over the mountains of the moon
down the valley of the shadow-
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.”
@Leto
