over the mountains of the moon down the valley of the shadow-
A
utumn has ever been his favorite time, in this world and every other.
Every morning clear and pale and precious, the fields limned in frost burned off as soon as the sun rises and turns the world golden. The cool breeze that sweeps in from the sea, the heavy scents of ripe fruits as they gathered up the last of the warmth before falling. And the color, oh! The world is a riot of scarlet and orange, of dusky purple and yellow bright as a bird.
He should be happy, then, as he walks from the wind-swept meadow and into Tinea, for the worst of the scars from last year’s rains are gone. The wildlife is back, each fieldmouse and meadowlark, and the sky is bright blue overhead.
But Isra is missing. But Seraphina is fallen. But Florentine is in Denocte, too stubborn to go where she might be safe.
Asterion presses into a run, the kind for forgetting, the kind that forces each breath from his lungs like a bellows. Not even Cirrus could keep up with him now, as he gallops too quickly to press the grasses flat beneath his hooves, as he urges himself on and on until every ounce of his Throughbred blood and sinew and muscle is forced into service. And for just a moment he wonders if this is as close as he will ever get to flying.
Too soon he is at the treeline, and it is this and not the burn of his lungs or the rush of his bloodstream that forces him to slow. He is euphoric from his run, light-headed and gasping. For the moment he has outrun memories of the meeting, and the trouble always on the horizon, and the way his thoughts circle him like dogs baying do something, do something.
He is not surprised to look up and find Leto there.
The king laughs, though maybe it is only a gasp for breath; then he shakes his head and considers her.
She looks no less wild and other than she had at the masquerade, when she had gone out into the night and he had let her, not following. He might be sorry for it, if he weren’t already sorry for so many things.
“Well, Leto?” he says, and leans forward, as though he might let the wind blow him away again.
It was as though she expected him there, as if Fate whispered that he would come. Leto does not stop in what she does, but oh she is so still anyways. Her lips reverently pressed to the bark of an ancient tree. Upon its bark are many things, carvings beautiful and terrible, leaves and stones and bones hanging like gems from his branches.
Stood beneath its shade, the star girl looks so utterly right and yet, so utterly wrong. Upon her own black skin, painted in silver (for it had not been for the benefit of a Night Queen’s ball) are a myriad of sigils and litanies. They seem to shift and whisper in answer to the tree and its own carved markings. Leto is, in that moment, so very of the earth, with her braided hair adorned in bells and bones and leaves of gold and silver.
When at last she lowers her mouth , and her prayers fall away from her lips like prayers, only then are all the ways in which she does not fit thrown into sharp relief. Her eyes open and there is no earthly colour there. No, Leto’s eyes are the light of the moon, of stars that shine from the far flung reaches of the sky.
She holds Asterion within that gaze and if she were not a shed-star girl, she might wonder if the starfire there burns his skin; if he hears the call, the cry of celestial bodies ricocheting, moving, echoing in choral voices. Because, oh, Leto hears them as if they are but souls clamouring beyond the veil.
Her face is the dark of shadows, of ink spilled across white, of satin night so dark it is tinged with electric blue. She wears not the bone of her mask and its impressive antlers and maybe he finds her quite exposed this night.
Leto says nothing as she drinks in this king of hers. His slim sides heave with gasping breaths and his eyes are wide as planets, his skin aglow. Leto takes a breath, pulling it deep, deep into her lungs. Oh he smells of city life, of the smoke of autumn wood fires and the wealth of royals. She smiles then, slow and mysterious and returns her gaze to the tree, for Leto is anything but royal.
Well, Leto?
Her ear twists to catch him, but she does not turn. Her eyes are closed once more, drowning in the whispers of her tree. She knows of what he speaks, of the question he does not ask her. And so she says to him, “Come.” Her eyes open once more to look upon him, to beckon her king closer. “Touch the tree.” And again her lips press to the sigils carved there, their patterns white and bright, red and bloody, black and monstrous. Slowly she withdraws and waits upon him, her silver eyes mid-moon bright.
“You already know I am not made for meetings, Asterion.” The girl says with a shrug as she looks to the canopy of trees. She could not leave the ball fast enough but oh Asterion was drunk on liquor of dance and joy. “My court is a cathedral of trees, a ceiling of stars and a floor of wildest earth.” Then, oh then, she utters soft as a whisper, “I saw to your lands whilst you enjoyed your final night of revelry.” And maybe there is something of hurt within her voice, of regret for the king that would not follow her home that night. Yet there also is gratitude that he ever came home at all.
@Leto | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
over the mountains of the moon down the valley of the shadow-
H
e is not sorry for how he arrived, all out of breath and tousled hair, but he wishes he had come more quietly, like a deer in the mist. That way he might have been able to observe her. As it is he only got a brief image, vivid nonetheless, of a wild girl leaving secrets against the gnarled skin of a tree.
If he weren’t here, would the tree answer her? Would it press back, whispering its leaves along her satin skin, tracing symbols of its own? (Perhaps he has outrun his senses, abandoned them in the field all rushing to catch up).
The king holds his breath as she meets his gaze, startled as he was the first time by the moon-silver of her eyes, and he only lets it go when she turns away again. She passes her attention over him like he is of far less interest than the ancient tree, and there is a boy’s prickling of indignation along with his curiosity.
Before she can tell him to - an oh he is unused to such orders! - he is already approaching her. Asterion is paying no attention to the bark or its secrets; his attention is solely on her, the whorls and lines of paint on her skin and the little bits of bell and bone wound fast in her hair. He wants to touch them each —
but obediently he touches the tree instead, careful to avoid the strange fruit hanging from its branches, saying nothing. With warm breath and cool lips he traces the rough shapes, his lashes butterfly-light on his cheek, but the sigils tell him nothing. When he withdraws he does so with a shake of his head, though he shows nothing of his disappointment. “What do they mean?” There is still a touch of his headlong gallop in his voice, the words as impatient as his blood for oxygen.
When she continues he raises a brow, and there is almost a smile teasing at his mouth as she speaks of her court. Her next words, though - oh! His ears flicker uncertainly, both the whole and the rent one, and he curls his head toward her. “I’d promised I would stay until after,” he says, and doesn’t care for the way it feels to defend itself to her. How could she know that he helped to make that strange and wondrous night, or the guilt of how it had ended?
He much prefers to recall what it had been like, to stand with just a breath between them and starlight in his veins. As if urged by the memory he dares another step toward her, heedless of the breeze that whispers through the turning leaves of the ancient tree above them. One drifts, brilliantly red, past her cheek as he ghosts his muzzle along the white marks on her neck. Asterion wants to ask her how it is she makes him so bold.
Instead he says, “Do you always paint yourself?” And he tries to imagine her, alone in the moonlight, delicately writing symbols like pressing stars in to the sky.
But he would rather imagine himself standing beside her, tracing those stark and fragile prayers against her skin.
Leto hears his breathing hold and it is as if everything falls as still as his lungs then. Do they hold such power? Power enough to stop the winds and sway of leaves and boughs and stems? Power enough to stop the breath in her lungs…
She huffs in distaste and her lungs strain with the effort. They ache with perfect throbbing and the stargirl’s lip curls – what power does this king hold? What ritual magic slivering through his veins… But Leto knows what magic there is that lies within the deep of his mortal bones. She can near hear the roar of Asterion’s blood like waves, the salt that tastes his skin and the touch of his gaze that she wishes were like sand upon her skin and not the cool, cool of flowing surf.
Beneath religion painted upon her skin, its creeds and vows making her a bold and sacred thing, Leto watches him watching her. She does not sway nor turn her eyes from him. The silver of her gaze promises to bathe him in mercury and moonlight, but of they are gentle things and there is something fierce within her gaze still. What sound does clashing metal make? How loud are the cries of stars colliding? They are all there within her nebulae gaze their songs of salvation and annihilation ringing out through the very bones of her. Silver is nothing in her eyes when behind them burns a scattered rainbow of stars.
Ah! He moves close, close and with each step that brings them closer her eyes burn brighter. Burn, burn those silver stars whisper. Still, still her essence breathes as each breath he now affords her lungs turns her skin to lead and stone. She will not be moved by his approach for how many times has she already moved with him like two birds amid a murmuration.
And he passes her to press his lips lips upon the tree. Leto is a tangle of so many things but something fierce tips her chin up. The same curls her lips into a smile wild and bright. The king’s eyes close, each lash lying upon his cheek, their combined shadows a fan of infinite black. Her heart is a staccato of a thousand worshipping knees landing upon altar steps, her sigils glow with more than mere light and a girl’s bold faith. They dance like witches upon her skin and swirl like ancient magicks lost.
Her bells are chiming, her bones chattering as her head shakes with his question. “So many things.” Leto answers as her gaze turns at last from him and back to the sigils upon the tree. “Fear. Lament. Vengeance.” She names each and yet a thousand more cover the bark of the tree. “The carved are anger and vengeance, the painted sorrow and premonition.” Her eyes tip up to the bones and skulls that hang, beautiful and morbid. Leto might wonder what he thought, this boy of royalty and luxury. The leaves of gold and silver flash like gems and knives in the ebbing light.
Then he is closer still, another step lost in the blink of an eye. Discomfort twists within her and oh how she yearns to lean away, despite her gaze that seeks his skin curious. “Why do you stand so close?” The girl asks, each word the strain of a violin, her voice the thrum of hearts and hands and feet worshipping earth and sky.
Yet Leto cannot bring herself to move and endures his proximity as heat prickles along her skin. Though she arches away, her nape the graceful bow of a laden flower, still she does not move from where he stands. Despite it all, Asterion has the words to draw her back and her gaze is bright where she turns back to drink him in again. “Most of them.” The star-girl confesses with lips that threaten him with wild smiles and a tongue heavy with delight and pride. “The ones I can reach, the rest are painted on by others each day.”
Her eyes trail over his skin and the stars that lie there, cast down from the sky. “But you, you are a thief.” Leto breathes as she drinks him in and the stars he holds, plucked from the sky.
@Leto | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
over the mountains of the moon down the valley of the shadow-
A
sterion misses the fierce and wild thing that carves itself across her face as his breath whispers across the bark. But he hears her bells, and it the bells that draw his attention back to her, their soft sounds seeming to chime out the syllables of his name.
For a moment his gaze catches hers, but when she looks back to the tree he does the same. It is nothing he has known before, at once more familiar and more foreign than the books and letters he had been taught his first year in Novus. It makes him think somehow of Ravos, and of the gods kept there, and a shiver wends down his spine as she speaks the meanings.
“Are they always such dark things?” he asks, and there is the wonder of a boy in his voice even as he looks up with the sorrow of a king in his eyes.
Asterion knows all those meanings, too.
It is nearly enough to settle him, this autumn night with the wind in his blood and his senses all stirred-up as dry leaves. It is almost enough, those skulls that dangle and spin to the touches of ghost, to make a stone of his heart again. Why, oh why, was the whole world so heavy?
And again her bells draw him away. Oh, he is greedy for it, for the wonder of her and all the questions she draws up to his lips like water from a well. He wants to think about stars and ancient tribes, wants to think of carvings and paint, and not of kingdoms and wars and death. Not of phoenix-girls who turned to stone when he touched them.
“I just want to see you,” he says, shy and bold and something else, too - something that makes his eyes soft and dark as the sea under a new moon. “Do they mean mournful things, too?” A little guiltily he draws back, and again their movements echo one another as she arches away too. Asterion feels heat dust his cheeks, warm his throat - his gaze shifts to the trees, where he is grateful for a pair of mourning doves to watch.
As she counts his stars he counts their feathers, bruised twilight and dusty rose. Their eyes are black and liquid and he wonders again what it would be like, always poised on the edge of flight.
First one ear flicks toward her, at her words, and then the rest of his attention follows. There is a little more space between them, now, and it has given room for his smile to creep back; it lives tucked in the corner of his mouth. “A thief?” he echoes, and laughs. “If they were stolen it was my mother who did it, and she took some for herself.”
Are they always such dark things? Asterion asks with sorrow in his gaze. Oh those eyes are heavy, heavy. But the weight upon Leto’s heart is heavier still. The gravity of sorrow has weighed her down, as if vines of the earth are rising up to wend about her limbs and hold her fast.
Her head bobs, the only part of her that can move. Her tongue wets her lips and her eyes turn from his to the tree and then back again. Bells toll with each movement of her fine head they know the truth of her words before she even speaks them. Leto’s bells were there with every blood drop lost, with every tear that fell upon broken bones. “The story of the Ilati is not a happy one,” the star-girl whispers. Her chin tips up, up, up, peering through the trees to the stars that begin to wail. Ilati souls her held within each tree and they too gaze up as stars begin to shed from their place amidst the black night sky.
Leto seems not to notice as a solitary spark drifts down and burns through a leaf to fall as stardust at her feet. “It is one of genocide and these -,” her lips touch each painted rune upon the tree. And over every one she lingers, eyes closed, her breath a sighing prayer. “These were carved upon the trees to tell the story of my people… They are memories and magic for protection…” the girl trails off and her eyes drift from the tree, out into the darkness where the cries of ghosts seem to echo. Her star-gaze shifts, bright as the moon, bright as the stars above that begin to weep with the summoning of her magic. Now the sky begins to shed its stars as tears of flames. They descend, small and fragile, until the skies above the trees begin to glitter. Only one makes it down to the ground below and Leto’s eyes close with effort, a sigh as her magic fatigues, fading to embers in her veins. The sky blinks, and its tears are lost, its stars gleam bright as bruises.
No Ilati should draw stars. No Ilati should look up instead of down because down is where the earth births life and magic with each setting sun. Leto’s lips withdraw from the sigils and her gaze pulls back from the ghosts amidst the trees. She looks to Asterion, the new Terrastellan King – though how is he new? How long had he held the Dusk Court together now? Leto does not count, she never thought to before, she never cared to before. Yet here he suddenly is, interest setting his eyes upon her skin, upon the sacred trees that hold the swamp wood up, like cathedral pillars. He is here amidst her religion and her life and she both hates and loves him for it.
She shudders with the call of the earth, the hum of roots and water, the thump of feet and the cry of a witch doctor in her ears. Bones jangle above the tree and her eyes lift to watch them sway, her own bird bones jangle in her mane and the sigils seem to dance. They lure her away, for the earth is all she should care about, beyond the siren call of stars and the mulled wine gaze of a familiar king.
I just want to see you, he says, so shy and bold, with eyes that darken, soften, and skin that warms like fires in the midst of night. Like a moth to his flames, he has her attention and she does not sway from him. Leto’s eyes follow that darkening blush, the warming of his voice as he speaks again.
She remembers the painting of her sigils, the cold of paint freshly made, the sweep of a paintbrush, precise in its art. The brush of Asterion’s gaze is something warmer, something more dangerously unknown… Do the marks upon her skin also mean mournful things? His question lingers and she pauses remembering each one that adorns the black of her body. “Not all… they tell the story of me: of my joys and sorrows, achievements and losses. They are the sum of my parts and then spells to protect, to flourish, to guide… They are anything and everything.”
Leto shivers as though touched by his gaze, his thoughts. Her heart is a hummingbird thrum within her chest. It sings its song within her ears and she might blush too if he did not look away to birds nesting atop a branch. “You are bold, Asterion, to assume that one would want to be watched so close. Is that because you are a king?” The girl ponders as he watches the birds. Yet how contrary her words, as her own gaze now draws upon each star of his. Her lips move linking stars that do not wish to be linked. No known constellations draw themselves upon his skin, no stars whisper of being stolen from the sky. She huffs against the hot of his skin, “I know none of these stars.” And maybe this is because he and his mother are not thieves but shed-stars too… “Were you forged from the sky too, Asterion?”
And oh it is a little hope that blooms like light within her soul.
over the mountains of the moon down the valley of the shadow-
H
e is rapt at her words, listening not only with the intensity of a king to his people but a boy’s desire to know. Asterion has given so little time to learning the Ilati; other things have swallowed up all his days. Yet they are under his care, too (though surely they would all say differently. They have been under the ‘care’ of many rulers before him and still they live wild and wary as foxes).
And he knows the sorrow of their story, but it is only in pieces. From Florentine, from Rhea, from the brief moments he has to wander Terrastella’s library alone, little bits of their long and dark tale have assembled for him. Fierce and shy and powerful, but hunted - forever hunted (and yet did they not hunt, too? He thinks of their skulls and rituals, of how he has been told they slay kelpies for teeth and tongue).
Yet only now does he begin to understand, does his heart feel the echo of it like the tree feels the carvings scored into its bark. Asterion begins to reach for the tree again, breath soft and warm, but he startles away when a spark flares at the corner of his vision, too bright against even the vivid autumn day. Wide-eyed, he looks back to Leto - and that is when his skin shivers in surprise, in wonder.
For the girl is aglow. Starfire seems to trace lines through her, brighter than her runes, like white paint on a dark tree. Her eyes, too, are alight, and though he wants to touch her (to see if her magic burns, if it might sear him) he falls back a step, the dry leaves rustling like old paper under his feet. Beyond them the doves take flight, their voices throaty with alarm.
The sound, the release of familiar scent (rich autumn, like gold and ruby dust) settles him. For a moment he searches the boughs and thinks he catches more light, like fireflies come too soon; but when he looks back to her she is dark as a shadow’s shadow once again. He asks nothing, but the question burns on his tongue like a small fallen star.
He swallows it in favor of listening to her, and though his body falls quiet again he can still feel the beat of his heart as though he was once again running, an urging rhythm. To steady it he focuses again on her runes, wondering at how each small mark denotes a story. Asterion wants to learn them all, wants to be taught the words and strokes to each spell and prayer. He wants protection, too, wants guidance and belonging. These things, too, he swallows down like water.
Instead he smiles at her, warm as an autumn hearth-fire, with a small spark in each eye. Like smoke his smile curls up, soft at the corners. “You admitted in Denocte to watching me. Perhaps I only thought it polite to return your interest.” Somehow they have drifted near one another again; his breath stirs her mane like the barest wind against the bone and seed-pearls and bells, and hers is its own little-fire against his dusky stars. “They’re the only ones that never change to me,” he says of the constellations he wears, and thinks of how many strange patterns he’s walked beneath. At last he has learned the night-maps of Novus; but will he live below them as long as his own?
Her question draws his gaze to hers at last. He searches it for a sign of that blazing light, but now they are silver as evening bells and not swords new-forged. But Asterion cannot answer her question. He blows out a breath, thinks of how Euryale had asked him not so different a question. “Perhaps the sky,” he says at last, slowly, and his gaze reaches up beyond the red and gold of the canopy. “Perhaps the sea. I long for them both, I love them both. And I feel like I am always following them both. Maybe that is why I never feel I fit…” As he trails off the wind sighs around them, cold with coming evening, and Asterion leans a little nearer to her warmth.
Tinea has eyes upon them. In the dark of its shadows (those shadows that grow as night begins to waken, to call upon the darkness) things creep and they watch. The waters bubble, ponds lapping at her feet. The vegetation beneath Leto’s hooves is damp and the cold presses in upon her, closer, closer. The afternoon sun, hazy with deep autumn, sets its eyes upon the Dusk Court king. It is a twilight season, as autumn slips into Winter. The court itself is spun by the approaching gloaming, frost gleaming upon the leaves as winter cools the sky to a brilliant white-blue.
But then her star falls and all smells like burning ozone and for once she realizes she is not watching the star that falls but the way it flares within his wide, wide eyes. Asterion shivers and she feels the air tremble too, the heat of the star is upon her skin. It burns like a flash, but her veins are hotter. Her white blood runs wicked and magical. Light licks at the center of her being. Leto is lighter that the midday sun; she is a star-fire girl.
She is burning. Her veins flare as though they summoned lightning down into her very blood. She is black and brilliant white, her eyes a solar flare. Ah that fire is burning, sweat is steam before it even blooms from her pores.
But so soon the star is gone, soon her body is ice and Winter’s kiss is slipping like rime along her spine. She is sure there might be thin frost forming, glittering like diamond dust over the black of her coat. A tremble rocks her, her teeth chattering.
The king sways close and it is not unwelcome. His heat is a sun to her now and she does not lean from him. The doves take flight, crying their alarm into the breeze, rustling the trees and bending the branch that held them. It creaks and it groans like the song of wind in deepest night
His laughter is smoke in the air. It slips like midnight through the trees and, though she cannot see it, she feels the lull of it. Her eyes close, succumbing to the dark of him, the stars that shine. Leto’s ears twitch, her gaze glittering with a drowsiness she blinks away, away.
Her king has caught her out and her lips purse, even through her drowsiness. A slow blink, a fluttering of her heart. The earth chatters with the clicking of the bones woven into her ebony mane as she dismisses his words. “But I came to call you home. I did not know what you looked like, I wanted to be sure.” Her chin tips up, defiant, for she does not wish to consider the blood that flushes her cheeks, for the twisting of her stomach and the anxious laugh that bubbles in her chest. She does not like what they might imply. Leto is made for the lauding of earth’s great magic for summoning stars out of the sky. She was focused, until Asterion.
His breath is warm fingers weaving between her mane, brushing over the shell of her ear. Her ears fall back and her heart beats faster, her skin blushes hotter. What blessing it is to be born of a raven’s wing! The night-time hue of her body hides all the sins of her unwelcome reactions. But Leto does not move from him, not as she should, not as she would like to.
“I have not seen a sea of stars.” She says, for it is easier to think of stars than of true saltwater that rolls toward her in waves and reaches to pull her out to sea. Her breath is shallow in her chest, her eyes wide, wide. A prophesy lies over her. It was told in the rippling and darkening of blood within a bowl, in the white set of the Witch Doctor’s eyes. Such a haunting voice that prophesy has and it whispers in her ears still. It make Leto tremble beside this boy of the sea. It makes her skin dry with salt, her lips chapped and dusted with sand. She shudders and maybe he feels it, maybe he can hear the way her breath rattles like bones at the bottom of the sea.
“I will die at sea.” The girl says, when he speaks of his love for it. And how she has fashioned herself to be strong, yet has run from the sea since the very day of her prophesy! Leto inhales until her lungs are fit to burst, until they are full of water and magic and- oh. She breathes out, slow, slow and knows, as she looks upon Asterion why she pulls away. The waters drift to him, the swamps deep puddles yearning for him. “You have water magic don’t you?” Leto gazes at this boy, this star-strewn king and whispers a plea, for what her sigils cannot protect her from. “Will you teach me how to swim, so I might not die?”
over the mountains of the moon down the valley of the shadow-
H
e does not feel the eyes upon them.
For Asterion, in this moment, there is only one pair of eyes he pays heed to, and they are as silver as the moon, as brimming as the sea. Where they touch his skin it burns with star-fire. Around them as the sun sinks low the evening things begin their singing, the crickets and the bullfrogs and the owls, a symphony unseen.
And yet the only music he hears is her voice. Oh, he is caught up in the mystery of her, unable to resist the shadow of the stars in her eyes, the runes painted so delicately upon her skin. Beneath the heavy limbs of the story-tree, the solemn tales of a thousand years of woe, he is ensnared by this girl of earth and of sky. (Some part of him knows he is too easily swept away, that he has always been a ship unmoored searching ever for new waters - but oh, there is a charred hole in his heart where a phoenix burned him, and he wants nothing but to forget.)
“And are you sure now?” he asks, a laugh in his smile and in his eyes at the set of her jaw, the flash of her gaze. He studies her still for another sign of that starfire in her veins, like lightning set down each capillary path. Does it burn her?- might it burn him too?
They are warm together in the cooling night, and yet she shivers and her bells toll soft and low. He wants to move closer still, wants to press his shoulder to her shoulder and his hip to her hip, to count each bell and feather and bone she wears and ask how she won them. Before he can do so much as draw a breath she speaks again, and names her death.
I will die at sea. Oh! Asterion feels touched by a winter tide, then, and it when it rolls out it steals his breath with it. His heart, too, freezes in his chest, caught suddenly by ice. How will it happen? How do you know?- Like fireflies in summer the questions rise to his lips but Asterion is still, neck arched and smile gone to a taut line. Not until she draws away (and how cool the autumn air feels then, rushing in to fill the space between them), not until she makes her request of him, does he look up again into her eyes.
It is impossible to look at her and think of death. Even after all she has just told him of her people, their tragedy written into skin and bark and bone, passed like an inheritance down and down. Does tragedy trace her veins the same way light does, then? Is it yet another birth-right?
“Can’t you just - avoid the sea?” It seems a child’s question, a boy’s, but he is not sorry for it, no matter how soft it is voiced on the chilly evening air. It drifts like a dead leaf, down and down to crumble to dust, before he shakes his head. "Of course I will teach you, if that is what you want.” But his heart still cries out, begging his tongue to warn her away from the ocean that he so loves.
Light is fading. The rise of the tree before them is tall and overbearing. It arches over the duo with gnarled shadow fingers that she feels creeping their cool touch along her skin.
But was the darkness really there, or is it the line of Asterion’s lips? Is it the presence of death looming thicker than darkness and more inevitable than the rising of the sun? She named it and it comes, obediently to watch her, to watch him.
Death creeps along her spine, knock, knock, knocking like the Witch Doctor’s horn over each of her vertebrae. She feels its song humming, vibrating within her bones, she feels it lacing through her veins. It’s grip grows as vines around her heart wild and thorned and as ready as a constrictor to tie tight. She takes a breath, it trembles in her mouth, it stutters in her lungs and her chest aches as she makes it bloom out, out, out. Her chest flutters with fireflies enough to challenge the ones that bring the flurry of unspoken questions to his lips.
Though the dark is softer, though it smudges with shadows and sweeps light away with the grimness of her revelation, Asterion’s softness is gone. He is sharper, the grim line of his lips pressed like razor wire against her confession. She longs to lean into it, with silver eyes blazing, with a wicked desire to see it her tether to fate may snap. Might that draw of his lips save her? Might a king have power enough to save his subject? She would hope for anything since all she had were the backs of her Ilati brethren for comfort. Each turning away from her for they say fate is binding and it will come for her, however she may try to change it.
“I won’t be afraid,” Leto whispers and hopes she means every syllable of it. She picks up a stone wet from the earth, covered in moss. She presses it into the tree, she carves her own morbid fate into the flesh of the bark. The tree groans with the afternoon wind, the leaves laugh with Fate’s coarse mockery yet she stands brave and bold and looks upon her new sigil and wonders how it is beautiful when all it heralds is her demise in salt and water.
Then she turns and with the stone, smears green moss upon Asterion’s shoulder. Her salvation is told upon his skin in curves and lines and when the moss is upon his skin and no longer the stone, Leto finishes the rune in mud.
She smiles as he speaks and she does not lift her eyes from the rune. Ah it is a sad smile, it is the earth weeping, it is stars shedding like tears from the sky. Oh she would burn death from her veins with starfire if she could. Like a twinkling star growing brighter, larger, turning itself into a blazing sun that reaches and burns and swallows all around it, so her smile grows into something fierce, something full of vitriol and yet as softly sad as a moaning winter wind.
“I need the sea.” She says with irony and laugh pouring like bitter wine from her ebony lips. Her lips wear a smile sadder than sad and as lost as a north wind full of Saharan sand. Her bells, as she moves, resound through the trees and sound like weeping. She hears the crying as if it were her own, and oh what self-hatred soars through her like acid.
Still her eyes have not lifted from the rune she painted upon him. Not even as he says he will teach her dos she lift her gaze from the rune upon his skin. But then the star-fire girl is laughing. Oh how she is laughing! What irony it is that this boy, this man, this king, is adorned in stars and bears control over water when Leto is forged of stars that have blessed her with a magic enough to kill her, were the sea not there to stop it from consuming her with white-hot star-fire. Asterion commands water and water will kill her, one day.
He hates him. Oh how she hates him! Leto has never needed anyone: she is her own help, always.
Never. Never has she feared her death and never should she.
But…
She has painted Asterion as her salvation and she does not tell him what weight the rune has, what heavy hopes (enough to cripple him, enough to cripple her) it carries. Leto ties her lips shut with the thread of selfishness and flinches with every prick of the needle.
This girl should be brave, she should stand like the earth’s cliffs: defiant before the sea. She should not fear death, she should not want to fall to her knees and beg a boy to save her. But she does, as she shudders and moves closer and as she did upon the tree, whispers “thank you,” upon his skin, upon his rune.
