows only that this is the girl he would battle monsters for. He does not know Calligo has blessed her with the abilities to battle her own. Maybe it should frighten him, that he does not know her at all. That he is head over heels for a hurricane, and there is no hope for him. That he is a man overboard, lost in the oceans of her eyes and the electricity of her skin. His whole life has been spent alongside the sea, but he has never until now considered how easy, how sweet it might be to drown. “Oh, Aislinn,” he says, her name like a prayer, a plea. Asterion keeps no gods, but for her he is devout. “I was afraid…” He cannot finish; he cannot name his fears – that he had done something wrong, that he would never see her again. That she truly had been a dream, a girl conjured by a boy who longed for the stars. @Aislinn -swoon-