in sunshine and in shadow
He does not yet wonder if the moonlight has led him astray, or if the waves were sighing out a warning against the rocks as he turned into the darkness of the trees. Asterion has never known a woman like her - a wolf or a witch or whatever she is, that she looks at him so, with promises in her eyes that all end in blood.
For the first time he thinks that Florentine would call him a fool, to see him now, and Marisol would curse him outright. For the threat is undeniable in the glistening curve of her teeth, in the arch of her neck, in the pattern of the snakes that twine so sensually along her hip, tangling over and through themselves like the reaching roots of the mangroves. And even so Asterion cannot find it in him to be afraid, for his curiosity outweighs his wisdom, and the heat of her blood is catching in his.
The king may call it fascination, but the beat of his heart knows better - it is want that stirs in him, dark and low and strange. Want for the way she moves, the way she looks at him, the way her voice traces like fingers down his neck, down his back. He does not quite know what it is he wants - to taste the salt on her skin, to scrape his teeth along her shoulder, to see if the wildness of her might make him wild, too —
All this time her eyes have not wavered from him. She watches him as the moon does, unblinking, though her lashes drift down over the red of her eyes like thin clouds might veil the moon. But no space separates them; she is near enough now that the silks she wears (thin as sighs, soft as secrets) brush against his skin with the cool kiss of a breeze. The summer night is alive around them, and the sea still rushes at his back, but it is fading, fading against the blood-rush that echoes instead in his head.
Her words are almost lost against that background noise, the way all his senses seem taken up by his skin, by his eyes. Yet one of Asterion’s ears slants toward her, and almost a smile slants in turn across his face. “I would ask the wolf,” he breathes, just as soft, and for a moment his eyes catch the blood-dark of hers. That is when she asks her question, when he can almost feel her skin on his, and all thoughts of any other kind of beauty but the beauty of wolves is near-driven from his head.
Nobody, he wants to say, or only a dreamer, but neither of them are true any more. Asterion is no longer a boy, to play at being a knight and drift from world to world like foam on the waves.
He does not want to remember the roots he has made, the ties and responsibilities that have ground him like an oak. He wants to be untethered, he wants to drift like a ghost along this laughing, wanton stranger, and take the things he never had the courage to ask for. But it is not who he is.
I am the sovereign of these lands,” he says at last, like a sentence or a vow. “I am the king of Terrastella.”
Asterion straightens unconsciously as he says it, and the moonlight picks out the silver in his hair, the star-shine on his shoulders. Yet his eyes do not turn from Euryale, and when she speaks again he is just as rapt. “Is that what you were doing tonight?” he asks, caught between the curiosity of a boy and a man. Still he has made no move to touch her in turn but oh, how his gaze follows her movements, how his skin shivers when the gauze of her ribbons drifts near.
“Not only in my dreams,” he says, and at last turns his eyes away to look back to the sea. Through the thicket of trunks and the tangle of limbs and the sighing leaves he can make out the moonlight on the waves. The tide has come in fully now; the night is quieting. “They are why I am here now. Too long apart from them and I -”, the bay king falters. He forgets he stands before a wolf, bare before her hunger; he forgets he is in danger, or in want. Only his blood remembers, coursing quick and hot beneath his dusky skin. “I forget myself,” he finishes, and when he turns back to her they are near enough to share breath.
@Euryale <3
