He tries as best he can to lose himself wholly in the festivities, but there is still a part of him on that beach, watching a piece of the mountain burn.
Asterion wonders if it will always be so – it is not the first time he’s lived with the memory of smoke in his nostrils, or felt his heartbeat quicken at the crackle and hiss of flame. Fire, it seems, will always wound him.
But he wrenches his thoughts from Aislinn now. She was never his to claim, and maybe he was nothing but a fool, to ever have been starry-eyed for a gypsy girl. Maybe it would have always ended like this – maybe loving her was like loving the moon.
The regent has decided a dozen times now that he is finished with the night; as he turns back to Moira, he adds one more.
She is lovely, a picture of grace, and he is sure he looks near-feral beside her, unadorned save his crown of wildflowers, his hair a dark tousle. Asterion feels a pang of guilt that his thoughts have been so far away, but shame is coming to be as familiar as a friend of late, and he ignores it as she presses closer to him.
Her words echo his own thoughts, but he smiles for her, and touches his dark muzzle to her cheek. “There will be no sad stories from tonight,” he tells her, and it carries the ring of a promise.
He should tell her she looks beautiful, he thinks, but shyness overcomes him. Instead he noses her flower crown, steadying himself with the sweet scent, a perfume to drive away the memory of smoke. And then he starts forward, smiling back at her over his shoulder. “How should we begin ours?”
@
if you'll be my star*
