i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
We are here, we are here, we are here,
It is the drumming of her heart, the hammering of her thoughts. She can no more stop the words pummeling her from every direction, the plea of her blood reaching for him over and over and over than she can stop the moon from rising and the revelries from halting. No. The phoenix never could stop a party in full swing save for with the fire of her.
Somewhere, Florentine has slipped into the crowds, a goblet of wine quick to come to her, and amethyst eyes glittering wickedly.
Somewhere, there is a King who stamped his name on her heart as he stamped his name on so many letters between them and so many words left unsaid.
Somewhere, Neerja stalks the halls of Denocte to protect the people as Moira brought Terrastella's former sovereign home into the arms of her people.
And now, the phoenix burns. Flora had asked when it was she would set fire again, and her tongue begged to whisper soon, oh so soon. But she could not. Not when looking into bruised eyes that smiled too easily and yet held wells of emotions and stories and history that the Tonnerre girl hoped to discover one day. Those horrors, those pleasures, those memories are meant for the future, not the tittering of girls in front of a mirror.
Instead, she'd braided the golden girl's hair, the Time-girl's hair, and told her of the styles of her own house. The gowns. The towering hairstyles. The many braids. Oh, the glory of it all was almost ineffable, yet she told it all the same while Florentine had stroked Neerja. Much to Moira's surprise, the tigress let another touch her skin, let the two lost-girls comfort one another in a mirror and eye to eye.
That time has passed. Her own hair still hangs loose in its waterfall braid, showing sharp cheeks and sharper eyes. There is no point trying to go home now when the day has already waned into night, when exhaustion would make her vulnerable on empty roads late at night.
So she plucks up her own flute of champagne, simmering and smoldering and ready to combust, stalking through the crowds not as an Emissary, not as a healer, but as an artist whose soul screams and rages for that muse which it has been denied. As a jilted lover in a tragedy of her own making. Moira Tonnerre tips the flute high, lets its bottom reach for the heavens as glasses did once so long ago in another life of hers, lets it burn its way down her throat and burn alongside the fire and fury of her. Oh, there is warmth now in her glacial fire. Warmth and courage and endless feminine charm as she grabs another glass and grabs a brush.
The night is young and her heart is shattering even as it mends in the halls of Terrastella.
@anyone | "moira" "neerja" | notes: this was not supposed to happen ovo ; for the drinking & drawing festival part !
04-18-2019, 02:02 AM - This post was last modified: 04-18-2019, 02:10 AM by Moira
The night has turned into a full one - proud fires crackle in the grates, throwing up sparks like stars to the ceiling of the hall. The shadows have been herded to the corners where they twist and flicker and accentuate the gleam of firelight in each glass of wine and each bright eye. Laughter rises like an offering, filling the room the same way the warmth does, and for one evening winter is kept outside the door.
But not all that is cold is so easily kept away. Even as the king moves among his people, or scribbles out failed attempts at art, or downs a third glass of wine, there is a shard of worry in his heart. There are too many for whom the night is dark, and Asterion can’t shake the way that Novus feels like a python circling ever tighter. It is strange to celebrate anything at all - he has never been good at this kind of pretending.
Yet when he sees her he forgets all of it. At least for the moment it takes his heart to rise and plummet like a swallow until it alights, trembling, in his chest. Oh, what emotions have surged up like wind drawn beneath its wings - shame, confusion, anger, and a longing like the tide that pulls him to her. For a long moment Asterion resists, and only watches her from across the room, the casual fall of her braid and the firelight that sets her skin ablaze. Even from here she is a torch and he is burning already.
From across the room Cirrus stirs at the change in him, but he does not watch her dark head turning, her keen gaze searching the room for clues to understanding. She is the first to see Florentine, and to guess how they have both appeared, but Asterion barely listens to her words against the maelstrom of his mind.
He ought to have gone to his sister, then - ought to have asked what was wrong, that she is here and not wherever she had been planning to go with Lysander. But Flora is laughing, and talking with Theodosia, and his dark-eyed gaze keeps finding itself on Moira like the trembling needle of a compass. This room is so similar to the kitchens of the Night Court, down to the snow whispering up against the glass and the talk and laughter from the crowd.
And still that bird in his breast is beating its wings over and over, as the shadows and flames blur the edges of the room into a dream. He feels like a man asleep when he crosses to her, a dark ship drifting through the crowd, and he still has not remembered how to breathe when at last he stops before her.
“Miss Tonnerre,” he says, the name shaped so carefully in his mouth, held there like a petal he might bruise if he presses down. It takes him a moment, but he pulls his gaze from the slim end of her brush to her bright and burning gaze. “Thank you for seeing my sister home.” Asterion inhales then, as though there is more might say - but the breath catches and holds in his throat, a barb with edges as fine and sharp as shattered china.
i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
Lost. Captured by a sea of greys and whites and blacks that swirl at the tip of her brush, a sea of monochrome that is not the same classic coldness of the Tonnerres, but something much more. Something, if she dared ever say, that would reveal too much should one stare at the painting coming to life under her careful ministrations. Concentration paints her a pretty hue, a softer shade than that of the burning girl moments ago. Such focus, such intensity, would spark even the wettest of woods if ever turned on anything but the canvas at hand.
There is a smile there as she stares at dark eyes.
Eyes of paper and ink. They stare back at her; as sweet and dreamy as the night skies that giggle above them. The crowd is all but vanished as she grins back at the man's face. It is there on the page and then it is there behind the canvas and there is a gasp in her throat and a fluttering in her stomach and something wrenching her heart from her chest to throw at his feet.
There is no shyness, no hesitation, in those honey eyes. "Asterion," she breathes so informally, lighting up from just the whisper of his name on sanguine lips died darker with berries. Moira will blame it on the wine if he asks about the excitement building and growing, she will not admit to anything. She cannot. "I knew you would come. I hoped you would come." As though this were not his party and one of her own!
Oh, the boldness, the sweetness, as the woman curtsies with all the elegance and grace and poise every Tonnerre is taught before they even know how to run or dance. Lashes hit her cheeks and she cannot meet his eyes. If there is a canyon between it she bridges it, flying and falling and soaring as never before. "I never can get your smile right, it's much better when it's much closer." The lilt of her husky words, her midnight words, they are the beating heart of her art as she looks to the canvas and the King again and again. He does not smile though, not with a breath hitched in his throat. What is it he has left that aches to come out?
"Florentine is lovely. She told me you talk of me," and a secret smile returns. "It is nice to see such happiness and life. Terrastella is beautiful," and she longs to tell him that he is as well. She longs to count the constellations on his sides, to run her lips along his cheek, to learn what it is to let him kiss her and kiss him back. The phoenix exudes that flirtatious charm, that siple confidence in knowing who and what and where and how she is. She is a black hole pulling and tugging those in her vicinity closer.
He is the star that holds her at bay.
"I'm sorry," she sighs at last. And Moira Tonnerre is sorry for so many things. She's sorry with how she responded and did not respond. She's sorry that she did not come sooner. She's sorry that Isra is gone and Lysander is sent to war again. She's sorry that she was a fool. She's sorry....
And although it is an olive branch between them, she can feel the tension sliding thick against her skin, against his skin, and knows it would take much more than that. There are so many times she has apologized to the stars and the sun and the moon and the crevices of every wrinkle in her sheets. There are countless portraits and sketches and renditions of the same thing over and over all tucked away and too many burned. But how does a phoenix who breathes fire and cries tears that will heal every wound but her own tell the sea and waters how sorry she is? They would only sizzle and vaporize before he ever knew the depth of that burning within, the brimming possibilities.
He does not expect it - not to find a version of himself so carefully created on the canvas before her, not the way she says his name, not the way she looks aglow like a spark has found its home in her heart. Asterion had thought she would be angry, perhaps even ashamed - not this boldness, not this voice like honey and smoke. The king takes a step back and his breath escapes at last, soft as a sigh of winter wind through a window.
I knew you would come. I hoped you would come. Asterion wonders what look his own face might be wearing at this - mouth taut and drawn, eyes dark with confusion. His tongue, his mind, cannot decide what to say; at last he only drops his muzzle in a fraction of a nod. “An easier trip for me than for you.”
Oh, were he a bolder man, less careful, he might have accused her then - and why have you come, Moira? He cannot forget the way she had turned to stone beneath his kiss upon her cheek, like he were some cruel Midas. Love was not a game to play, she’d said, and here he stands feeling like he does not know the rules, like he has already lost.
At least then she looks away. Oh, but it is only to turn to his likeness on the parchment, to speak of his smile as though it belongs to her still. He is not smiling now, and neither does he speak, not until she mentions his golden sister. How long since he has talked to Flora of the phoenix girl and the way she made him feel like the scatter of sunlight on waves? Not since Denocte. Asterion had told no one of that disastrous meeting save Cirrus - though he would not be surprised if many knew, for how public their parting had been.
It is not just wine and firelight his cheeks are burning with now.
“I had not known she was saying in Novus,” he says at length, when he can not bring himself to speak of anything else she mentions. “Home will be better with her here.” It is far from a lie, though his words are still heavy as river-stones, and his gaze does not stray to find his sister again. Instead it is on the only bold part of him, trained on her face, each graceful line and errant curl of hair kissed with gold and crimson by the fire. She seems unchanged from the girl he’d dreamed of, the girl he’d kissed on a long-distant winter day.
And then, at last, she speaks the words he’d waited for, hoped for, could not bring himself to say.
They might have changed him, once. When the wound was still fresh as an ill-gotten cut, when every night he dreamt of her eyes, when he replayed their interactions like a boy trying to memorize a play he wanted nothing more than to forget. They might have softened him, when Novus seemed at last to be coming together again, dreaming of spring. It had seemed a possible thing back then, fixing mistakes, healing hurts.
Now he only looks down at her and wonders why she couldn’t have stayed away.
“I should be the one to apologize,” he answers, and though something like a smile curves his lips it is faint, hollow, as handsome and false as any fleeting, pretty magic of Isra’s. “I was too forward. You have my word it won’t happen again.”
Asterion feels nothing like the stars he wears when he nods again and turns away. He feels bleak, and hard, and cold, a soot-stained tallow candle cast to the bottom of the sea.
i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
No light leaks into his face, none of the brightness that shimmers in her blood (would soon shimmer on her skin) is etched into the curve of a smile. Only a ghost of one as he turns to leave reminds her of the beauty of him, the vitality of him, the essence of him that she just can't quite catch. He is the elusive winds on the cliffs where they'd first met.
But if the King thinks he should retreat, that he ever stood a chance of escaping, she will be glad to show him how wrong he is. Black slippered feet tap on the ground, and quick as a cat she's beside him once more with raised brows and pursed lips. "You're emptier than the day I met you, Asterion, and isn't that an awful way to be?" She knows the hollowness that howls through him, shakes his bones with the screaming of gusts of wind when all else has fled; she knows and does not know the depth of emotions and loss as he does.
Moira lost her family in coming here, in following a lightning girl with a storm-bright smile. She did not lose their beating heart. And before even that she'd lost her mother and father when they sent her off for her apprenticeship. She'd lost her little brother. Perhaps she should be thankful then she'd never had a lover to lose.
Moira will not lose Asterion, too.
Whatever ghosts he has, hers twine about them and watch on as she keeps at his side. Somewhere along the way, the Emissary has plucked up another flute of champagne and thinks nothing of how it tears down her inhibitions and walls. Before the snow-flecked night is through, the phoenix may very well be a bleeding husk of a girl before him once more, or in the bed of some stranger, some other who is willing to pick up the pieces of her that she wields now like weapons.
All those shattered fragments are spears, are spires of determination, are the new blossoms of wanting to be selfish. Moira is so careful about what she cares for, what she claims as her own. But she is not careful tonight.
"You sipped dandelion wine with me once and ate cake, you wear a frown now that your people would hate to see at such a time of merriment. I won't ask you to dance, paint with me?" Share my heart for just one night she implores with those golden eyes that rake over every niche upon his brown skin. His eyes are pools of chocolate so deep and dark she would drown in them if she dives in tonight. So she does not, she holds back just as he does but for entirely different reasons.
The phoenix will not shatter any longer. Every particle of her that broke and exploded and was left torn off now shines, filled with lights of every color like stained glass coloring her soul, lighting her from within. Every shattered piece is her future and her love and dreams and everything she will become.
War hangs heavy in Denocte, but she will be their light starting here, starting now beside the boy she's come for.
So she asks him to paint with her - something so private and sacred that carried her through those long nights alone, through tears and rage and torment and isolation. Only her heart and her art...and now him.
Asterion does not expect her to come after him. He has forgotten that she is no dappled doe but a phoenix who burns from within, whose eyes snap with sparks and whose heart is a hungry thing like fire wanting wood. His days are filled with quiet, with the scatter of the stars and clouds furrowed into patterns by wind and always the soft hush of the sea. The king does not burn; he is not sure if he ever has.
But there is still heat in his gaze when he turns his head toward her, their mouths a whisper apart. He meets her eye and sees himself reflected in the black around her bright iris. “Many woeful things have happened since that day,” he says, and his thoughts run over them like a stick ticking along the slats of a barrel. The Summit, when the gods trapped them, bickered, and left. The plagues (had he ever believed in miracles?) of rain and flood and collapsing earth - and that for Dusk alone. So much sorrow, so much death. And now? Their positions seem little better. A queen missing, and one dead; Dawn’s borders closed.
At what point was seeing to your own people simply hiding yourself away? Like the world might not reach him, if he does not leave the forests and cliffsides and city he knows.
Now Moira is here, beating on the gates of his heart, but Asterion has had too much practice defending himself.
“I’ll endeavor not to frown for you,” he says, and schools his expression into something neutral, though he turns his head away. It feels too easy to stand beside her again, too easy to imagine a smile beginning in the far corner of his lips - the king claims a glass of deep amber mead from a passing tray and drains half of it with one breath. Then he regards her, steady despite the tight ache of his heart. “I will,” he says, and his voice drops soft and low enough for only her to hear. “But only if you explain some things I can’t seem to understand.”
Again he turns away from her, but this time it is to return to where she was painting; the pathway is narrow enough that his shoulder brushes against hers as he does, and Asterion is grateful to step away. It’s easier to breathe when he is not so close to her, easier to ground himself in the laughter and noise of the hall without her voice like smoke in his ear.
No games, he reminds himself, and casts an eye over her unfinished painting as he takes some paper for himself. He has never seen himself depicted before; it feels as unsettling as standing far out enough from shore that the water begins to pull, to suck the sand from beneath your feet, to urge you to give in. He stares down at his own dark eyes, the small star that marks his forehead, the smatter of dusk that traces his cheekbones, his neck. The care in the painting is as clear as the skill, and there is something like surprise in his eyes when he looks back to her.
“Don’t ask me to paint you,” he pleads. “It would be an embarrassment for both of us. Not even I can tell a boat from a bird in my attempts.” And maybe her fire is melting him - maybe it is inevitable - for at last he smiles.
i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
Stardust fringes of the world narrow, pull together, are sewn thread by thread until he is the only planet in her orbit. She is a meteorite going in for a crash landing. She burns through his atmosphere, breathes the air he breathes for but a moment as he turns. Shock ricochets through his eyes, through his spine; but there is more, more she cannot decipher and wants to.
He does not realize that every breath he takes, every step closer, every word draws her in. He does not realize that the way his voice drops sends butterflies flitting through her stomach, sends shivers racing down her spine. Valiant is the attempt from the phoenix to suppress them, to hide his affect on her. The phoenix can only hope she burns bright enough, hot enough, that his eyes will not stray to intoxicating side effects from simply being near him, basking in the glow of him, the glory of him. And she can see the memories floating like corpses on the surface of the sea in his eyes, the troubles and woes and hardships he's gone through - difficulties they've both faced.
They stole his smile. She will bring it back.
There are walls being built and turrets defended, there are arrows of formality and manners flying so quickly at her that it should be a challenge to dodge them all. Ah, but she bats them aside, pushes past as water flowing through every crack and weak point. Moira is a selfish thing, a jealous thing, and she does not want to know what it feels to lose again, not when the stakes are so high. When he would retreat, she moves next to him. His shoulder against her own reminds her of the snow, of that fateful day when he left and she'd shattered him.
Moira does not mean to be a wildfire, she does not mean to be a tornado of flames and emotions and uncertainties. The damage she causes is purely accidental, a consequence of a girl learning to be a woman. A punishment of a heart still learning how to love. "Give that gift to those who look to you for guidance. You need not hide in front of me - there are so many masks I'm tired of," and I'm so tired of my own façade she thinks. Slowly the phoenix tips her head back, long neck and throat exposed, and repositions her hair so that the splatters of pale paint (the white of him on the paper they make their way to, the dreams and clouds reflected in his gentle and sad eyes) are hidden and tucked away. Her hair is free of her face so she is all angles in the firelight; angles and sleepless nights and hopes for the future (for their future perhaps?). "Give me your honesty with your smiles and solemn faces, and I offer the same respect to you."
As she picks up her brush and the palette underneath her easel, as she looks to the face with a half hidden smile on the page that is so similar and dissimilar to the man before her now, she wonders what he'll ask of her. Slowly she dips the tip of her brush in the white, returning to the stars she'd abandoned for one much brighter than she'd ever portray. "My family once had me paint their portraits when I was not tending the wounded. Theirs are faces I've committed to memory. Bright eyes and sad eyes and angry eyes. Flat mouths and smiling mouths. There is a wall of them in all colors and shapes and sizes, and any mistake I'd made was punished and then the pictures and their flaws burned only for me to start again." A piece of her past she hadn't offered before, an opening into the world he'd never been a part of at last revealed. Caine knows more of her horrors and shame, but that is not something to simply spout out when you are still learning to trust.
Oh, and how she flares brightly, Tonnerre blood rising to the challenge as Moira swallows and meets his eyes at last! "We've much to discuss, you and I. Ask and I shall answer as best I can. Ask and paint whatever your heart wants - I do not command you," but you command me, she almost whispers as her brush dips into a pale gray, as she looks to the man on her paper and seems to attack it with ferocious intent. Trepidation sits in waiting, curiosity and nerves a painful mix alongside the alcohol in her belly.
Moira Tonnerre will be honest no matter what it costs her tonight. She does not smile back at him now, not when so many dark things (living things, shadow things, nightmare things) crawl out to play and taunt and torment her where he cannot see, where he cannot reach.
And so she paints. And so she waits.
@asterion | "moira" | notes: <3
04-27-2019, 07:16 PM - This post was last modified: 04-27-2019, 07:27 PM by Moira
She speaks of masks and all Asterion can think of is the Ilati, with their terrible skulls of roe deer and wolves. He thinks of the masquerade in Denocte, hidden behind a mask in gilded silver and yet had felt his truest self. And he wonders, too, what masks she wears, and if she is wearing one now.
He always forgets how easy it is with her, how intimate she has always been - not unlike Florentine, in a way, who could disarm you with a smile and a funny observation. Yet it is not the only way she breaches his defenses (weak enough to begin with) - there is the curve of her neck, the fall of the shadows on her hair, the fire in her eye.
But Asterion has never been able to keep peace with fire. Those that burned too hot, changed too quickly; he feels like the surf pulling at their feet, begging stay.
She speaks of her family, not for the first time; but now Asterion does not think of grand halls and gardens, and there is no smile when he replies. “Then I hope never to meet them. No one should ever be made to earn love.” His gaze flicks from the tip of her brush to her eyes, wondering if he will see anger spark there. Would he have said it, if she had not just beseeched him for his honesty? Asterion does not regret it, because they had hurt her, and yet she still calls them family. Because the idea of berating a girl for lack of perfection over something so trivial as painting portraits makes him angry when held against all the grief they’ve seen.
Still, he does not want to hurt her. Not even after how she had hurt him, become a nymph escaped to stone beneath his touch. When he imagined himself in stories he had always been a knight, noble and true, and not a king whose kiss turned girls to stone.
Asterion has yet to pick up his brush; instead he is watching her face, the sharp lines of it in the flickering light of the hall. He finds himself surprised at how steady his breathing is, how even the beat of his heart.
“You kissed me first,” he says at last. “And the way you looked at me, and spoke of love not being a game-” and it is so easy for him to remember how he’d told her he agreed with her, and then caught for himself the kiss she meant to leave on his shoulder. “I suppose I may have misunderstood,” he continues, slowly, his voice little more than a murmur that reaches only her. “But I - I was trying to tell you I chose you. And I thought you wanted me.”
Only then does he look away, dropping his gaze, unseeing, to the rest of the room. He can make out none of the faces of his people; all is only shadows and light, soft and unsure as the breath in his lungs. When he breathes out it feels like a release, rustling the corners of the blank page before him.
He had meant to ask her the source of her anger, why she had shattered a glass, why she had sworn off his name. Had his crime been so great? But Asterion finds that there is only one thing he is still desperate to know.
One last time he lifts his eyes to her and they may as well have been alone, back on the cliffside where they had first met, for the way the room falls away from around him. “Perhaps there is nothing to explain, after all. I just wonder - what is it you want?”
i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
There is a hidden, rueful grin at the corner of that solemn mouth that has been too flat from frowning in private chambers where her people would not see. A dark look rolls like a storm in those firestorm eyes as she pauses his portrait and looks to the skies that might someday hold her in their arms as the sea holds Asterion's heart, his destiny. After a pause, a beat of her heart, a breath shared between them, she meets his chocolate eyes to drown. They are as depthless as the nights she has come to love so dearly. "I never earned their love," she says simply. It is a mantra, a quiet truth she knows to be true. Oh, they respected her. But the benevolent and lovely Moira Tonnerre never really belonged to a people who still hold part of her heart in a vicelike grip, strong enough to strangle her still.
He looks at her as she does the history painted and carved on Tonnerre walls: intent and evenly. There is nothing he will miss on her tonight, not from the rise of her brows when he speaks to the fall of her eyes. Along her high cheeks a blush rises, but she is ashamed of herself rather than any of Asterion's actions. Those last few words - they are her undoing as Caine's apology was her undoing.
"I want you-"
it is as true a confession as she has ever given. Her throat tightens as she realizes again and again all that she has to lose. Him. It's all led her to him. From searching for a home, to finding a house and breaking it window by window. Rot crawls along the walls, ivy chokes rose bushes planted so carefully when he loved another.
The phoenix clears her throat, she sheds her embarrassment and shame and every chance that this will go south. Taller and taller she seems to stand, squaring up to him not as a shy girl afraid to make a friend, but as a woman before a man ready to serve her heart as the main course. "I choose you Asterion. There is so much of me you do not know, and so much of you I have hurt with what I've done. In every little bit of my life, I chose you over and over and could never admit it to myself."
Moira feels like she cannot get enough air, she feels herself falling and flying. By her sides, wings rustle boldly, stretch wide and arc up before settling at her side. "There are many things I fear, and perhaps I've made too many mistakes, but I choose you and I won't give up. I..." seconds seem to slow as her eyes widen.
Can he hear how loudly her heart beats?
Moira steps forward, leans close so they are cheek to cheek and her hair hides her from the world. "I am not afraid anymore, you give me courage. I love you, Asterion, King of Terrastella and the first to hold my heart."
Her body is warm and she feels a hive of bees buzzing within her. Did she really just say that? Now, there is no turning back (but she would not even if she could). Instead, she pulls away. Peels her skin from his skin until they are no longer one, but two bodies face to face. "You don't have to answer, you don't have to say anything. Somehow, some way, I will show you the apologies and explain what I can in time."
So the lamb becomes a wolf, smiling as something she never was before - in love.
@Asterion | "moira" | notes: 8I we won't apologize <3
Love is not for earning, he wants to say again, when she answers him so matter-of-factly. Oh, the things he would tell her, the things he hopes she knows - that love is not a gift given for deeds done, or payment to be bartered. That it is inevitable, uncontrollable; that sometimes he is certain it will be his undoing, that it almost has been already.
Maybe it is lucky that she speaks before he can.
For all the fire in her eyes tonight, for the low smoke of her laugh and the way she touches him, he had not expected those words. They could fell him like a dove for the way that she speaks them, fearless as a lion. The king of saltwater and starlight does not shy from her response, but oh - he cannot say whether his heart is flying or falling. Perhaps there is no difference.
There is nothing in the hall but her, and the gold of her eyes against the black of them, and the words that rush against his ears like the tide against the beach, washing over and over him. I want you, I choose you, I love you. It is not what he was braced for, not after the memory of their last parting; when she leans close he wonders, just as Moira does, if she can feel the beating of his heart. When she murmurs words so close he can feel the warmth of their speaking Asterion closes his eyes and lets them fall into his heart like stones rippling down a well, or like wishes cast down to the sea.
And then Moira steps back.
If he walks away, he thinks, then she will only come after him again. If he says nothing at all, then they might only continue to orbit one another’s stars, to tug at the other’s loyalty and reason and weigh each other’s hearts.
But there is already so much that anchors them both. Asterion is no longer a cloud or a comet, free to roam and to name his own path - and neither is Moira. For a long moment he only stands with his eyes downcast, memorizing the feeling of her cheek pressed against his own, the warmth of her, the way each feather and inch of skin is richer than firelight. He thinks of what has befallen all the love he has witnessed - Florentine and Reichenbach and Isorath and Aislinn, and all the terrible ways a ruler’s passion could turn to ash, laying waste to all it touched. Beneath him their shadows mingle and jump, thick as the wine in his blood. Between them hangs the word she had spoken and every beat of his heart echoes the shape of it.
Asterion pulls in a breath and lifts his gaze to meet hers.
“You called me empty, and I am. Terrastella asks everything of me, every beat of my heart and thought in my head. I thought - once I thought I could balance that with what I wanted. That love was a thing that could grow and make room. But now I think there is not enough of me to give.” Steady, he urges his heart, but it is well beyond listening; it tolls like a bell, it hammers against his ribs, it protests that he is wrong. Asterion thinks that if he paused long enough the whole room could hear it racing.
“When I first met you on the cliffs, and you told me your home was Denocte - I wanted to ask you then to stay.” Still he holds her gaze, still his voice is low and steady, and all the firelight in the room burns and burns upon his dusky skin. “I will not ask you now. Your people need you, Moira Tonnerre, and mine need me.” In this moment (perhaps this moment alone), he is every inch a king; fierce and proud and steady from the flicker of firelight in the dark of his eyes to the set of his shoulders and slope of his neck.
Yet before her he still feels like a boy. Asterion feels no more grown than the man he had been years ago, standing in a sickroom in Denocte, shivering from the rain and Aislinn’s delirious pain. I love you, he had told that lightning-storm of a girl, and she - broken and frightened and drugged - had returned his words. Now he finds they are difficult to drag back to his tongue, and for the first time since he began speaking he looks away. “Love makes a fool of me. And this is a bad time for fools.”
There is no telling what he is thinking of then; if it is another girl with a wrecking in her soul and a constellation on her skin, or if it is a people suffering at the whim of their own god, or if it is wondering what which disaster will befall them next. But when he meets her eyes again (if she will still meet his) something in Asterion is already gone, faded like seafoam on a dark and silent beach.
“Goodnight, Moira.” For a moment, he leans toward her, as though he is considering breathing a kiss onto her cheek. But Asterion does not touch her, not when he said he would not, not when he has given her nothing in response to the brave baring of her own heart. For one moment, he might yet close the distance between them - and then he turns away, walking like a condemned man through the crowd, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the hall. The king does not glance aside for anyone, and does not feel the burn of eyes upon his back.
When he leaves, all that remains of him is the piece of paper on the table - blank but for a scrawl of neat black letters.
