asterion,
He does not expect it - not to find a version of himself so carefully created on the canvas before her, not the way she says his name, not the way she looks aglow like a spark has found its home in her heart. Asterion had thought she would be angry, perhaps even ashamed - not this boldness, not this voice like honey and smoke. The king takes a step back and his breath escapes at last, soft as a sigh of winter wind through a window.
I knew you would come. I hoped you would come. Asterion wonders what look his own face might be wearing at this - mouth taut and drawn, eyes dark with confusion. His tongue, his mind, cannot decide what to say; at last he only drops his muzzle in a fraction of a nod. “An easier trip for me than for you.”
Oh, were he a bolder man, less careful, he might have accused her then - and why have you come, Moira? He cannot forget the way she had turned to stone beneath his kiss upon her cheek, like he were some cruel Midas. Love was not a game to play, she’d said, and here he stands feeling like he does not know the rules, like he has already lost.
At least then she looks away. Oh, but it is only to turn to his likeness on the parchment, to speak of his smile as though it belongs to her still. He is not smiling now, and neither does he speak, not until she mentions his golden sister. How long since he has talked to Flora of the phoenix girl and the way she made him feel like the scatter of sunlight on waves? Not since Denocte. Asterion had told no one of that disastrous meeting save Cirrus - though he would not be surprised if many knew, for how public their parting had been.
It is not just wine and firelight his cheeks are burning with now.
“I had not known she was saying in Novus,” he says at length, when he can not bring himself to speak of anything else she mentions. “Home will be better with her here.” It is far from a lie, though his words are still heavy as river-stones, and his gaze does not stray to find his sister again. Instead it is on the only bold part of him, trained on her face, each graceful line and errant curl of hair kissed with gold and crimson by the fire. She seems unchanged from the girl he’d dreamed of, the girl he’d kissed on a long-distant winter day.
And then, at last, she speaks the words he’d waited for, hoped for, could not bring himself to say.
They might have changed him, once. When the wound was still fresh as an ill-gotten cut, when every night he dreamt of her eyes, when he replayed their interactions like a boy trying to memorize a play he wanted nothing more than to forget. They might have softened him, when Novus seemed at last to be coming together again, dreaming of spring. It had seemed a possible thing back then, fixing mistakes, healing hurts.
Now he only looks down at her and wonders why she couldn’t have stayed away.
“I should be the one to apologize,” he answers, and though something like a smile curves his lips it is faint, hollow, as handsome and false as any fleeting, pretty magic of Isra’s. “I was too forward. You have my word it won’t happen again.”
Asterion feels nothing like the stars he wears when he nods again and turns away. He feels bleak, and hard, and cold, a soot-stained tallow candle cast to the bottom of the sea.
king of dusk.
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