in sunshine and in shadow
Asterion is not sure that she is right, not even when he glances her way (secretly, shyly) to see the light she speaks of make constellations of her eyes, stars to follow through the dark. He wants to believe her, wants those words to be true, despite their strangeness coming from someone who looks at him with such strange fire, passion bordering on threat.
He does not say anything, only continues to regard her as she crosses over to him, firelight rippling on her skin, catching in the twists of her horn. When she first touches his skin the slow breath he pulls in is winter-cold, a shock to his throat and his lungs; maybe that is why he is frozen as a deer as she traces a line down his neck, ends it in a blazing kiss at his shoulder.
Thana, he wants to say again, but his eyes are the only thing that speak when they find her, and they are full of questions and answers and simple words like please. When her breath spills in silver smoke across his back he feels baptized by spirit, or by winter. Maybe he will wake up in the morning, new and knowing. He feels like a ghost, the way he is longing for something he can’t name.
If she did not speak then, he might have answered her kiss with his own - might have followed the star-map of her eyes and the winding of her horn like dark waves and the way his body down to each dark hair is aware of each movement she makes. Instead, he only turns a slender ear toward her, lets go a breath of mist before he answers. “Yes,” he says, definitive, and then - “but I’ve known it to return things, too. In the proper time.” Maybe it is because it’s a holy night, this longest darkness of the year, and the border between their world and the infinite has been worn thin - but Asterion feels like the stars are whispering to him, like the waves are trying to tell him something. Oh, but he can’t quite hear; he is too full of his own feeling, and the sound of his own heartbeat and running pulse.
But all of that falls still when she pulls away, and the cold can’t dispel the lingering warmth of her, and the only mystery he cares for is the one of her question. The king doesn't think anything could keep her, not even the death that dogs her heels.
“Only if you let it,” he says.
@Thana
