[P] the price of being remembered

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* Asterion doesn’t remember what (or who) he is looking for. Something has brought him back to the cliffside north of the city, to footpaths he helped carve over the last five years. He never thinks about scents, when he thinks about memory, but today’s particular perfume of Terrastellan spring - wild rosemary and lavendar, the tang of the sea - makes him want to sink to his knees and lay his cheek to the sun-warmed soil and dream of all he’s known here. So much change, so much leaving. How did anyone decide which of all those who wandered in and out of their lives were the ones they couldn’t do without? When he was a boy - that distant, foolish boy - he would have said it was Talia, his twin, he would follow to the ends of the earth. But then she had told him to Go. He would never have guessed it would become such a common refrain. Oh, but he hadn’t come here looking for a ghost. Not unless - and here the stallion looks sharply toward the gulls, their voices carrying over the water. There is not one who calls to him. He hasn’t heard Cirrus since left, hasn’t heard her wry, comforting voice in his mind for a year, the day he left for the island and told her to keep watch. Asterion wonders if she migrated with the other gulls, gone for the winter, and became wild again, or if she died, or (worst of all) if she is still there, just beyond the shoreline, watching him and saying nothing. She wouldn’t like what lived in his mind now. What had curled up there, in the space her bond had left. There is no gull on the horizon, but the bay’s dark eyes narrow in a squint when he sees a far larger shape. Ever since that first year - Isorath, Reichenbach and Aislinn, the Dragon Gate, days when it seemed like man might be the most dangerous thing of Novus - he has been wary of dragons. And this one is not Fable. The grass whispers against his legs, but his gaze doesn’t stray from the dragon as Asterion moves to the cliffside. Wind off the sea leans against him, and he watches the beast dive and circle until a flash of gold out the corner of his eye makes him turn his head. Quietly, he watches the man watch the dragon, and not until the man notices him does he say, “I don’t recognize you.”   @Vercingtorix