A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
Asterion stands under the other stallion’s gaze as easily as he can, aware that he had been staring just as openly. Still, he is uncomfortable beneath such searching eyes, and he keeps his own turned politely away, though curiosity – the color, and the cat – keeps drawing them back.
He is almost relieved not to be recognized, and he smiles even as he rolls a shoulder in a shrug, finally meeting that bright green gaze directly. “I’m still learning them, too,” he says, “and you would have had no cause to remember me.” He is unremarkable enough now, wearing his new title like a boy in an ill-fitting suit – then he was nothing but a windswept stranger, wide-eyed and muddy. When the stranger converses with the cat that crouches between his shoulder-blades, Asterion watches curiously. He has learned many things, now, in Novus, but this is his first encounter with someone who has a familiar.
But he makes no move to close the polite distance between them, and for the moment he manages to keep his questions to himself.
Instead he only nods at the name, dark ears forward to catch the voice that drifted soft as the spring breeze. As the kirin’s eyes searched the court spread behind him, Asterion’s own widened marginally; the feeling Jude had voiced is one he knows. “I can understand that. I only recently decided I…belong.” Even that word seems wrong; Terrastella had claimed him as much as he it. When he closes his eyes, brief sunlight on his eyelids, he pictures Cyrene gathering the children to paint him in colors of home. What word had she used?
Blessings, he remembers, and he’s smiling when he opens his eyes.
“I’m Asterion,” he says, the dark of his gaze meeting that bright spring green, then watching as the stranger looks away. “And I do welcome you back, then, whether or not you choose to stay.”
For a moment he follows Jude’s gaze, his eyes running over the rises and falls of the castle and its surroundings. They were growing more familiar, like the shape of a friend.
“Shall I accompany you in?” His voice is soft, and his gaze, when it settles again on the stranger, is its own soft question.
@Jude
