[P] we can weep and call it singing;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* He had left at once, still blinking sleep out of his eyes, still hoping this was some nightmare, some mistake.   The sound of the bells had woken him from uneasy slumber, limbs tangled on pale cushions he would never grow accustomed to. At first what had swum to his hazy pre-dawn mind was Reichenbach and his ever-ringing coins, but it was not Reichenbach.   After reading the letter (and oh gods, what if he had never learned to read? If he had not so recently asked Isorath to teach him?) everything bled out of his mind but fear and worry and the need to go. Never before had he wished for wings; with each step against the driving, freezing rain he urged his heart, his legs, his lungs on.   And at last he had made it.   He is drenched and shivering and weary to the marrow of his bones; dawn is silver behind him, a cold opening eye. Asterion has never been to the night court capital; as he staggers into the courtyard he thinks, briefly as a beat of butterfly wings, of what Reichenbach and his people had done. Of the betrayal that had happened the night of the festival.   What if it’s a trap? It’s a hateful thought, born surely of his exhaustion and the fear that gnaws at him, that has its teeth and claws sunk into every inch of him. He pushes it away as he takes the last ringing steps through the keep’s yawning door.   “Where is she?” he cries to the first person he sees, a guard who’d snapped to attention from slumber when he clattered in. For a moment the guard only stares at the bedraggled bay stallion, wild-eyed and soaked as though he had crawled out of a hurricane. Asterion clicks his teeth, impatient with worry, and repeats himself. “Where is Aislinn?”   Finally the guard responds, accompanying him down first one twisting hallway and then another until they reached the infirmary; the guard caught his eye, swallowed, and gestured him inside.   Never has Asterion looked so wild or felt so helpless as when he steps into that room. At once he detects the metallic scent of blood, bitter-sharp even over the smell of lime and vinegar used to clean the room.   His heart is a leaping, running thing in his chest, more fleet-footed than it had been even on his panicked flight here. He stops only long enough for his gaze to fall upon her, half-hidden by a curtain on the far side of the room. Something looks terribly wrong with the shadow of her wing that plays on the fabric in the firelight; his mind pushes this away.   The last few steps seem longer than the whole of the rest of his journey; he is hungry to see her face, starving to hear her voice.   And then he does. He is not even conscious of whether they are alone or not in the room; he is aware only of how large her eyes are, how her light places are darkened with red.   “Aislinn,” he breathes, half-relieved to see that she is still standing, and then his gaze slips to her ruined wing and his breath hitches. Water puddles beneath him, a steady drip; his thoughts are in a freefall. What happened? he wants to cry; wants to demand Who did this? But he closes his teeth on them both. Instead he reaches for her cheek, tender, even as a tempest rages within him. “Tell me how you are.”      Tell me you’re all right. @Aislinn D: