It was a brisk autumn afternoon, the light falling fast to evening, and Asterion is missing the sea.
He hadn’t thought he would. The twilight bay had spent a good part of his life trying to divest himself of his ties to the ocean; he’d grown up along a quiet shore racing sea-foam on the sand, dreaming of bigger, wilder things. Now he missed those ties, missed the things that grounded him and made him belong. His heart had always cried excelsior! and so he was a pilgrim, always alone.
Here, though…here, he could already feel others like roots, twined around his heart. It is too much, even if it is good, and so the boy breaks away for the coast.
The winding path to the cliffs reminds him of Novus – a little wild, a little lonely, filled in with the low sound of the wind and the high, thin crying of the gulls. It feels good to work up a sweat with the day this cool, feels good to tire his muscles and give his mind a chance to wander over all the…discoveries. It’s difficult to believe it’s only been a week since he arrived here; so much has happened.
Asterion is neither surprised nor particularly sorry to find he is not alone in his walk to the sea. At first, he thinks the gold-and-cream is Florentine, but it becomes very clear very quickly that he is wrong. The bay hesitates for only a moment, salt-tinged breeze tugging at his dark hair, before continuing on. He makes no effort to disguise the sound of his hooves on the path, but it’s hard to say what there is to hear above the distant crash of the ocean, the whine of the wind.
“Hello,” he calls, the word as much question as greeting. His smile is soft on his dark lips, but there’s no worry in his eyes. This does not seem like the kind of place bad things happen; if there is magic here, it is not the unpredictable, feral kind he knows. “How’s the view?”
As he approaches her, he does not consider that it is man, as much as magic, that must be treated cautiously.
he’d returned to the cliffs, finding something intriguing about the tall, naturally towering stone, and the way that the ocean still managed to wend its way through it all. Not travelling far, remembering how long it had taken her to get back down from the high vantage where she’d met Cress, she stops at the first suitable place, and looks out across the wide, endless breadth of the sea.
The sun is a golden ripple along its surface that occasionally is lightened into mercurial tones by the dance and waver of the waves. She watches this magical alteration from gilded to silvered with a passive eye, her mind actively playing through the difficult truths that had suddenly become her life.
She still had not found any trace of her family in this world, though it seemed that there were many from Helovia, dwelling in the peace to be found here in Novus. She had Evangeline, at least, but her old tutor was not the same as Maude remembered her; twisted and changed by the death and destruction that had impended their arrival here, miss Eva was not a young woman, ready for change, as Tilney’s daughter was. She was a woman set in her ways, at one with routine. Maude, however, didn’t truly understand this; it left her feeling as if Evangeline would rather her not be around, and so she had done just that, and slipped away from her one, steady tie to home early that morning, to be alone, as seemed her new fate.
She was mentally chiding herself for being so pessimistic when a gentle, masculine voice breaks her chain of thoughts. Looking over a the source of the sound to discover the kind, bay gentleman she had seen at the meeting in the tower, her smile is tentative, but warm.
“It is beautiful,” she answers, taking a step aside, to allow the man room alongside her, if he so desired. She, like her new company, rarely thinks about the more vile natures of men. “Do you come here to think and pray, too?”
He ought to have placed her from the meeting immediately, but Asterion’s head had still been stuffed half-full of dreams and cobwebs, that morning, and he had felt so terribly new. New, and out of place in that strange courtyard made of materials he’d never seen before, towering like a mountain and hollowed by rooms. To these people, Asterion surely must be barbaric - he has never seen a book, can certainly not read, and before standing in that semi-circle of strangers had never thought a horse could do so very many things with their hair.
Suffice to say, his mind had been preoccupied.
It’s not until her vividly green eyes turn to him that he remembers, and chides himself for his forgetfulness.
“I’ve not been here before,” he says thoughtfully, looking down his dark muzzle at the ripple of the waves, “but I may have to start.” A quiet smile creases the bay’s lips, and his eyes shift over to the pale filly. She reminds him at once of the earth-horses in Ravos; there is something kind, curious and gentle in her that sets him in mind of the earth-goddess he’d known. She even wore similar antlers to Maaemo.
He wonders if the gods were still at Ravos, or if they, too, had leapt into the rift. What did a god do when their world went empty? Far below them, the waves rush, ravenous, against the stone. He can’t yet see it, but he knows the sound.
“But I left my gods behind,” he continues, stepping up alongside her, and there is something soft and sad in the shape of the words, though his smile remains. “I don’t think they thought much of my prayers, anyhow. Who do you pray to, here?”
For a stallion who had met his gods, he has always been frightfully lackadaisical about religion. But she had been at that Dusk Court gathering, and he assumes (wrongly, evidently) that she is a native. She seems too young to be a refugee - at least in the eyes of someone who has been more or less fortunate in the events that had led him to this cliffside.
As he glances over her again, though, Asterion wonders. With the golden light slanting on her, the pearls between her antlers look like dewdrops caught in a spider’s soft-spun web and it makes her look like a magical thing, old-and-young, some sort of cliffside nymph.
Then he shakes his head, and the vision dissolves into sea-mist.
She smiles at his remark that this is his first time at the cliffs; remembering her first visit here, she giggles softly.
“Be cautious which edge you approach,” she smiles, recalling how both she and Cress had been startled by the surprising sea, “sometimes, it hits the stone hard enough that it, like, blasts into the air. It pretty much knocked this girl I know out of the sky the last time I was here, and sure surprised me.”
Leaning slightly over the edge, and looking at the eddy and sway of the distant sea about the spade-like shape of the cliff below, Maude’s face becomes one of sincere pondering, before smiling with (what she assumes, anyway) a sage nod towards Asterion.
“I don’t think it can get us here, though,” surmises the youth aloud, “this cliff-face is much different than that one was.”
When he joins her, the girl does her best to look at him, without staring. She’s not always good at it, often getting preoccupied with thoughts about this, or that, but as she gets older, she grows more adept at moving her eyes about, even when she’s deep in thought about something other than what she currently looks upon. Moving between the stranger and the sea, her pale green gaze is kind, and inquisitive.
That is, until he mentions Gods, as more than a passing thought; her joy suddenly crumbles away, becoming a face of sorrow which gazes far, far out over the sea.
“More Gods that probably don’t hear the prayers offered them,” she solemnly says, doing her best to keep her tears barred behind the flimsy guise of satisfaction she’d managed to piece together in the quiet peace of Novus, “I don’t know of any others to pray to, though.”
She finds that her eyes slowly wander down, to where the flimsy tufts of grass drift lazily in the wind, or dangle over the precipice, and how her hooves are embedded neatly among their autumn-withered bodies. She wonders, while she looks at the shadows of the grass play across her ankles and creamy hooves, if she and the stranger are right, at all; maybe they can hear her. Maybe the Earth is still there, beneath her, if she wants him to be; maybe the wind caressing her cheeks is her Goddess, after all.
The tears she’d struggled to hold back fall, regardless, one and then another, slow and steady down her cheeks. With a sniffle, she disregards her heavy emotions, trying her best to smile and force what tears threaten to follow the two traitors behind that warm expression, and her earnest desire to not feel as if the world was a place in which she would forever be tragically alone, and cut off from the sense of belonging that had once defined her every day existence.
“I’m Maude,” she manages, her smile becoming a slight wince as she (somewhat) admits to having become caught up in talking to Miss Eva, rather than listening to what was being talked about, “I think we were at the court meeting together. I… I admit I didn’t catch your name. I get distracted sometimes.”
The sound of her laugh is a lovely counterpoint to the crash of the sea and the crying of the gulls and he flashes a grin at her warning, dark eyes alight, before edging forward to peer over the sheer dropoff. It takes a moment for a large enough wave to roll in, but soon one does: sure enough, at the base of an adjacent cliff, a great spout of water sprays up with a ferocious roar.
Swiftly he backs up with a toss of his head and a laugh, surprised to find that he is still dry. “I’m glad you’re right about us being out of reach,” he says, glancing back at her. He hadn’t caught her at staring; likely he wouldn’t mind, even if he had. Asterion has no illusions about how strange he might seem to some of those here, with no adornments to him. Standing in the courtyard, he’d felt positively barbaric.
But he does see the way her gaze goes faraway. This time it is his turn to avoid staring; instead, he follows it out to sea, watching the distant waves glitter under the lowering sun. She does a good job of disguising the sadness in her voice, but Asterion catches it, anyhow. The bay glances back at her, quiet for a moment, until he sees the tears take shape.
“Oh,” he says, “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to make you sad. So long as they’re real, I’m sure they hear – that’s a big part of being a god, isn’t it?” Slowly – cautious enough that a signal from her would tell him to refrain – he presses his muzzle against her shoulder, a soft and gentle touch.
Asterion has not been present for many tears; his twin had never cried, though she’d often seemed cloaked in deep sadness. It had manifested, instead, as wildness, as rage. It had made her seem old and frightening, where this girl’s half-hidden sorrow only shows her youth.
He wonders again whether he’d interrupted her, here, and withdraws to himself when her smile reemerges.
“Maude,” he repeats, and offers her a smile of his own. “That’s very pretty. I’m Asterion. I was distracted, too…but in our defense, there was plenty to be distracted by.” Indeed; he hadn’t expected so much change from his first time meeting his new leadership.
But then, consistency has never been a part of his life – it seems naïve, even for him, to expect things to change here.
ot quite as delighted by the appearance of the wave, seemingly drawn from the ocean by her mention of it, the girl does smile, despite her melancholy, inward mood. The pleasure of the gentleman alongside her is infectious, after all, and she is the sort of girl who adores the playfulness of fate, as much as it had also caused her the pain she presently endures. Feeling the kiss of the mist left behind as the waters fall back to the sea below, the maiden also allows herself to feel as the sun draws the chilly dampness away from her cheeks and neck with its radiant warmth.
“Me too,” she answers, no laughter wreathing her cheerful grin as it does stranger’s, “it’d be awful cold, this time of year.”
She implies, of course, that she wouldn’t truly mind being hit by the wave all that much, so long as it wasn’t cool or cold, as it was presently. A warm day was actually the right sort of day, if you asked Maude; nothing beat cool water when the sun seemed intent on baking you right into the ground, and made even the shady forests unbearably humid. Today, however, was the sort of day that a dousing might leave you sick, if not worse, and though the light spritzing she had received from the jettisoning wave was pleasant, she was sure more than that would be quite awful, indeed.
The distraction of the pleasantry of the sun upon her was short lived, however, for the girl could not bask in the glory of things which reminded her of her forever lost home for very long. Her tears are slow, and too obvious – the sudden tenseness of bay assures her of this. Though he tries to reassure her with what he says, it only makes it worse, and the tears flow freely, becoming a pained sob when he gently touches her shoulder.
Though they were real, they were also dead! She refrains from shouting. Her head collapses downwards, her eyes squeezing shut, and the hot tears which brimmed within them are forced out in thick, wavering treks down her face. The sun no longer feels comforting, and the sound of the sea merely wavers in-between, rather than soothing her with the steadiness of its rhythm. Though it feels as if she cries and dwells within herself for hours, it is truly only a minute or so before her crying quiets, and, very, very quietly, she murmurs:
“I – I’m sorry,” mumbles the girl, her nose shaking to and fro very slowly, her words warbling nearly incoherently with her emotions, “I… well, h-home… they…”
A heavy sigh slips through the air.
“They’re dead,” quietly continues Maude with greater composure, glancing very quickly away from the sea to the stallion, but then again seeming to lose herself in the bob and sway of the sea beyond, “so I am not sure if they are still Gods at all.”
Staring out at the ocean, she silently cries, at least until the conversation moves towards names, and the meeting. Glad that the man has forgiven her for being less than studious in a situation she probably would have been better served to have been, the cremello darling smiles and nods, finding she agrees with Asterion quite fully. Even if she’d been inside a building like that before, and hadn’t had friends about, the news that had been delivered was the sort that changed kingdoms.
Remembering when King Tembovu gave his position to Miss Lyanna, the girl wonders if the changes about the Dusk court will be similar – mostly positive, albeit strange, for a time. She certainly hopes so.
“I guess it was a worthy meeting, then,” tries to more cheerfully converse Maude, her smile faintly appearing on her still tear-dampened face as she remembers other meetings that were far, far less eventful than the previous two she’d thought about, “I’ve been to a few that were really hard to stay awake through.”
@Asterion eeee thank you <3 Asterion is very charming himself :D
Dead. He thinks, of course, of the rift that had brought him here, and the others who’d gone into it before, and of the gods left behind. Had they leapt, too? Had they wasted away to nothing in an empty land with no one to worship them? Had they simply created more creatures to love them, crafted them from ash and dust and bone and mud?
Is a dead god a god at all?
Asterion has never been a particularly pious creature; his faith was a fickle thing even after he’d spoken with Ravos’s gods. He wants to tell her that gods can be reborn – it seems like it should be a truth – but he does not want to lie.
And so he only edges closer, near enough to offer the deep brown curve of his shoulder, and looks out across the straight blue line of the horizon. He tries to match his breathing with the roll of the waves; in as the water sighs up on the sand, out as it pulls back, leaving foam insubstantial as dream-stuff.
When the moment passes, he feels both empty and full, lonely and yet closer to the girl than he had been a few minutes ago. It’s a strange, in-between sort of emotion, and he, too, is glad when the conversation circles to something far less weighty.
Perhaps, if he ever makes it to the peak where the Novus citizens worship, he will remember Maude’s sorrow.
“It’s the first meeting I’ve ever been to,” he says, and is surprised by the measure of guilt he feels at the admission. In Ravos, his desire for adventure and unwillingness to belong had not seemed at all selfish; now he thinks back on some of the conversations with No, the god’s frustrations with his wandering feet and foolish head, and wonders what he’d missed out on by turning away from community. “I’ve never even lived in a … a herd before. Though that feels like the wrong word for whatever this place is.” The buildings and books and weapons and titles – it makes him wonder if somewhere there are a flock of seagulls who call themselves kings and wear crowns of mussels.
It makes him smile – a curve of the lips at his own foolishness – and he shakes his head to chase away the vision. “I’m not sure what to make of it all,” he admits, dark-eyed gaze slipping back to her, and then his voice goes soft and grey as the November sea. “But I have no where else to go.”
