He tells himself that it is good for him, to see a place in Novus he never has before - somewhere without history, without memories stirred up like muddy water with every step.
He tells himself that it is good for him to be so far from the sea, which has been whispering strange things in his sleep.
And for the most part Asterion believes these things. Beneath the midday sun, with winter (as he knows it, anyway, cold and white) a memory kept beyond the desert, he feels more himself than he has in weeks. Here he need not worry about being recognized, and anyway the Solterrans are so busy with their own business that hardly any glance his direction. So he is left to explore on his own, wandering beneath the thin shade of brightly colored banners, curiously eyeing the wares displayed on silk-covered tables, listening to the call of birds he doesn’t know the names of. And in each alley, beside each well, he imagines Eik, and smiles.
Eventually he arrives at a statue, a stallion with his forelegs flung to sky, head twisted, eyes defiant, each strand of hair too realistic to have been carved by any hand but a god’s - or a monsters. Asterion’s dark eyes drop from the stone to the white marble beneath, and skim across the poem there. At the end - That peace for what they paid - he sighs, and turns, and feels the sunlight fall like a warm hand across his back.
And there in the winter light is his friend.
Asterion doesn’t hesitate before crossing the hard-beaten path between them - not even long enough to study Eik’s expression, or look for new scars. He presses his forehead against the gray’s, and exhales a breath that surprises him its shakiness; when he withdraws and shakes his head his lips are shaped almost like a laugh.
“I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” he admits, and the expression in his eyes is more complicated than the one his mouth wears.
And for now, the thing that lives within him that is not him stays silent and still.
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take;
Eik hasn’t walked this way since his daughters were born. But even after two years, he could do it with his eyes closed. Small details have changed, like the creosote and juniper grown slightly taller, and the washes grown broad by a generous spring, but the old landmarks are still there where he remembers them. Some of them he had forgotten about, until he sees them and remembers: The vipers love the sun-facing walls past that old burned tree, or I once climbed that rock with Vadim, nimble as a mountain goat.
It’s the oddest thing to go down a path you’ve walked a hundred times. The body seizes with excitement. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed, the body has no sense of time & change. It says “I’m going home. The markets will just be getting busy. A late morning breeze will come in off the ocean. Seraphina will be in her library.”
(He realizes that he misses her, but not in a way her presence would entirely remedy. It was not that simple. He missed who they used to be.
He could go on, and some part of him always does, repeating names come and gone, come and gone.
Why let go what you can carry?)
Eik had always loved the canyons, and he took his time crossing them. At times he stopped just to press his cheek to the colored sandstone walls. (Aspara always wished she could read minds, and Eik would trade anything for her power to speak with rocks and roots, seeds and earth- the two of them are creatures of wish and worry.) When he emerged from the Elatus, the court and its proud walls lay across the sands before him, lit in the warm glow of late morning sun. He picked up his pace, turning his thoughts away from ghosts and toward the living.
-
“Asterion.” The two men stand before each other, each with his own baggage. When picturing this moment, Eik thought it would be filled with uncertainties. A balancing act of who they used to be with who they are now. But for all the distance each man’s life has taken him, and all the months and years that sit between them, when they are pressed forehead to forehead it feels like no time has passed at all. Their breaths mingle, in and out as one.
When Asterion says “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” it aches for Eik to hear his own fears said out loud. “I knew you’d be back,” the grey says easily, banishing thoughts of I didn’t know if I’d still be here. Asterion doesn’t look a day older than the last time they saw each other, but Eik could not say the same about himself. The differences were subtle, but still there: the lines around his eyes are deepened, and his dapples are just a little paler. Across his muzzle are errant flecks of white. All of him is headed for the washed-out white of a ghost. His daughters laugh as they count his white hairs on his chin and say he looks wiser every day. Isra never laughs with them.
It feels good to be back in his city. No matter it’s no longer his by any measure except sentiment. The winter air is warm and dry. “Come.” As he turns them toward the market he is careful not to look at the statue Asterion stood beneath- but his heart leans toward it and his magic reaches out in wonder- is there a mind and heart to the stone? If there is, it does not respond to the gentle knock of his magic.
(And if Eik thinks for a moment he can hear a whimper in the dark expanse of stone, he tells himself he’s mistaken, the sound was nothing but the wind and it’s tricks.)
For a while it’s companionable silence. The easy, familiar quiet they knew so well, interrupted only by the sound of their steps on the worn dirt side streets. “It feels good to be back here,” Eik admits finally, thoughtful. He is surprised; despite how much he missed this place, he thought coming back would make him feel like a character fallen from a story and then gracelessly reentered several chapters later. Instead it’s seamless, easy. The desert did not ever embrace, except in death, but it at least did not turn Eik away, and for that he was grateful. “How was it, when you returned to Terrastella?” He glances at his friend almost shyly, wondering at the shadow he noticed in the bay's smile.
Even now he isn’t sure why it is with Eik, and Eik alone (save for Flora, who shares his blood and half his history) that Asterion feels all himself, only himself, without pretense. It isn’t only that they both left - although, guiltily, he knows this is a part of it - or that they met, years ago, before either of them were anything but wanderers.
It is something in the man himself, and his steady, patient soul. And Asterion will always be grateful for it.
There are new lines on Eik’s face when they draw apart, new scatterings of white on his muzzle. He looks faded in the daylight even though he smells and feels gloriously real, and the bay averts his dark eyes, as though if he doesn’t look he can pretend he didn’t see. When he thinks of his own meeting (vision? Dream?) with death, and the change that came after, it isn’t joy he feels, or even relief. Don’t leave me, he wants to plead, like he never became anything more than a foolish boy.
He follows his friend easily, without the burden of words between them. Anything he says in this moment would be too light, or too heavy; he has lost the perfect balance, if ever he had it. It is enough to walk beside Eik, to let the soft wind brush his cheek, to let the clamor of a strange city - a city beloved by someone he loves - fill the spaces of his mind that he’s afraid to.
His smile widens, unburdened, when the grey says that it is good to be back. He wants to ask what has changed, and what remained - but even that feels like a dangerous question, too loaded with recent history, which is stained red. “It seems impossible that I’ve never been here before,” he says instead, easy words with as much weight as the shadows that slide over them from bright banners hung above. “Now that I know how nice your winters are, maybe I won’t leave.” Despite his jest, shame flickers in his heart (an emotion on which the thing within him loves to feed). Once, the two of them spoke of the responsibility of power - and then, when Raum came to the desert, and Asterion’s power might have done something, saved someone -
The breath he blows out is unrelated to Eik’s question, but still fitting. “It was good to see it again, and see it safe,” he says. He meets his friend’s gaze, but only briefly, a moth-wing to a windowpane. Asterion thinks of the cold of Marisol’s eyes, the bluntness of her words, all the old stone of the cliffside which could batter a man to pieces. “But it seemed clear that the nature of my leaving left hurt that could not be solved by my returning. I feel that…there isn’t a place for me anymore. The wound has healed and I would only open it again.” His cheeks warm - shame, again. The errant king wants to ask how it was for Isra; instead he looks at his friend and says, smiling again, “Tell me of your daughters. I met Aspara, briefly, on the way to the last festival in Denocte. You have much to be proud of.”
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take;
Eik had always been a different kind of man, never quite at home in any one place. Now that he is back in the city he so loves, he recognizes that, at least for Solterra, this is because he does not feel worthy of this place-- not least of all because he left.
How could he possibly look at a true Solterran, born and bred, and say “I am from here too”? Love and belonging were not contingent on each other; Solterra owed him nothing. Here or Denocte or anywhere in Novus, Eik would always be other. And yes, he thinks about this a lot for someone who has made peace with finding a place to belong. He has a small family and a peaceful space in the wilds and a few dear friends by which to measure the passage of time. (remember when we met, before all this madness that too has come and gone.)
He knows better than to ask for more. Yet he wonders, oh he wonders, sometimes, what things could have been like...
It is enough (it must be enough) to be here now, alongside a friend gone and returned, and look back on how far he’s come, and begin to accept the limits of how far he might go. This last one hurts, but he was never one to complain.
“Oh I doubt you'd last a single summer,” Eik says, only half in jest. The summer heat was terrible, but not unbearable. Moreover, it was impossible to begin to understand the Solterran people without living through the worst of it with them. Intense heat shaped metal, cooked and baked food, cleaned water and wounds... it touched people, too, and changed them in ways that were not always irrevocable. Asterion might as well experience it, at least once.
The grey had always admired his friend's skill with words. When Asterion speaks of returning to Terrastella, of wounds healed and opened, Eik understands. He can tell there is shame there, and hurt, and perhaps the ache that comes with a lack of resolution. “You’re always welcome to stay with us. We don’t spend much time in the court anymore, but there are places in the mountains…” He trails off in thought. Peaceful places where the trees are old as stone, where moonlight spills through the branches like a silken web and in the quiet hours of early morning the soul stirs, touched by some timeless nameless thing. He shows Asterion in shimmering glimpses of the mind, but even the memories are not the same as being there. “There would always be a place for you.” It was far from the ocean, but it was a good place to be. It felt more like home to Eik than any walled place ever did.
But that was enough of that. Surely the offer did not detract from the fact that there was no place for a former king in his own kingdom. Eik could relate in part, but ultimately their situations were different.
"Tell me of your daughters. I met Aspara, briefly, on the way to the last festival in Denocte. You have much to be proud of."
“Oh I know. It’s the first thing she told me, when I came home.” He snorts. There was no “Hello mother, hello father, how are you? How was the war?” It was “Papa, papa, I met uncle Asterion! He really does have stars in his skin! And the sun king, Orestes, he has a lion, can you believe it...”
“Thank you." He smiles and sucks his head, at once bashful and proud. "They’re... smart. And brave, and beautiful, and strong. And so different from each other.” Avesta was a thunderstorm and Aspara was a tidal wave. It was always a marvel to him, how each daughter was her own woman, and would seemingly be more or less exactly the same with or without the influence of their parents. Yet sometimes he’d look one or the other in the eye and it was like looking right at himself. “It’s terrifying, seeing myself in them.” He shakes his head and laughs, although he is entirely serious- he had hoped they would be all Isra. (He recognizes that would be terrifying in its own right, but still…)
They’re the best thing I’ve ever done, he almost says, but that seems too much like gloating. There isn’t very much for him to take credit for, anyway. If anything, there’s only blame. He shouldn’t have left Aspara behind, he should have made her come or stayed with her. At the same time, he needed to be there for Avesta-- yet he wasn’t, not when it counted, and she… his mouth turns dry. She died, didn’t she? And she came back, but at what cost he did not yet know, or did not yet want to admit. "They give me hope," he says finally. In a way it feels as though all his flaws and mistakes have been redeemed, some cosmic scale has been evened and with it he can now breathe easy-- Even in the city that fills him with guilt and remorse and wonder.
The two men stop walking to let a group of mares pass, heavy water skins on their backs and laughter on their tongues. One with long, dark lashes glances coyly at Asterion. When they continue it is toward the market, toward the varied scents of spices and dates and fresh flatbread, baking on coals.
There is a quiet shoreline, far away - worlds away - where grew salt-grasses, and a little further back from the water cedars and madrones, and further than that a wide windswept plain. That is the place where Asterion was born, but it would be a mistake to say he is from there.
What is home - the place you stay the longest, the place you give the most to? Both of those, for him, would be Terrastella. And yet he can claim it no more than Eik can this desert. Where, then, do they belong?
“I hear it’s a dry heat,” he says, with a smile that passes for a laugh. It fades only a little as Eik continues, and the bay pauses to brush his muzzle again against his friend’s shoulder. “The first thing Isra said to me was an offer for me and any others of Terrastella to stay with her - after the floods,” he says, his voice soft with memory. He says nothing more as Eik shows him, and for a moment those lovely versions crowd out everything else in him, including the creeping darkness that is not his at all.
“I was thinking of going to the mountains myself. I’m sure I can find you there.” It is a pity, almost, when all his attention returns to where they stand in the Solterran capital.
He likes to hear Eik talk about his daughters. He likes to hear the smile in his voice, the bright gleam in his dark eyes, the sound of his laugh. Asterion notices others look up at that, such simple joy, one without cost. It makes him glad enough to forget his shame (never mind no children, never mind the quiet longing, the what-if - he should have been there for Leonidas, for Aster).
“I’m happy for you, Eik,” he says, and smiles at his friend as the mares pass. And for once he does not think of wars, or gods, or men or magic as they pass into a world of stalls and noise and color. For a moment, he lets himself feel only hope.
Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take;
