Asterion stands high upon the cliffs above the thrashing sea, his breath billowing out like a ragged spirit, haloed by the bonfire at his back. Above him, sparks leap up to meet the stars; below him the waves spill foam onto black rocks. It is silent but for the crackle of flame and snap of wood and the constant sighing of the sea.
He is warm from drink and from the fire, from a night of revelry with the people he has come to love. But in this moment he is grave as he stands alone and the winter wind rakes its fingers through his dark hair. The king has only a moment before he must rejoin them; beside him is folded a scrap of rough paper, and in a rougher hand yet a wish is scrawled. Let me not fail them.
If he desired, he could call up a creature of saltwater and magic to deliver his slip of paper to the depths below. But the bay only breathes in, deeply and greedily, tasting the salt and brine on his tongue like medicine, like sacrament. And then he presses his eyes closed and casts his wish to the water far below.
It is already lost when he opens his eyes, but Asterion wills it to find the crest of a wave, to fill and sink and go to - where? He is wise enough to know, now, that no gods are listening; not Vespera, not No or Selke. Maybe there is some creature in the deeps who eats his fill desires each year on this night, but the boy does not think so.
They are alone, for better or for worse.
But he is smiling when he turns away, and the fire is warm against his face. There are others waiting and he nods his head to them but says nothing, only slips away until he is in the shadows once again, blue with snow and starlight. Halfway down the cliffs there is another fire, this one leaping and merry and full with song and companionship. For now he does not join them, only watches, caught with a happiness that feels keen and wistful as sorrow.
Until a shadow red as the heart of the flames catches his eye, crossed with a strip of lightning like a kiss from a storm.
Asterion is surprised to see her there, but more than that he is glad - he had wondered, after that day beside that pool so golden and so hot, whether she would stay or whether, like the little phoenixes, she was a wild thing, a drifting thing, a leaving thing.
Only for a moment does he hesitate before going to her, leaving soft footprints in the softer snow, little moons to melt away. She is on the edges, her back to the pines; when he stops he reaches for her the way he might a doe with eyes so dark and wide as to hold the whole night in their reflection.
In the gloaming darkness she counts each pillar of smoke rising up and dissolving into the black space. An itch rises her in, creeping along her spine like it's a branch of dry, dead wood. Every inch of her skin feels like that blackness, a thing to swallow smoke, and soot, and wishes. Every inch of her feels like dead wood. Thana is brittle and looking for a fire.
She wonders what would be left in the coal and embers of her. She thinks it would be nothing but ash waiting for a breeze.
The horses drinking and dancing seem strange, un-tethered where they should be cautious. Her eyes follow them like wolf follows the track of mice through the thicket. At first she doesn't want to move closer. At first she only feels the way all the dead winter branches sigh and learn towards her in the night. The horses dancing around the fire seem to alive for the likes of her. But then she hears them talk of wishes and her hooves cannot help but to move slow and oddly through the snow.
Thana wishes. She wishes for a hundred things-- a hundred feelings other than 'cold', a fire other than 'consuming'. The red unicorn wants a skin that is not red as blood and heavy with weaponry.
She wishes, wishes, wishes. And when a horse presses paper and ink into the fragile hold her of magic she cannot help the way her young heart trembles and aches in her chest. I wish, she writes. Each word drips wet down the paper, as if the paper itself refuses to hold the wishes of a monster. Thana pauses when a cluster of stars shines, as if fallen, in the corner of her gaze.
The ink is still running wet, like blood, on the paper even as she forgets it.
“Asterion.” She whispers and it doesn't sound like anything other than a name dipped in smoke when the syllables of it fall from her lips. Upon her brown her horn trembles. That too whispers in the smoke and it sings songs of war.
Thana reaches for him as he reaches for her. The forgotten paper falls from her magic into the fire. I wish, burns and burns until only embers and soot are left of it.
But perhaps, if she was not caught wishing on fallen stars instead, Thana would have written in dripping ink, I wish I did not want to kill him.
There is something so wild about her - something so foreign to the horses of the capital, with their clothing and their buildings and their magic made almost domestic. She reminds him of the creatures of the wood and the sea, of the animals he had known in Ravos and worlds before. Like a doe the whole of the dark world seems reflected in her strange amethyst eyes, bright as the stone on her brow. (And who gave you that charm? What is it to you? he wonders.)
But tonight, even in the calm of Terrastella, the setting does nothing to tame her. There is a bite in the air, and the woodsmoke layered over the salt and brine of the sea makes things ancient and strange. Firelight dances around the spirals of her horn, from darkness to light, and Asterion is caught remembering the fall of a droplet of golden water down and down that shape when he realizes how near he is standing.
When he wants to trace the path of lightning that cleaves her fine-boned face, he steps away.
“Were there any traditions like this in the world you left?” Oh, the question itself betrays his ignorance of her, all the blank spaces of things he doesn’t know. But he could never begin to ask all the questions he keeps for her, numerous as the stars bright and cold above them - was there fire? was there winter at all? was there anything stable, was there anything like happiness?
Standing next to her, a longing stirs in him like a storm begins to build over a blank expanse of water, far from any shore. Asterion does not want to die in Novus, to grow old and wither in a world he can learn. He is almost surprised to find that within him is a still a boy dreaming of adventure, untethered as a rowboat, hungry for a strong current and a strange horizon. Foolish boy - he will never have his fill of monsters.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, surprising himself with the fierceness of the words, and even when he feels heat flush his cheeks, warm as firelight, he does not look away.
Thana looks at him drenched in firelight instead of saltwater, dusted in stars instead of war, and she understands. She could count all the way in which he is a king and she a unicorn with destruction a low, organ hum in her blood. Touching him feels like dying, like he's pulling every black thought through her skin and he's heedless of the fact that there will be nothing left.
If he traced that patch of lightning all she would have thought about was that other unicorn marked with a storm. If she scrapped her blade across his brow (like everything black thing in her is telling her to do) she would have wondered if he was thinking about her at all. Thana thinks he only sees the pieces and gives it a name so that it can be called another other than lost.
She wishes she didn't drop that scrap of paper dripping ink like blood. She wishes she dropped into into the fire and watched it burn down to nothing but black dust and char.
Asterion pulls away and she follows suit because she's still thinking dark, black things. “If there were any traditions I didn't bother to learn them.” Her voice grates against her own ears and she lashes them back to be lost in the wind-blown tangles of her mane. She doesn't tell him that all she knows of where she came from is, is, is....
Nothing.
The skin across her back feels like a fly is crawling down the dip of her spine. Thana shivers and it's not from the cold or the fire.
She shivers because she wants to drag both her lips and her blade across this king dusted in the night sky. The fire doesn't feel warm anymore and she wonders if she could kill flames like she kills flowers. Or would she kill it like she dreams of killing girls with feathers or boys with stars in their eyes?
Blood blooms like a flower across his skin and Thana thinks only of the heart in which it sings through. Her lips quiver with a smile, although she couldn't name the reason why it feels so terrible against her teeth. It feels like a lie. “Did you burn a wish?” Her voice waivers like a hawk in a hurricane, sharp and dying. Thana feels as unsteady as a seed in the stone.
She's still thinking about burning, and blood, and how everything blooms in her like a graveyard each time she looks at him.
He ought to be grateful to the darkness for the way it disguises her killing gaze with firelight, with smoke.
Instead he only wants to see her more clearly, to study her for longer, to learn for himself if there are any other mirrors of who she is and who he has known before. Each time the blade of her tail glints like a sword in the light of the flame, each time she turns and his eyes catch upon that thin, jagged strip of lightning, his wondering mind fumbles nearer to an answer.
There can be nothing truly strange to Asterion any more - not when he has witnessed the waking and the wrath of the gods, not when his sister can bend time to her will and open doors between worlds, not when he has seen so many wonders he tires of them. And so, when he catches just a glimpse of Thana out of the corner of his eye - just the swing of her tail or the dip of her horn or the flash of her eye - it does not seem too far-fetched to wonder if she is the daughter of Calliope and Raymond. It does not seem far-fetched to think he must know her, somehow, in some world-below-worlds, in the part of his heart that is deep and dark and keeps its secrets even from himself. Why else this feeling of knowing, this draw of recognition, and even the flash of death in her eyes?
The king nods at her answer, slow, regarding her as she twists back her ears and the wind keeps her in movement. “Then we can learn Terrastella’s together, if you want.” A smile as the wind shifts, as smoke blows between them, as laughter scatters around them like starlight scatters across the water. Asterion has to bend nearer to hear her question, but he is glad for it - for the way that each time he draws close he doesn’t know what will happen, where the terrible weapon of her horn will point. Maybe he is mad, tonight, but he doesn’t mind that either.
“I give one to the sea each year.” He glances to the cliff, where the water glimmers far below, visible only where the scant light touches it like bright runes on dark skin. “But I don’t believe that they’re answered. Still, it’s nice for something to have them other than my heart, or my head. An ocean of wishes, where none are alone.” When he laughs it is at himself, and there is something dark in it, almost bitter, almost hollow. Asterion knows he has lived his life as a foolish boy with hope a buoy in his chest, telling him each day is a promise and not a curse. But Asterion the man - the king - has learned better. How could he not have, when he has had so many willing teachers?
He might have answered her question another way. I have burned a thousand wishes. One for peace, one for protection, one for the rains to end. One for love and one for justice.
It could say, yes, if she poured it all out into the snow until all she became is a storm turned to snowflakes. But she's a unicorn, and her flesh is a cage, and her blood is singing for violence while her heart is singing for love.
She does not understand what it means to learn with him. Already she understands the way the stars paint constellations on his skin, and she could follow the map of his blood in her dreams. Are those not traditions? They are hers, she knows no others, needs no others. But, oh, oh how she wants them!
So she says nothing about all the things she want's to do 'together' with him.
Thana steps closer to the fire and calls it home. Each flame feels hot against her skin and the snow at her hooves is melting. It leaves blooms of death around her. Grass turns to seed then, seed gone bad and turned to mold. The distance she puts between them yawns like a great-toothed thing walking up from hibernation. Her heart yawns with it and each bone making up the cage of her ribs feels like a tooth curling inward underneath her belly. She wonders if he can see the way she's falling apart and falling away from him.
“The ocean is dark.” Thana does not think it is so dark in his heart or his head. He is made of stars, and twilight, and mortal things that she knows how to unmake. Of course he is made of magic too, but she was made to understand the way horses are made of magic (and the way in which it makes them all monsters).
Yet when she looks at him and the firelight dances in his eyes like small suns, she's not thinking of unmaking or magic. There are still a hundred small wishes, and a hundred dead things, flourishing in all the places of her Asterion will never see. She looks to the stars briefly, and then back to the brighter ones shining in firelight across his sides.
Thana does not look away again.
“Wouldn't it be better to throw them to the moonlight?” If his eyes shine like two caught suns, her own shine like purple oceans in which the sea is all wrong, wrong, wrong.
He watches the firelight catch on the dark red of her skin, burnishing it to the color of wine. It is wine he thinks of tonight, and not blood; starlight and bonfires instead of lightning and ash. The saltwater-king watches her and remembers the way she had looked painted by gold water in late afternoon light, the way she had looked with something terrible in her eyes the first time he saw her. Why, he wonders, does he so wish to see her in every season, every light, beneath every shape of moon or pattern of cloud? Why do his thoughts catch on her, or his gaze, snagged like silk on a bramble (or flesh on the cutting-edge of her blade)?
When she offers no response to him, when she steps away, Asterion does not follow - except with his eyes, ocean-dark. They see the way the snow flees her, the way everything below that withers where it had been waiting for spring. If he followed her steps, if he touched his lips to each little-death, would he, too, diminish and die? What would he feel, would he know as it happened?
Oh, he wonders from where these thoughts are born, that drift and flare like bits of ash. He prays they don’t become wishes, too.
Only when she speaks of the sea does he turn to it. Then on ear slants toward the unicorn and the fire, and one to the waves that thrust themselves against the cliffs as though the rock might save them, only to shatter and disperse and foam.
“But the moonlight does not last,” he says, and the sorrow in his voice is for far more than a handful of wishes. It isn’t paper and ink he thinks of then, but every name and hope that has been written on his heart. Asterion has learned, since he arrived here so young and foolish, that such silver-sweet moments are never for forever.
Maybe they were never meant to be. How easy it is, to tire of magic and the gods themselves, to grow bored of peace. Maybe the darkness is essential to help them remember the light.
“The ocean will keep them forever.” When he sighs, it is still not wishes he thinks of.
“The moonlight lasts long enough.” She looks away from him, away from the fire, away from the sea roaring like a lion against its cage of rocks and sand. The moonlight snags in her eyes, shards of diamond dust that she wants to read like a map. All her blood craves that silver-light; she wants to drink it like she drank the light-water. She would drown herself in the moonlight if she could, she would drown and wish on the bit of stone it comes from that she could learn to love the sea and the stars instead of loving the way they beg to be unmade.
It's drowning she's thinking of when she moves to him, drowning and stardust maps made of dying stars. And it's dying she's thinking of when she traces a constellation down his neck. Thoughts are running, running, running wild across the backs of her eyes. Thoughts are burning when she paints a kiss of a comet across his shoulder.
She pauses. She inhales. She breathes him in.
“Do you think the ocean could keep everything it drowns then?” Her words taste the brine on his skin. Winter makes her breath curl up from her lips and across his spine like smoke instead of words. Every inch of her trembles like a storm, like a star trembling in the black, black night. It's not dying she's thinking of now, at least she doesn't think it is.
Thana pulls away until her horn and her circle of death are the parts of her nearest to him. “Could the ocean keep me?” She asks even as she wonders if it's all those bleeding, watered down wishes that the monster in her is really looking for.
And perhaps for the first time it's not his death that she sees when she snags her eyes on his.
Asterion is not sure that she is right, not even when he glances her way (secretly, shyly) to see the light she speaks of make constellations of her eyes, stars to follow through the dark. He wants to believe her, wants those words to be true, despite their strangeness coming from someone who looks at him with such strange fire, passion bordering on threat.
He does not say anything, only continues to regard her as she crosses over to him, firelight rippling on her skin, catching in the twists of her horn. When she first touches his skin the slow breath he pulls in is winter-cold, a shock to his throat and his lungs; maybe that is why he is frozen as a deer as she traces a line down his neck, ends it in a blazing kiss at his shoulder.
Thana, he wants to say again, but his eyes are the only thing that speak when they find her, and they are full of questions and answers and simple words like please. When her breath spills in silver smoke across his back he feels baptized by spirit, or by winter. Maybe he will wake up in the morning, new and knowing. He feels like a ghost, the way he is longing for something he can’t name.
If she did not speak then, he might have answered her kiss with his own - might have followed the star-map of her eyes and the winding of her horn like dark waves and the way his body down to each dark hair is aware of each movement she makes. Instead, he only turns a slender ear toward her, lets go a breath of mist before he answers. “Yes,” he says, definitive, and then - “but I’ve known it to return things, too. In the proper time.” Maybe it is because it’s a holy night, this longest darkness of the year, and the border between their world and the infinite has been worn thin - but Asterion feels like the stars are whispering to him, like the waves are trying to tell him something. Oh, but he can’t quite hear; he is too full of his own feeling, and the sound of his own heartbeat and running pulse.
But all of that falls still when she pulls away, and the cold can’t dispel the lingering warmth of her, and the only mystery he cares for is the one of her question. The king doesn't think anything could keep her, not even the death that dogs her heels.
When she holds their eyes together it's as if he's more than a star. She's wondering if Asterion could light her way home, a silver shine through the thick black river of death she walks in. Thana almost steps closer then to catch the breath of smoke falling from his lips like a weapon. But, when she inhales and tastes only ash and not brine, she tell herself that he would only lead her to madness.
Although her blood sings to her that moon-madness would not be so terrible.
The space she grows between them starts to call itself a monster when she steps back, back, back towards that black treeline no firelight or moonlight can touch. Thana wants to loose herself in the dark, and forgot all about the way the words, “I would not want to be returned,” feel in her heart when she cleaves the last bit of wonder between them into two pieces.
There is only Asterion standing by the fire and Thana far from him with something hot like fury in her belly.
But it doesn't singe her like fury should. It rises in flames of cold-fire and still it does not start to ache like she expects it to. It makes her hungrier than she has ever been and still it does not hurt in a way that makes her want to peel back the map of his stardust to whatever place it is that she's looking for.
So Thana turns and runs. She runs until her belly starts to ache and her bones start to feel once more like steel beneath her skin. Even then she does not stop, because the world still does not make sense in the same way the ache does.
