over the mountains of the moon
down the valley of the shadow-
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
