the dark is empty; most of our heroes have been wrong.
Men are fickle.
Girls are fickle, too. But in a different way, a way Marisol understands more clearly.
Girl’s hearts stay put. When girls feel a thing, or love someone, it is inherently permanent, Marisol thinks, and it is only the use of their head that stops them from showing so. More than once she has rebuffed someone she loves. More than once she has denied feeling anything at all.
But it does not mean the feeling is not there—only that her head outweighs it. It will simmer there forever, just under the surface. It will push at the bonds her head makes to keep it in check. Often times, the head is stronger. But sometimes the heart will win.
Men are fickle in a way Marisol cannot comprehend, a way that she finds infinitely more terrifying. A man cannot be counted on to love something for years. For that matter, he cannot be counted on to love something the way he did yesterday; sometimes, somehow, he cannot even be counted on to tolerate it the way he did last night.
They are switches instead of dials. On—off—instantly. Girls are fickle from the head, and men are fickle from the heart. One is infinitely more painful to be subject to.
(Orestes was meant to be different. He spoke differently, act differently, and still left her, left his country, left his children, did everything right and still disappeared, said everything perfectly and still broke her heart and how can anything ever be okay again—)
The mountain, though, is permanent.
She is supposed to be a pious girl. But Veneror has evaded her list of priorities ever since she became Sovereign, and even for years before that; something about its towering height, the sheer importance of its existence, sends her into a panic. Even now, standing at its base, looking up at it from under the foamy gray-blue sky, something in her hurts. It aches. Her chest constricts. Just looking at it, she feels its weight.
For a moment there is silence. Just the sound of the breeze, the leaves rustling faintly. Marisol debates turning back. There are altars at home.
But those altars did not stop her husband from disappearing. Maybe this one, she thinks, her heart all-pain, can change things.
And when she starts up the slick staircase to the temple, she is too bruised to even the remember the first man who left her, for the first time in many months.
Beside a sleepy shore, curled tight against his twin, he listened to his mother tell stories of gods in their greatness and men who were greater still, spinning them together like stars make up a constellation. As he drifted off to sleep he never knew whether it was the shush, shush of his mother or the sea that lulled him, or whether his breathing found its own rhythm or only followed his sister’s. And every night he went to sleep certain that he would grow to be good, and noble, and brave.
Asterion has not been dreaming at all, of late. Or rather - when he falls asleep, it is not him who dreams. Even when they were melancholy things, there was always light in them, and sound - the stars hung in a mist above a new spring sea, a forest where each leaf was beaded in raindrops like diamonds spun by spider’s feet. Stories of possibility, even when he woke from them aching. But now - oh, now when he dreams of the sea it is black, and churning, and there is no crash of waves but a moaning, a gnashing of teeth, like there is something boundless and dying far beneath the water. In the dream-sky the gulls surround him, laughing and screaming, so many the air is a fog of feathers and there is nowhere he can move. And when he wakes his skin crawls with the knowledge of being watched by a thousand pairs of eyes, though it is lonely on the mountain.
He can’t say how many days he’s wandered the peak, or how long it’s been since he parted from Euryale. He’s a winter thing now, lean-ribbed with gleaming eyes, and there is something of ice about him even as he descends below the snowline. There is something he must get to - someone he must find - he can’t remember quite what.
It’s an itchy feeling, that forgetfulness, but he doesn’t mind worrying at it, not when it occupies his mind in a way that feels safe.
But when he sees her, all else fades.
They meet on a thin part of the path, with a granite wall textured in dark cracks fuzzed with moss on one side and an open expanse to the other - blue sky, the tops of ancient trees swaying far below. Asterion measures her for a long moment, looking down at her, a friend he’d stood beside countless times. So many of the same events had left prints on the clay of their hearts, and yet what different shapes they were.
There is a flicker of emotion like a line of wind-whipped surf that moves across his face, but he has already felt all the regret, all the sorrow, all the loss he can measure. Asterion has moved on from these things; he finds there is nothing left to feel. And even at that, there is no measure of relief.
“If you’re looking for gods,” he says quietly, “there are none left.” On his mouth, a peculiar little smile blooms.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
the dark is empty; most of our heroes have been wrong.
Since the minute he left, Marisol has tried her hardest not to think of him.
And her hardest really is her hardest. She has held a blade to the throat of all thoughts of him, slept hour after hour in a dark and dreamless sleep, sparred until the throbbing pain of the gashes and bruises overcame the dull ache of missing him. Pain is pain. Physical, emotional. It’s all the same wavelength.
She tries so hard it has become a habit, a baseline instinct just under the necessity of breathing; has become so practiced that he hardly seems real anymore, just a figment of her imagination or a badly drawn caricature of a man she once loved; so practiced that at this point her heart believes he may as well be dead.
So seeing him really is like witnessing a ghost.
And oh, does he look dead. Slat-ribbed and thin. He’s all angles, gangly and sharp against the wall of granite that rises up behind him. His eyes are unnaturally cold and bright. There is no Asterion in them, no soft brown gaze to meet or any buried warmth. Instead, he is flint and stone all the way down.
Marisol wonders if that is what he has seen in her all these years. How could he bear to meet eyes with her so often when she looked like this—feral and unwilling to feel?(She wonders guiltily what she looks like now. Whether she’s softened the littlest bit. Maybe the broken-down girl she always sees in the mirror is destined to stay there forever, trapped in that thin sheet of silver, and the one who goes out into the world remains stubbornly vicious without a way out.)
Her heart quickens. She feels it race against her chest, so bright and fierce it feels almost dizzying, and the rush of blood that comes with it turns the edges of her brain and her gaze a deep, fuzzy black.
If you’re looking for gods, he says, wearing a funny little smile, there are none left.
Mari stares. The wind comes screaming down the mountainside. Without looking, she knows that to one side, she is only a few steps from the steep fall off the cliff and the whispering forest a hundred feet below. The air smells like pine needles and rain. And it is cold, cold, cold: cold as the ocean when Amaroq dragged her down, cold as the spot in her bed where Orestes used to lay, cold as the slash of a blade across skin.
"Asterion," she says. Clears her throat. Her mouth twists into an awkward line of worry, of want, of missing-him. “There will always be gods."
Since he’d turned that day on the beach (and he hadn’t looked back, not until he was well out of sight, and there was both hurt and relief not to see her silhouette on the beach or above it, wings wide as a an albatross, coming to ask him to stay) he hasn’t thought of Marisol much at all.
Leaving the Dusk Court had hurt. But it had not hurt as badly as leaving Denocte after Moira left him at the castle doors, the memory of her kiss still burning on his cheek. Asterion had thought, foolishly, that the more he was pushed away, the less it would sting - as though he could become numb to it, or at least inured. It seems, instead, that grief is a sea as wide and deep as love.
After that, he had not thought much at all.
He still doesn’t know what it is in him that tangles his mind, that deepens its shadows and its hunger. Asterion doesn’t realize that it’s anything at all - but oh, he should know better.
If nothing else, he should know by the way his gaze flicks from the queen to the open space beside them, a terrible, long way down.
The bay stallion looks back at the sound of his name. His ears twist back, as though uncertain, or displeased. Still, his small smile (the one that doesn’t belong to him at all) remains.
“It’s better without them,” he says lightly, as though she hadn’t answered anything at all. Then he nods down at her, takes a step closer, tilts his head curiously, dog-like. “You’ve grown out your hair.”
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
the dark is empty; most of our heroes have been wrong.
Something is wrong with him. Or: something is wrong in him.
Looking at him is like missing a step down the stairs, or getting startled awake when it’s still dark out—it’s unnerving and sharply discomforting. Marisol swears she can feel her teeth itch when she glances at him and sees that peculiar little smile still on his face, frozen there with the gaunt steadiness of a killer clown.
A chill runs through her. It rattles down every vertebrae of her spine, from the back of her skull to the base of her tail, and with every iteration Marisol feels her body growing colder and colder and colder. She tries to justify it, turns her thoughts to the wind that whips down the mountainside and the prickling threat of rain inside that breeze; of course that could be the thing that makes her shiver, nature curling its sharp, cold fingers into her flesh.
But she knows it is not the wind. She knows this—the thing that makes her shiver, and whatever sick blackness it is that hides in the curl of Asterion’s awful grin—is not natural and never could be. It is death, or fate, or something so terrible Marisol has not even heard of it yet.
She knows: it is the kiss of something otherworldly.
And she is so woefully wound up, so unbelievably on edge, that the slightest movement of his eyes—suddenly cold, flashing from her to the drop-off and back to her again—feels like watching the whole world fall apart. She sees it all. The quick blink. The sideways glance. So terribly casual. Marisol’s eyes follow. Her chest fills with a cold flash of fear as she sees the steep cliff fall into nothing; the carpet of trees a hundred, two hundred feet below, painted in a patchwork of deep greens and blues.
Marisol is strong and winged and has nothing to be afraid of, not when it comes to a fall like that. She doesn’t even have to be afraid of falling; there’s simply no chance she, a practiced soldier, will slip and lose her balance. But still something in her flinches at the sight of it, the world opening up wide as a jaw just below.
It’s better without them, he says. Marisol presses her lips together; she feels salt sharpening the corners of her mouth. There are so many problems with what he’s said—so many problems with the things he now believes, or the things he thinks he believes. But she holds her tongue. She presses down the urge to argue, pushes it to the back of her brain. She reminds herself, with eye-darkening focus: it is less important to agree with him than it is to love him.
She does not admit to him why she’s let her hair grown out; which man it is that appears in the mirror when she looks at the short, dark curls. It is that admission that makes her realize just how long they have not seen each other. Somehow he has missed a huge swath of her life, bigger than the first time he left. And knowing that, Marisol’s heart aches—it is infinitely worse to know that her dearest friend was here, right here, and still doesn’t know of her husband, her children, the faultless turning of the earth.
“Asterion—“
Her voice cracks. It breaks neatly in half: twig underfoot, heart upon abandonment. And the second Marisol hears it, the sound of her whole self falling to pieces, time reverses—
She is a child again, small and scarless, begging her father to stay;
then a cadet crushed under the weight of Eustace dying, the weight of knowing she will have to take his place while his body is still warm;
then she is herself a month ago, watching Ariel disappear over the horizon in a blinding flash of light;
the wind comes rushing in and Marisol is torn back into her cold, stiff, scared body, and she says, voice splitting almost into tears again: “Why won’t you come home?”
He remembers (though the memory is hazy, the glimmer of a tower through a thick night fog) standing in the dusky rainbow light of the archway in Denocte, talking to a stranger.
The stranger was a king, a golden man from a golden land, and his name was Orestes. Asterion remembers the tone in his voice, the raw hardness of it, when he said You left Marisol. It was hard for her.
Marisol has always been strong, he’d said in return. But he’d wondered, sharply - thoughts like little brambles, pointed at the tips - who this golden man was to the mare he knew, that she had let him in enough to show even that much vulnerability.
Would he have found it an irony bitter or sweet, to know the situation now?
Maybe he would have asked her, in the end, whose leaving was hardest?
Again she says his name. When he looks at her now, there is a kindling of something like warning in his eye. Has she ever said it so much? Has it ever been so earnest on her lips? And why, why is she treating him like a feral thing - skittish as dry leaves in a high wind - dangerous, even?
How dare she be weak - how dare there be the threat of tears in her voice like a seam of water in a cavern - now?
His queer little smile begins to curve into something else without him knowing it.
And when she asks that question - the question he’d wanted to hear, oh, months and months ago, on a bright foggy day on the beach, before everything fell to pieces - he closes his eyes and sways on his feet, and his heart is full and swollen but oh, not with the right things.
He almost looks like himself again, when he opens his eyes and drops his head and steps, carefully, down to her level. Within him his magic is a wide yawning chasm, a trench deep and deep into the belly of all things, a black well where water pools. Within him, something else has taken his place, because Asterion is below those waters, fallen in that well, head far below the surface of sorrow and regret.
Something else looks out at her from beneath a fan of dark lashes, and reaches out to touch the curve of her neck. Its teeth ache with wanting, but it knows power, and it knows it is not strong enough to fight her. And so -
”I will if you show me the way,” he says, softly, barely more than an exhale against her cheek.
And then two things happen at once: greedily his magic reaches for her, pulling the water from her body, a weed choked by drought finally given rain - and Asterion shoves against her, hard, toward all that dizzying space.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
the dark is empty; most of our heroes have been wrong.
Marisol dreams vividly, and often.
Since childhood, sleep has run from her instead of nipping at her heels, no matter how tired she is. When she tells Hilde of Ole Lukøje, the same story her own mother told her, there is a part of her that wants to say: if he is real, he is a fickle king, for he has never deemed me worthy of good dreams.
Instead, he spreads the black umbrella; and when Marisol sleeps, it is always nightmares that find her, dreams with claws and teeth.
This feels like that. Like the Sandman, the sleep god, is hovering ominously overhead, his feathered wings blocking out the sun. Though Marisol knows that this is indeed here, and now, it all feels somewhat incomprehensible. The scene is colored with the same opalescent fog that lines all of her old memories—the plasticine sheen that she has always associated with times long past. All the corners of the world here are fuzzy, and too dark to find the edges of, and Marisol’s chest is filled with the cold, pale fear that always startles her awake.
She blinks. Tries to focus. Below, the tops of trees sway in a terrible wind. The air up here is so sharp, so thin, it almost hurts to breath; when Marisol exhales, she sees plumes of steam curl away and dissolve into the air.
It is the only real thing.
Of course Orestes had told her. The next time he came to see her, he had mentioned in a strange little whisper, his voice unusually low and tight: I found Asterion, today. Marisol had felt it more than heard it, a rumble pressed up against the curve of her neck, and instantly tensed like a deer caught in Artemis’ crossfire: the sound of his name alone was enough to make her deathly ill, a body cut through by cold and an over-active heartbeat.
But she had said nothing. Just leaned back and pretended to be half-asleep. Now, if she could go back, Marisol knows she would ask: did he seem sick to you?
Because he certainly does now.
His smile is sharp, his body gaunt. His eyes are dark and dull; in the gray afternoon they flicker like firelight, with none of the stability Marisol had grown to expect from him. When they close—when they close, she is stuck in the terrible place between worrying what it might mean, and simply feeling relief that they are not looking at her anymore.
He steps forward. Marisol steels herself. She makes her body, as scared and cold as it is, a permanent fixture settled into the rock; she does not let herself fall back.
He steps forward, again. This time he reaches for her. The dark velvet of his nose brushes against her neck; Marisol's heart clenches and spasms and screams in her chest, so loud that for a moment, all she can hear is the terrible rush of blood in her ears. And every cell in the Commander’s body tightens like a bowstring when she hears the sound of his voice, strange only for how familiar it still feels, saying: I will if you show me the way.
"Wh—"
And oh, now she knows why they all had cause to be afraid of him.
The pain that floods through her body is excruciating. A scream tears out of her mouth, but she is already so far away from her own body that it sounds like nothing worse than a too-early church bell.
Marisol reaches blindly for an explanation, and realizes he is sucking the water out of each cell in her body.
It should be impossible. It feels impossible: a searing, blinding sting so strong her vision goes black; she knows, in that moment, how it would feel to die of thirst in the desert, and on top of the pain, a feeling of horrible worry and nausea splashes through her stomach, and for the first time in a long time, tears stream down the Commander's face.
He pushes her.
Somehow, this is worse.
He pushes her—this man she loves, still, with all her heart—the living being she has known the longest, whose starry-sky markings she could describe in coordinates, if she had to. He pushes her. She could survive the magic, but the push is fatal, simply for the fact that she could never imagine him doing it. He pushes her, and even as Marisol's now-weak body slides toward the edge of the cliff, some part of her, young and in terrible pain, recognizes the smell of his skin.
When her hoof slips from the mountainside, and she goes tumbling down toward the sea of trees, as dark and heavy as a comet, it is her children she is thinking of.
But in the split second between Marisol hitting the ground, and falling into the sleep-god's arms, it is Asterion's face she sees against the paisley-black of her closed eyes.
There is something like rain running down his cheeks.
It’s not until he tastes the salt that he realizes that it is tears - though he cannot remember crying, and his eyes don’t sting, and his vision is no clearer. Maybe it is only his magic, the tide in him drawing the water from her cells.
There is a scream ringing in his ears.
For a moment, he thinks it might be from his own mouth - certainly something in him is howling, shrieking, wailing, enough to shake an avalanche from the upper slopes. But his dark lips are still sealed tight, and his ears ring and ring and ring, and the scream falls away -
Like Marisol does.
Asterion can’t help but watch her fall. He doesn’t want to (he is still screaming, somewhere in his head) but even so his dark eyes are full of it, the bright underside of her wings, the dark smudge of her body growing smaller and smaller. He keeps expecting her to fly, and she doesn’t, and doesn’t, and doesn’t, and soon there is no sound but the stones that plinked down the ledge along with her, then only the wind, then only his own breathing.
At last the shape of her, so familiar, is swallowed up by the dark tops of the trees.
And there is saltwater tracking down his cheeks. It does not abate, those tears that turn to sobs that turn to heaving breaths, even as he begins to walk. Asterion picks his way ever so carefully down the slope, cautious not to so much as slip on a loose stone or scattered bit of scree.
It is a long way down.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
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