asterion*
She is impossible to look away from, even as he wonders what new horrors are unfolding on the horizon, out of sight beyond the trees. Here in the dark of gnarled roots, of last year and the year before’s rotting leaves, she shines like a madman’s vision, like a prophet’s dream. And oh, what will he make of her prophecy? He is learning his way around disaster, but the heart of his people - that is a wild wood, that is a maze ever changing from the inside.
But Asterion has learned, too, to bear their blame. He meets her boldness with his own, chin as high, eyes flashing dark where hers are bright. Little about him looks a boy-king now, a soft man surprised to find himself a leader. Scars are mixed in with the stars scattered on his skin and he knows more constellations will be added.
“It was,” he says, and thinks of their fields rent and ruined, their grasslands flooded. Little to eat, the threat of a sinkhole collapsing underfoot. How he’d agonized over that decision, how he’d waited for Marisol to flay him for it. The relief he’d felt at safety, and the shame at not being able to provide it himself. Still his head does not drop, still he does not step away from his half-wild girl. “Only half - because I gave them a choice to stay. I know how fiercely Terrastellans love our court. And I know how stubborn they can be, when you ask them to change.” His gaze is still holding hers, pointed, even as he thinks of Marisol and her devotion to Vespera, and the Ilati and their ancient traditions. Some loyalties led onto death, if you held on too tightly.
And he would do it again. He will do whatever is necessary to see his people live to make their own foolhardy choices.
Still she presses him, her tongue a lash. Asterion does not quite bare his teeth, though his ears flatten into the windswept tangle of his mane. But it is a laugh that escapes him then, rough as smoke, a wave crashing against the immoveable wall of her smile. “I seem to remember finding you dancing there, too.” He says it low, even as the memory stirs him as it does her; the way the light scattered over her mask, the heat between their dancing bodies, the wail of the violin as it urged them on. Leto could pretend she came for him alone - but the king would call it a lie. A season of woe, and a night of revelry to mark it done; would she hold such sins against him?
The king’s breathing is coming harder, now, as though he’s been running endless beneath the trees. Her eyes on him glance like the flat of a blade, like thorns to catch and cut. But Asterion did not come here to fight. Though tension still has him wound tight he drops his head, blows out a long breath. He remembers the wonder of standing with her below a tree with a trunk wider than his height, painted and carved with sigils older than the named Court. Slowly the bay reaches toward her, to touch his lips in a question to her cheek; he wonders if he will burn for such a transgression, if she will kill another star down to burn him hollow. Now his voice is soft, pliant, a murmur in her ear. “Perhaps the gods have cast us off. But Leto - have you no faith in me?”
It is not until the words leave him that he realizes that his earlier questions for her - for the bowl, for the blood and the bone - were meaningless in comparison to this. Here, now, is the only answer with the power to make him fall.
@Leto
