He doesn’t think he will ever get used to the echo of his hooves on the marble floors, the way the walls close up around him and box him in. It reminds him of his dreams of the maze, the strange and glittering walls, the feelings of being hemmed and caught.
Asterion appreciates the structure for its artistry, for its protection from the elements, but he can’t quite picture it as home.
But he is trying. That is what brings him walking slowly through the halls as the morning fades to noon outside, late autumn sunlight making patters on the floor. His life has held no shortage of mysteries, but court life might be the strangest of them yet – and so Florentine had suggested he speak to someone far more experienced with them.
The gold-and-ivory stallion had caught his eye from the moment he swept into the meeting, striking and lovely. It wasn’t the thought of speaking with him that had nerves prickling beneath his skin like ripples on a lake; it was the setting itself. He is out of his depth here, and he knows it, and he swallows as he turns into a corner room rich with wood and leather.
“Isorath,” he says, managing to keep it from sounding like a question. He also manages not to stare, although his gaze can’t quite pull away from the stallion; he is beautiful in a way that Asterion is unaccustomed to. The man puts him in mind of nothing so much as the gods of Ravos, but even they were modest and plain in comparison.
Isorath belongs here in a way that the bay never will, and he’s never felt it more clearly.
Even so, his dark-eyed gaze meets the ethereal lilac eyes of the kirin, and he tips his chin toward the desk, where books are scattered and something delicate and silver hisses with steam. “Florentine said I might ask you…how is it you learned to read?”
hile Terrastella is not as grand as Sunsyia, the city of his birth and the cradle of grandeur he had been blessed to lay in, he can appreciate the normality it brought. Too long has he gone without four walls to call home, the structure of Courts and it's daring games of Intrigue. It had taken every ounce of his self control not to flop upon his silks the first night he had settled, and roll until his legs were entwined and his hair artfully disheveled beyond repair.
It is achingly familiar, but not so heart wrenching as another place he has long come to view as home too.
He'd been awake since the morning rays had finished their warming of the chilled earth, the beams of sunlight reflected off of his gilded scales pleasantly, and shimmered brilliantly in the many facets of the gemstones he wore. Warming the winged kirin and bathing him in a halo of glinting light, a picture for the ages. The rich smell of perfume and tea coiled out of the cozy room he had selected for himself, a book having drawn him into it's pages hours ago. A tale of pitfalls and victories, one lone hero betrayed, who rose again as the very thing he had swore to never become.
Isorath almost missed the sound of hooves clattering against stone, and his eyes settled on the doorframe with a curious flick before Asterion's frame appeared. "Yes?" Lilac's peered inquistively beneath the canopy of thick white lashes. The bay is handsome, in the light of mid-morning he can see the shimmer of twilight upon his hide, as if Vespera had a hand in the very spinning of his coat. The star upon his forehead gave him pause, a mere moment of a second look before he settled back on the brown eyes that peered on him.
For one fleeting second, he thought he saw another in his stead, one with haunting silver eyes and the smell of jasmine and wood smoke in his hair.
Jewelled eyes followed the tip of Asterion's chin, down to the scattered books and scrolls, the pot of ink with the pheonix feather quill.
Florentine said I might ask you…how is it you learned to read?
There's no denying the small amount of surprise that reached him when he learned the bay had been sent by Florentine. The implication's of the question are clear, but he took them in his stride, no one asked something quite like that without the desire to also acquire the knowledge. "I was taught by another." Isorath replied silkily, wispy and smooth as the tea smoke beside him. "You can come in you know, I don't bite." He added after a moment, a taloned finger on his wing pointed leisurely to the pillows which lined the desk, his teasing smirk displaying just a hint of the sharp canines that resided within his pale maw.
The room is warm in every way: the sunlight that gleamed gold and ivory off of the kirin and the rich dark walls, the heat like a balm from the fire and the east-facing room, the unfamiliar smells of bergamot and herbs and something rich and almost seductive that he cannot place.
At least his eyes have wandered from the man; he’s in his second, slower pass over the room, wonder writ across his expression, when the stallion’s words catch him. I don’t bite. Asterion would blush, if he could; instead he enters with a flick of his tail and duck of his chin, moving where he was directed although he lingers, standing. Reclining here would feel too…familiar. He might sink into those pillows and become somebody else.
He does not miss the barest hint of teeth; it makes him wonder just how honest the previous admission had been.
In a different way, he is as awed as he had been by Calliope, the wild unicorn warrior he had once known. She had struck him from the first with her beauty and her power and the way she moved within the world, as though sure it would shape itself to her wishes.
Isorath, to the dark-eyed dreamer, seems just as commanding. And to be able to make sense of the black marks on pale pages spread before him – maybe that was power, too.
“I – I would.” His brief hesitation comes not from being unwilling but being unsure of himself; he is just a horse, just a boy. He was not made to read, and live in castles, and converse with men spun from gold and silk. His gaze lifts again, and this time he is caught, momentarily pinned by those pale purple eyes so like and not-like his sister’s. It is strange, he thinks then, that she is a Queen, that it makes her a ruler over someone like Isorath. “If you’d have me,” he adds, and swallows as he glances away.
sorath would of likened the experience to having stepped foot within a lair of a Dragon, to those who were not familiar with such simple pleasures he'd had the luxury of being birthed too. Out of depth, adrift in starlit waters without the shore in sight, hoping that a figure composed of moonbeams and stardust would show them the way. Asterion is not the first, and he certainly will not be last, who come into these hallowed halls beguiled and hesitant.
A musical note escaped the ethereal man when Asterion finally stepped in, a pleased and pleasant hum low in his throat. Momentarily, his attention moved toward the tea pot and the engraved cups beside it. The day he had planned is clearly delayed, if not pushed out of the books all together. Not unpleasant, of course, it's an interesting turn of events. It's his duty, if anything else, to educate those who wished to indulge in their wants and whims. "Sit, I insist. It will be far more comfortable for you, and my neck." Again, gilded talons twitched from where they curled around his breast, gesturing to the pillows, smirk still delicately placed upon his sharp features.
Ah, now that was a truth best left undiscovered until the sun dipped low on the horizon, with the last wisps on incense exhaled into the air. To be discovered by those bold and brave.
There is beauty in simplicity, and just a careful dab of something more. The kirin has a fine eye for such things, whose gods have spun them not with divine purpose, but to be divinity made real. Made simple, comprehensible. The ones that can part the veil and dwell among the rest.
If you'd have me.
The sound of tea being poured halted momentarily, as the Sage considered the weight of those words. Dangerous words. But here they are simple, straight forward. Innocent. There are no hidden meanings, and they are certainly not two lovers between a full moon. "Of course, why wouldn't I?" The tea is resumed, and he fussed over it with the same care he would if handling porcelain. Yet, his gaze remained on the honey brows, a flicker of mischief burning in their jeweled facets. "We'll have you reading like a Sage in no time." It was interesting how fate spun her threads, Isorath has flown too close to the sun and been beloved by it, crowned in it's ethereal flames.
Then each time he'd fallen back to earth a burning star. Many could not blame him if he chose to stand beneath the brilliance of the throne, rather than find himself curled upon it, for now. For now, he bends his neck and flutters his startling white lashes at the behest of others, but only those he found worthy.
There was once a time when Asterion longed for nothing more than to meet a dragon in his den.
His was a boyhood stuffed with dreams of heroes and villains and gilded knights, of skipping from one adventure to the next like a smooth stone across the water. It was a natural yearning for someone born somewhere both safe and solitary. When he could deny the begging of his feet and his heart no longer, he’d left and never looked back.
Now here he was, a young man on a quest far from the ones he’d envisioned. Even so he could feel the hunger in him, the want for more prickling in his blood, and he is beginning to lean over the desk when Isorath directed him once more to sit.
Asterion sat.
The sensation surprises him; it is nothing at all like bedding down in a bed of wild, coarse grasses along the sea or wildflowers in a glen. This felt like reclining on a cloud, but warm and sleek. He manages not to exclaim anything, though his surprise is briefly written across his face.
It’s gone by the time he looks up, watching the kirin do tidy and efficient-looking things with the steaming liquid. “You just must be very busy,” he says, though he has no actual idea what a Sage does. This space suggested being far more involved than his own little corner of Denocte. Where Isorath smelled of incense and the leather-musk of books (and other things, things Asterion had no way to place) the bay still smelled of pine and wind and early winter.
His dark ears tip forward at Isorath’s admonition, not half so sure himself. Not so long ago, a black-and-silver unicorn with a horn like a rapier and a laugh like a storm had promised to teach him to fight – and that hadn’t come true, either.
Still, disagreeing seems like a bad way to begin, and so he meets the kirin’s gaze with a nod and a smile. “Under your teaching I almost believe it,” he says, then tilts his chin back toward a book, near enough for the musk-and-paper scent to tease him. His breath ruffles the pages. “What is this one about?” He hopes fiercely that it is a tale of knights and kings and wild things, though likely it is only a ledger of goods.
Things were often much more in his head than they turned out to be on paper - so to speak.
