you wanted to live forever, but didn't you realize? you had to die to be truly immortalized
Vercingtorix stands, watching.
He finds himself in Terrastella again. It is a land he frequents more and more regularly, it seems. He would not say it is because of any particular connections, but in denying the fact he knows there is a lie. There is Elena who, against reason, has become his sole friend.
He thinks, however, it is because out of the entirety of Novus, Terrastella reminds him most of home. He walks through the knee-high grasses, allowing the wind to batter him. This late in spring, the air feels too hot, more like summer.
Vercingtorix can see Damascus flying in the middle distance. They have not been speaking, much—perhaps because Vercingtorix blames him for the incident involving Sereia. Damascus should have been there. He should have felt it. He should have saved him—or else, what is the point of having a Bonded?
From this far away, he cannot deny the majesty of the dragon. He strikes a massive, imposing silhouette on the clear horizon. With such a cloudless day, Damascus is in fact the only thing on the horizon. Vercingtorix walks to the cliffside and lets the wind from the sea block out everything else. It fills his ears and numbs his skin; and when he turns to see someone else standing there, he is not surprised.
Asterion doesn’t remember what (or who) he is looking for. Something has brought him back to the cliffside north of the city, to footpaths he helped carve over the last five years. He never thinks about scents, when he thinks about memory, but today’s particular perfume of Terrastellan spring - wild rosemary and lavendar, the tang of the sea - makes him want to sink to his knees and lay his cheek to the sun-warmed soil and dream of all he’s known here.
So much change, so much leaving. How did anyone decide which of all those who wandered in and out of their lives were the ones they couldn’t do without? When he was a boy - that distant, foolish boy - he would have said it was Talia, his twin, he would follow to the ends of the earth. But then she had told him to Go. He would never have guessed it would become such a common refrain.
Oh, but he hadn’t come here looking for a ghost. Not unless - and here the stallion looks sharply toward the gulls, their voices carrying over the water. There is not one who calls to him. He hasn’t heard Cirrus since left, hasn’t heard her wry, comforting voice in his mind for a year, the day he left for the island and told her to keep watch. Asterion wonders if she migrated with the other gulls, gone for the winter, and became wild again, or if she died, or (worst of all) if she is still there, just beyond the shoreline, watching him and saying nothing.
She wouldn’t like what lived in his mind now. What had curled up there, in the space her bond had left.
There is no gull on the horizon, but the bay’s dark eyes narrow in a squint when he sees a far larger shape. Ever since that first year - Isorath, Reichenbach and Aislinn, the Dragon Gate, days when it seemed like man might be the most dangerous thing of Novus - he has been wary of dragons. And this one is not Fable.
The grass whispers against his legs, but his gaze doesn’t stray from the dragon as Asterion moves to the cliffside. Wind off the sea leans against him, and he watches the beast dive and circle until a flash of gold out the corner of his eye makes him turn his head. Quietly, he watches the man watch the dragon, and not until the man notices him does he say, “I don’t recognize you.”
you wanted to live forever, but didn't you realize? you had to die to be truly immortalized
I don’t recognize you.
This fact seems of little consequence. I do not answer immediately; perhaps because the stranger’s voice interrupts the wind’s refrain and I had been cat close as I come to peace.
“And I don’t recognize you,” I state, at last. The silence that stretched might have been perceived as impolite, but I did not mean it as such. I only wanted—what? To remain a prisoner of my own thoughts a moment longer?
(I cannot escape the memory—the memory of drowning, the water that rushes in the lungs, the way I could taste my own blood. The pulse of the current, a heartbeat I was within and without).
“I suppose that’s the prerequisite of being strangers,” I add, more sarcastically. The edge of my humor is not harsh, however. “I’m Vercingtorix.”
I have long since stopped giving false aliases. It seems unnecessary. Out at sea, Damascus tucks his quadruple wings and dives. It appears as though he might lunge into the sea; but at the last moment he careens away, snatching from the water a dolphin.
I feel it die, when Damascus swallows it in one deft toss of his head and continues circling. Perhaps he realizes I am not alone, because that circle becomes linear as he steers towards shore.
“It’s only that that’s rare, for me.” He says it a little wryly, an echo of the self he used to be. “I have to admit it’s nice.” He smiles, when Vercingtorix gives his name - a slight curve of his mouth, quick to be blown away again by the wind - and he does not give his own.
He would like to stay strangers, for once. He would like not to leave a piece of himself in another’s care, or carry anything beyond what he already does.
And he has never much cared for sarcastic humor.
The bay’s attention returns to the dragon as it stoops. Immediately Asterion wonders if the reach of his power was enough that he could cup the sea like a hand and take the creature - drag it down to the cold and dark. His next thought is a backlash to the first, and he might have recoiled in horror from it, until he sees what the dragon has caught.
There in his claws a dolphin wriggles and flexes, like a salmon caught by an eagle. Asterion thinks only of Elena, bright-eyed, soft-voiced, asking him if he could conjure dolphins. He’d done it, and the false ones had drawn the real, and the simple, warm happiness he’d shared with her was something he had not felt in years.
He wishes he had used his magic, then. And it curls up within him, deep and cold and huge, when the beast turns toward them. Without looking back at Vercingtorix he says (all the softness gone from his voice), “Is it yours?”
you wanted to live forever, but didn't you realize? you had to die to be truly immortalized
The stranger reveals, without stating them outright, two facts:
The first being he has been in Novus long enough to not meet many strangers.
The second being that, for whatever reason, he would prefer to remain anonymous to me.
I do not mind either of them. They seem of little significance and so, too, does this bay stranger. I do not recognize him; and perhaps the two of us are representative of changing prominence. And, besides, he does not regard me long. I turn my attention to him, and I watch him watch Damascus. There is something in his expression that reminds me of Antiope’s interrogation of me; that reminds me of a Sovereigns apprehension of massive beasts and strangers.
“Yes,” I answer, with just as little softness. I say nothing else as Damascus makes short work of the distance between us. When he reaches the cliffside, it is with a bellowing groan. I have thought, since first being Bonded to him, the sounds he makes unforgivable for a creature of such profound strength.
He sings like a whale—a melody which, sung together, sounds majestic and beautiful. When bellowed alone, however, that same enchanting tune becomes unforgivably melancholy. A sound reaching out into absence; a sound waiting for a return.
Damascus lands upon the cliffside; he perches there, like some tremendous bird that shakes the earth, claws sunk deep into the rock. It puts his own eye level with us and I stare, for a moment, at our reflections in the kaleidoscope pattern of his irises.
“Are you very fond of dragons, stallion dressed in stars?” Damascus asks. When he speaks, billows of vapor fall from his mouth. Violets and indigos, harmless, dissipate through the grasses.
