in sunshine and in shadow
Asterion has learned, since leaving his first home long ago, that there is always a storm to come.
So many he had met told him there was something building, building on the horizon, even when the bay felt like he was living in halcyon days. Never has he been able to see the shadow of it, felt the weight of it pressing in on him, invisible but no less real. Even now, when he knows there are painful things to come, he feels no dread.
Perhaps because he is adrift no longer. Asterion is no longer a lone boat on the sea – he has found harbor, and he will weather what comes.
Oh, but Asterion is still terribly naïve, no different a dreamer than he was before he woke this morning. He laughs and ducks his head at the mention of the mead, and his smile, this time, lingers. “I’m glad I’m not the only one.”
He is surprised by how glad Eik’s question makes him; he is proud, he finds, at the thought of beings sought by this man, of counting him a friend. “It would be my honor,” he says, then twists his lips at how stilted and silly such language sounded, coming from himself. He follows the gray’s gaze as it travels the battlements, the keep, the smooth cool stone. “You’ll have to forgive my occasional ignorance, though. This place hasn’t come naturally.” It does not feel shameful to admit it; it feels like not needing to pretend.
That makes it a little easier, when Eik’s gaze finds his own again, though his expression still turns just a touch wry. “Well,” he says, both an answer and a beginning, and then he draws in a breath. “Florentine has made me her Regent – just a few hours ago. But I’m afraid I’m unprepared for such responsibility. There’s so much I don’t understand.”
The bay had looked away during the most of the telling, but now he glances back, prepared for the surprise Eik surely would wear. Maybe it had been too soon to tell anyone – particularly outside the court – but no part of Asterion wanted to lie, even by omission.
“Follow me,” he says then, and his hooves make ringing sounds on the stone as Terrastellans take down the remnants of the festival around them. “And tell me how you’ve been.”
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