I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
Asterion almost does not recognize his sister when the flash of gold catches in the corner of his eye like a tear.
At once he turns, a cry of warning already forming on his tongue, but it never passes beyond his teeth. Something has transformed Florentine; she is not the sad and bruised girl that has walked Novus for months like a flower crushed by summer heat. There is no mistaking her - he has never met a girl so gold, could never miss the shape of her wings or the bright purple thick in her hair - and yet this is a sister the bay king has never met.
Oh, she gleams against the blackening sky, and even without her dagger (without her magic?) she cuts a figure of power and awe. Here is the queen that Dusk had looked up to, here the princess of a world intent on destruction; he had never doubted her stories but he has never so readily believed them as now.
For all the magic that lives in him, it is not a word that has crossed his mind since seeing that billowing cloud of ash and darkness. Destruction, and the gods, and another disaster in a parade of them - all these things he had thought of, but never wonder, never awe. Not until now.
He lets himself remember, as he crosses to her (and the shallow water of the beach parts to let him by) the day that they had met. The storm that had blown in then, proceeded by lightning that splintered the sky and ate up the shadows, by thunder that shook the trees and made their leaves shiver beneath the drenching rain. How alive she had been then, and how remarkable - and how his heart had leapt alongside her own. Asterion lets himself turn his back on the terrible darkness to press his muzzle into the crook of her throat, the curve of her cheek; he presses the star-marked plane of his forehead against the soft gold of her neck and inhales the scent of hyacinths.
When he leans away again there is a new shine to his eyes, like some spark in her blood has caught in his own.
"What comes next?” he asks his sister, and there is no fear in him even as he wonders and how will we survive it?
@
Asterion.
