you must like me for me
yeah, i want you
we can’t make any promises now
can we babe —
Stardust streaks across the sky in trails of silver and gold, and she swims and swims and swims in those skies. Her wings beat madly, furiously through the thick of woodsmoke and embers of Aether’s dragon fire. She climbs the reach of the mountain’s hands, rising and falling until the sea below her calls to her aching heart. The stormsinger is nearly gone.. nearly out of precious, precious time.
And oh, does she wish for a moment for time to still. By some unspoken bond, she is drawn here with all of her wishes and hopes and duties tied around her rib cage like silken ribbons. But they are not as strong as the draw that binds her to him by something eternal, something more. Be it Calligo’s divine hands and comets that shower the heavens and show her the way, or her own heart and soul that bleeds twilight lavender and silver shot through an ebony mane.. Aislinn spirals. Her wings tuck, diving through the star-strewn air until her hooves dance across the sea. The waves kiss her with their cool salt spray, and then her legs plunge beneath the surface of the dark waters. She prances through the shallow cove towards the shore, blue eyes wide and searching.
Always. The sea has yet again called to her once more. And again, she is searching. Forever searching for him. For her prince. Her other half. Asterion.
The sky at her back begins to fade as Calligo’s ethereal tears slow. The dark of night still reigns, but the horizon leaches the softest whisper of lavender upon the sea’s far reach. Smoke rises and burns in the mountains to her right where the Pass has been closed; the Raven Gates shut. Her kingdom drawn. She knows that her time is short. She knows and she knows and she knows.
Aislinn braves the warm waters that lap at her midnight sides, stopping short of the sloping sands as her gaze shakes on the figure in the dark.
Somehow, someway, she finds him. Just like he had found her not so long ago.
"Asterion. I —" her voice breaks. She swallows, her gaze pleading. Begging for understanding. And far away, she still hears the wild crackle of fires burning the only passage to her home.
"We don’t have much time. I don’t have much time."
@asterion ♡ -flailing and screaming and crying- this is set right after the events of this thread but before the fires die out so she can say goodbye ;_;
"Aislinn speech."
Always, when his thoughts are a Charybdis that threaten to pull him down, he seeks out the sea.
It is no different tonight, not long after a Dusk meeting that has left him as weary as he has been on Novus. He only pauses once, in his pilgrimage to the water, and that is to watch (with horror, with awe) as the mountains across the water burn and burn and burn, a distant pyre to some dark god. Surely it was lightning, that started that blaze – except it spread so quickly. Except he can still hear Jude warning them all of dragon-fire. Except the only fires he has known have been started by men or by gods.
He only hopes that everyone is safe. Asterion can’t keep his gaze from the distant smoke, like fingers that yearn to scratch a scab or worry a wound.
At last the water – but he is not alone for long.
She draws his gaze like a swan landing, and he marvels they way he always has to see her. At first his mind does not connect the burning beyond her with her presence here; he is too happy to see her whole, to see that she has found flight again. That she has come to see him.
He starts forward, but her words stop him before he can take a second step. His ears twist, uncertain. His nose catches scents he’d hoped never to know again.
“Aislinn? What do you mean?” Oh, why does she smell like ash? His gaze, so dark, keeps wanting to draw away over her shoulder, where smoke rises in a column dark as sin against the bruise of the sky. He tries to match his breathing, his heartbeat, to the hush of the waves as they kiss the sand in sea-foam; for the most part he fails.
That lick of flame on the horizon, that smell of green things burned to black on her skin, it reminds him what it is to be afraid. He is dizzy with the memories – one fire he ran from, fled like a coward boy, and another he ran into, to save the twin who repaid him with hate like cold gold.
He does not take another step toward her, though the water beckons him, whispers for him to come and be healed. Asterion pulls in deep breaths that taste of salt and sea-grass, the things he loves, the things he is made of as much as any star-stuff or silver twilight.
And then he levels his gaze at her, and a slow suspicion gnaws at his heart, narrows his eyes. So many questions he has meant to ask her, but has never had the time; now he must push them away again. Always there is more trouble. He thinks of the festival, how happy he was with her, how blissfully ignorant of the darker things that transpired that night. How there were never enough answers, only more questions. The accusations Jude had leveled – is that what she thinks, too?
The regent straightens, and watches her as she stands in the water (not so different from another night, a year ago, her tail trailing from pale starfire to dark soot on the rippling surface).
“Is that why you’re here?” he says, and angles his muzzle toward the distant blaze, the one that sets his skin to shivering, that makes his traitorous, remembering heart so unsteady. “What have your people done?”
There is a burning in the night, there is ash on the air (if he kissed her, would she taste of it?) but Asterion is cold, cold, cold.
you must like me for me
yeah, i want you
we can’t make any promises now
can we babe —
A delicate, divine string of silver and night’s smoke draws her closer to the shore, where he waits upon the sands. The ribbon has been wrapped around her heart, digging into it’s beating flesh with a fever that builds and builds. Her heart is as much a wild and untamed thing as she — and on this night, oh on this night, she is everything but if not unbound. She longs to close the distance between them, to brush his velveteen muzzle with her lips. Yet.. yet, she does not. She stays; the whispers of the sea’s waves the only sound as the water laps against her with their poetry.
Aislinn? What do you mean?
A million words lay unspoken on her lips, tumbling over themselves as they war for their right to be breathed. Her crown shakes, the curtain of moon-kissed hair falling across her eyes — breaking her contact with his lovely, handsome face. How could she tell him? How could she tell him the truth of the dragon’s fire — Aether’s fire — that now burns through the mountain pass? How could she tell him that the ancient Raven Gates have been closed, and that their isolation, their solitude, was decided by three? She being one of the masters behind the Night’s decision to break away. To safe themselves. How could she tell him that?
Copper nostrils flare with salt and ash and ocean brine. When her head rises, her gaze pins onto him with an unfamiliar strength, an unfamiliar flame. Not once had she ever looked upon his face with such ferocity. The thought had never crossed her, nor had she ever expected it to. This was her prince. The very same prince who stole her heart from the shores of a silver lake; the very same prince who danced with her in a field of fireflies; the very same prince who shared her own swollen heart, who had found her when she needed him most.
And yet, he had never looked so cold. Not at her. Not until now.
Is that why you’re here?
She does not need to turn to know that his eyes — those pools of galaxies that she cannot help but steal her breath — are on the angry orange flames that reach towards the stars. Embers kiss this night, ash falling into the sea in dark, dark tears. And she is tangled within their grasp; their greedy fingerprints like shadows that dribble onto the glow of her mane, dousing the the starry gauze that clings to her skin until all that is left of her is smoke. "Please, try to understand—" she starts, before a roar of flame cries out into the night, whooshing skywards with heat and light.
What have your people done?
"What my people have done?" Her voice finds her, and she strides forward, stopping just short of the water’s edge. Fingers dance across her spine in angry drumbeats, igniting her from the inside out. Aislinn turns now, facing Asterion fully. Her lover, her other half.. but now.. the enemy? No. But she is Rage, and hell bent, and every ounce the storm-wrought child Calligo had designed her daughter to be. Aislinn’s walls are cracks of ebony stone, her storm crying out beneath her skin. Her will to protect, her loyalty, now a call stronger than any blood.
He had no idea the lengths in which she would go for the star’s children. No idea at all.
She twists her neck violently, the shining white stars tattooed there burning beneath the firelight. But it is the purplish scar there, near silver and forever etched into her skin that she brandishes. The crude, brutal Sun that she is forced to wear as a reminder for her failure, for her weakness. What had she done, but do what she needed to do to keep her kingdom safe from men like him — her attacker? From Solterra? From the Davke? In the end, it hadn’t mattered.
And now, now the stormsinger bores into him with eyes of searing blue, pleading. "My people have bled. They have been maimed" —her wings flare, her body shaking — "they have been broken, and they have been manipulated and used. We are not innocent. We desire Peace. And what of the Solterrans? You know what they did to me. Just look, really look" — she remembers all too well the rock that had marred her — "at what they have done. What they are doing. Their own Regent rebelled against their Court, and what is to stop them from invading Denocte? From Terrastella?"
Swallowing, she inhales. Long and slow. She softens, but her eyes do not — they are pyres of wicked blue, near twin to the fires that rage in the Arma. "We are doing what we must."
Only then, does she look away, seeing nothing as she stares into the abyss of shadow and flame. "I’m here.. I’m here to say goodbye."
When her eyes blaze at him, a blue that freezes, it is Calliope he thinks of. He has seen that kind of look before, but it was the unicorn who wore it – and it was for the world she found unjust, the gods she would tear down. Not for him, though it had struck him then as if it were.
He wonders who Aislinn’s look is for.
Try to understand, she says, but oh, how can he, when he has told him nothing? Flame spits higher, throwing sparks like an assault; Asterion winces, and despises this weakness in himself. He should be better, he should be stronger, he should not tremble as his dark eyes reflect a distant glow, a forest burning.
Her voice, her movement, calls back his attention. A breeze bitter with smoke - woodsmoke, truly now the incense of the Night Court – tangles their hair, stirs the water of the bay to whitecaps. Oh, if only he still had his power over that water, the sea singing in his veins – maybe then the distant burning would not turn his heart so cold.
But he is powerless, bare before her, and his mouth is a thin line as she bares for him her scar. As if he could have forgotten it, that skin-soaked night he raced for Denocte, to wait out her whispers, her screams. To confess his love.
He might have done it again, there between the sea and the shore, but her next words catch him like a fist.
Even then, perhaps he might not have spoken if the accusations and warnings of Jude were not so fresh. Perhaps he might have held his tongue if an explanation had been earlier coming, or if the horizon were not burning, or if he didn’t feel like everything was falling to ash around him.
Almost, almost, he brushes his muzzle against her scar. Almost he presses a kiss to the constellations he has memorized, the ones he has dusted with cinnamon kisses.
But Aislinn is not the only one to know loyalty, and anger, and cold fingers of fear. She is not the only ones whose people have bled and been maimed.
His voice is soft when he answers, and he says nothing of her scar (what can he say? He hurts for her, he remembers too well the tatters of her wing, the screams, the crust of dried blood, but she had chosen that fight, if not the result). For all its quiet, it is no less firm – a carrying current, slow and silver beneath the burning sky.
“Their Regent rebelled against their court? I know nothing of that. I only know of a Regent who rebelled, in his way, against this court, then abandoned it when his intent was laid bare. Recently we were told that he might set Terrastella alight out of petty pride. A warning I did not take to heart, though I see now I should have.” A sigh, a whisper of sorrow that shivers along his skin. He has never been so weary as this world has made him.
But he has pledged himself, and he can not leave, to be borne upon the waves to brighter shores. There is a people under his care, and he loves them as he loves her. Loves her even though her gaze scalds him, even though she could call down lightning to smite him if she wished it. (And would she? His heart says no, but he does not recognize the Night Court any more, not since the festival, when the two of them danced as Lysander bled).
He forces his voice to be measured, his expression smooth. She cannot hear the way his heart races like a rabbit’s over the noise of the waves. “Peace, you say. Then why does your own country burn? I would not look for peace from men who would do such a thing. I would not look for peace from men who would beat a citizen at an occasion of unity and never offer apology, however insincere.” His eyes are the endless sea to the fire of hers, and they might have stood like that for a long time. Until she looked away. Until the distant fire kissed gold along her cheekbone, and she said the word goodbye.
“Goodbye?” His voice falls to a whisper; he shakes his head like the word is nothing more than smoke. Something he can close his eyes against. But like smoke, it lingers in the air, and it tastes bitter, bitter. “For how long?” Suddenly the space between them is an ocean, a chasm; it is a shut gate, a burning pass. Oh, Asterion wants to bridge it and he leans toward her, a ghost seeking warmth.
But it is too far – too far to cross alone.
“Please,” he pleads, more unsteady now than he has yet been. Even the seafoam that rushes up and kisses his hocks does nothing to soothe him. “Please stay. Help me to understand – don’t leave me when I don’t understand.”
He does not tell her the truth – that he is afraid of what might happen if she does.
you must like me for me
yeah, i want you
we can’t make any promises now
can we babe —
He is ice and the dark of space that swallows twilight. The silver threaded through his mane a cold kiss of reality that presses against her cheek where his lips had once brushed not so long ago. In answer, she is her people’s dragon fire; a whisper of storm and brimstone and lightning carefully constrained in midnight and star-flecked skin. Never had she dared look upon him with her eyes like pyres, but then again, when had he ever seen her for what she truly was? How could he look at her as if he had known her — every part of her, no matter how shadowed, how dark — and yet not understand?
Her people were everything to her. They were every damn star in her galaxy.. save for one. The North Star — Asterion. The brightest in her night skies; the beacon in her dark.
But it would seem that some stars could begin to fade.
Peace, you say. Then why does your country burn?
Asterion’s words pull her faraway gaze from the smoke that rises in the mountains. "My country does not burn only for us. It’s a warning, a statement. We will no longer bow to the chaos rippled across the courts — both from our hands," she swallows, a stone dropping in her stomach as the sun-scar on her neck burns, "or at the hands of others." She trembles to face him, to drown in those eyes of calming seas, when all at once she is igniting with pent up rage. Anger. Despair. Desperation. The threat on her and on her people was real, just as much as the scar on her neck was tangible. No matter how many times she tried to forget that it existed, it was there. But unlike the sun etched into her skin.. she could do something. She had to.
She had to.
Her heart begins to crack.
"You would not look for peace from the Night? From me?" Aislinn is lethally quiet, bordering a shuddering calm as her tempest beats against the dam of self-control. How could he say such things? Her heart constricts, violently, brutally. All she can do is shake her head, willing the words to fade away.
Goodbye? For how long?
There is a sudden, coarse line drawn in the sand between them. A canyon without passing, a crumbling bridge, an ocean of waves and stars and promises made. Too soon and all at once, they stand on opposite sides.
Please..
A crater cleaves through her heart like shears — shears that cut the sewn strings of twilight lavender and dusty rose around the beating flesh. The very same strings that had carefully threaded the broken pieces of her heart back to wholeness, near exact to one year ago. But then, they had met on a different shore, a different night. Now, there were no fireflies or summer wine, but tears and flames and the weight of a world settled upon her phantom crown. This time, she was everything but the Child of the Night that had found her prince of daydreams that midsummer’s eve.
And she hated it; for no matter how hard she tried, the cavity grew, crumbling into a hole of obsidian in her chest where he had once been forever there in her soul.
Only one word, and she was undone.
Please stay. Help me understand — don’t leave me when I don’t understand.
Her voice is feather soft — terrifyingly soft. "Do you know what I am?" she asks. Even the waves that crash onto the shore are silent as Aislinn’s words fall from her lips. She dares to look at him, really look at him, memorizing the lines of that handsome dark face. The clouds of dusk that cling to him like the stars cling to her. And those eyes.. those eyes she would have swam in, only to find the truth hidden within.
Does he truly know the woman he had fallen in love with?
"Do you know who I am to them? I can’t.. I can’t abandon them." Aislinn half turns, sea foam beating against her sides, her legs. Droplets of silver spray and catch the little light drawn from the flames. She points to her homeland with her wing, beckoning. "They are mine to protect. I swore an oath. And I —" she cranes her neck, looking back at him. "How can you blame my people? How can you blame me?"
Does she truly know the man she had fallen for that summer night?
The sigh that escapes her lungs breaks her and when she faces him full on, silver pricks her blue eyes. "Please," she begs, "please don’t ask me to stay. Not like this."
She fears the answer as sparks continue to fly towards the stars; the words tasting of ash on her tongue.
@asterion ♡ I don’t know what’s happening ;_; sorry for the book
"Aislinn speech."
He does not know what he expected, standing there with his heart and his hope both caught in his throat, but he had thought he might at least have an answer.
But there is nothing, nothing to soothe the whirlpool within him, nothing to explain the questions he had leveled. He can feel that ocean inside sucking him down, down; the depths of it threaten to whisper over his head, closing him in silence, in darkness.
He listens to her speak of warnings, of statements, of chaos. He listens and waits for any explanation, any word of what had caused that fire that eats and eats at the horizon, or what it might mean (the only fires he has seen had been set from madness, from rage). And he waits in vain.
Do you know what I am? she says, and oh, there is such a storm in those eyes when he meets them. It sets his heart to trembling, whether from fear or from sorrow he cannot say.
When he had first seen her, stumbling on her like a boy in a dream, he had thought her wild, he had thought her lovely. Both of those things are true still: she is a summer storm, magnificent, but all the fireflies are fled. She had never been a maiden, twining flowers in her hair in the woods – it was a goddess he had stumbled on, as Actaeon had stumbled on Diana. Would he, too, be punished for such a small sin?
I do not blame your people, he wants to say, and I do not blame you. But uncertainty holds his tongue as the silver of her hair glows from the distant flames, a star set alight.
Please, she says, echoing his own plea, and oh, Asterion loves her. Suddenly he is so very weary.
Had he not stayed for her when she begged, clothed in bandages and blood? How many more fights would leave them all beaten?
All of these things he considers, gathering them up in his heart like smooth stones. He could cast them away, or they could sink him.
“Go then,” he says at last, and his voice is so soft that it might already be a memory. Asterion does not take his gaze from hers, but he lets his heart dip below the waves to be cradled by the current. Never has a goodbye felt so like drowning.
you must like me for me
yeah, i want you
we can’t make any promises now
can we babe —
There is a crater where her heart should be. A bleak, starless expanse that sees no scrap of light or goodness. Only an unending, a ruin. He was her faerie tale, once upon a time. The twilight prince to her land of daydreams and happiness. The man who sewed the shattered thing of her heart back to wholeness. Lavender and rose strings now hang in the darkness that swallows her, leaving nothing but an emptiness that could devour worlds.
He is the destroyer of such a wondrous place — leaving nothing, not even the kiss of stars in his wake.
She is the galaxy dark of Calligo’s chaos. And he is the witness of her disaster.
Her breath exhales frost fire, despite the flames that reach heavenswards. Ash falls upon her, and she allows only one tear — one, single tear that holds the weight of a sea — to slip from sapphire eyes. Before she steals herself, closing herself off, building walls of adamant and moonstone between them. The line in the sand has been drawn, and it is a canyon, and world away. Asterion is gone from her heart, her soul, and she knows that she will not leave a whisper of his name left for her to mourn.
She fears that if she does.. she might break after all.
Strong wings outstretch over the surface of the sea. The softest kiss of dawn breaks over the horizon in the barest of light. It is a whisper, a promise of a new day where the gates are closed. They are protected. Separated. Guarded.. but safe. It is a new day, and she must go. So slowly then, the stormsinger turns, the waves crashing against her sides in lilting lullabies. Singing to her return.
Go then.
Aislinn does not look at him at she inhales ash and dust and ocean brine. The wind catches her feathers, beckoning, as she launches herself from the sea’s greedy clutches and soars. The sun crests the sky, falling droplets shining like stars as she flies. Once, she might have noted such a thing. Once, she might have felt the heaviness that weighs in the center of her chest where her heart should be. Once.
But all she can feel is the numbness of a single word as it falls from her lips.
Goodbye..
..and maybe he could hear her, maybe he could not. And she does not know how in which she might return, if she does at all.
All she knows is that her kingdom is calling her home.
He watches those proud wings unfurl, and tries not to think of the brush of their feathers against his skin, soft as a kiss in a dream.
He watches her exhale, and tries not to think of the way he had counted her breaths, there in the infirmary that smelled of blood and antiseptic, guarding her as she had slept. Even then he should have known – even then he had been helpless to hunt her demons for her.
He watches her turn away, and tries not to think of the times their eyes have met across a crowd, the way he felt drawn to her like something inevitable. Like their ending had been already decided and nothing could rewrite it.
Asterion watches her rewrite it now.
Oh, he has never before felt a pain like this, such an aching where his heart had been. He would not have thought it possible, to feel it like a wound, like a physical thing. Asterion wants to be sick, wants to fold up on himself and cry like a colt for the thing he has lost. But he forces himself to stand firm, to breathe in the salt and the brine like a balm and welcome the way it stings, to watch until there is nothing left of her but the memory of a constellation he could trace in his sleep and eyes the color of no blue he will see again.
He does not hear her say goodbye.
Ash falls on the waves, and through his tear-blurred eyes it looks like snow.
Their summer of starlight is over; the dreaming is at an end.
