in sunshine and in shadow
There are many ways they might have parted that night, amid the quiet dazzle of the archway and the harsher gold of the lion’s glow. It is enough for Asterion that it did with the unicorn’s kiss to his brow, the word uncle on her lips, as though he is still as good as family. “Thank you, Aspara,” he says in place of goodbye, and he feels like an old man then, sentimental and silly-grateful that she turns away before the tears prickle enough at his eyes to make themselves seen. While she says farewell to the sun king, the star-browned once-king scrubs his cheek against the inside of his leg, wiping away the trace of them.
When he watches her go, it is with a fondness he has no right to; she vanishes like a little moon in the darkness.
Orestes he watches with a more subtle, complex expression. “I’m sure we will,” he’d said at their goodbye, and he had meant it; it does not seem unlikely, though the whims of Novus’s gods were, to be fair, unpredictable. And perhaps he is wrong - for if the man knows Marisol the way his brief mention of her had suggested (in only so much as the shape of her name on his lips, the timbre of his voice - Asterion knows the sound of a man in love) then perhaps it will not belong before Marisol tells the king of their recent encounter.
And that is a memory too new to be dull, so the bay presses it down, down as he turns away to join the stream of pilgrims to the city of starlight.
When he watches her go, it is with a fondness he has no right to; she vanishes like a little moon in the darkness.
Orestes he watches with a more subtle, complex expression. “I’m sure we will,” he’d said at their goodbye, and he had meant it; it does not seem unlikely, though the whims of Novus’s gods were, to be fair, unpredictable. And perhaps he is wrong - for if the man knows Marisol the way his brief mention of her had suggested (in only so much as the shape of her name on his lips, the timbre of his voice - Asterion knows the sound of a man in love) then perhaps it will not belong before Marisol tells the king of their recent encounter.
And that is a memory too new to be dull, so the bay presses it down, down as he turns away to join the stream of pilgrims to the city of starlight.
