A
round them the flowers are a blaze of color stretching from one end of the field to the other. Ipomoea knows there is a pattern to them, he knows that in the castle keep there is a tower that spirals into the sky. Standing atop the terrace and looking over the field was like witnessing a secret unfurl.But Ipomoea does not want to unravel secrets today. He wants to live in them; he wants to admire the flowers for what they are without stopping to tell them how much more they could be.
They were already enough.
He can see the wolf eyeing him, and perhaps a part of the feral look in his eyes stirs a bit of the wild in his magic. But he forces it back down with a smile, as the wolf settles and falls into step with them. His own bonded is running free somewhere away from the flowers, away from the fields of people that always stared too long. And Ipomoea lets the wild part of him run with his bonded far, far from here.
“I have friends in Terrastella,” he tells her. Elena had invited him to their festival (and as she had come to the fire festival in Delumine, he felt it only fair he repay her visit with one of his own — and it was another excuse to see the place he had spent so much time in as a boy.) “Apparently more than I thought I did,” he adds with a laugh. It feels lighter, to laugh here — it feels easier. As if being in the Dusk Court has reminded him of something, of who he was.
Or maybe it was Maeve. He can see her mother in her; and he can see so much of the Night Court that he loves. So he smiles, and with a nod of his head he turns back to the paths between the tulips. The flowers bob on their long stalks to either side of them, a rainbow of colors smiling up at them.
Ipomoea trails his muzzle gently over the blossoms for a moment. “Which color is your favorite?”
an endless garden
