hen he closes his eyes, he can still see the trees burning.
Every breath brings new smoke into his lungs, coating his throat with ash; the taste is bitter and acrid on his tongue.
He can't help but feel as if he's standing in a skeleton, looking at a sea of burned bodies that extend as far as he can see around him. Their trunks were twisted and warped, their branches broken and burned. Everything around him is black, black and sooty and charred to a crisp. A shiver goes up the Regent’s spine. Unable to look any more, his eyes tremble shut.
His sigh is lost in the wind whispering through the dry, dead, blackened branches of the trees.
For a minute, he's still. Only his mind wanders, opening, expanding, probing the dead blades of grass for life, for meaning. The magic trickles out of him, subtly at first, like a seasonal spring after the first rain, hardly perceptible.
But slowly, gradually, it begins to flow more naturally.
Flowers bloom around his hooves, tiny blades of grass sprouting and growing in an instant. The colors are bright amidst the ash of the destroyed forest floor, creating a vibrant spot of life in a desolate land. Slowly, slowly the flowers and grass begin to expand around him, turning the blackened soil into new life.
When Ipomoea opens his eyes it's as if he’s standing in a miniature meadow, tired but happy. A smile quirks at the corner of his lips as he looks over his handiwork.
It’s a small start - but it’s something.
A twig snaps somewhere in the distance, breaking his concentration. The magic stutters to a stop, slipping through his grasp like water - and then it’s gone. He frowns as the circle of flowers stops growing, disappointment blossoming in his chest. He had hoped to do more, to grow more -
He hadn’t expected to see someone else wandering the empty shell of a forest - maybe they hadn’t yet heard of the tragedy that had taken place here, didn’t yet know that this part of the forest was restricted. ’Go away,’ he cries in his mind, ’there’s nothing left to see here, it’s ruined, the beauty is all gone.’
But he doesn’t say the words out loud. He turns to the source of the noise instead, cerise eyes scanning the shadows.
“Hello?” he calls, his voice and skin alike trembling. The summer air was warm, the sun bright overhead, but the magic had left him feeling feeble and cold. “Is someone there?”
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The ground blossoms at his touch. Ipomoea stands amidst a flourishing field that reaches out and out and out. It turns ash into flowers and grasses, trees and brush.
Florentine had roamed through black, so much black. The forest was utterly silent, a charcoal sketch of greys and blacks that smelled of burning and smoke. It was a cathedral blown open by gunpowder. Each tree is split and as her feathers touch their scolded bark, it blows away as ash.
How long had she roamed through this stricken land until Po appeared as a splash of colour between the trees? How often had she run here and watched the eagle fly? Was its home now ruined? Did it still watch the dawn from atop its tree’s crown?
Florentine moves to her friend, each step a cloud of dust and debris. A twig snaps and she wonders how it was still rigid, how it does not crumble like all else. Sadness twists in her chest, but she does not shed a tear, not like she did with her brother. Is there no part of Novus that does not bear a scar? Terrastella has only just recovered from its floods – all is still sodden and full of mud. Her garden washed away.
“Oh Po,” The traveller girl breathes as she steps from ash to grass. Her lips lower to skim over the grasses his magic forged. Oh, they taste sweet and full of promise. The flowers are a sweetness to counter the acrid smell of smoke and ash. “What happened?” She asks and fears she knows. “The gods…” Her eyes lift and she moves to reach to touch the flowers atop his crown, but stops, hesitant. The last she saw of him was when they were corralled in the stone of Tempus’ temple. That was bad, it dogs her mind with ghosts, but oh, this is worse.
Florentine moves to stand beside her friend, her wings reaching for his, her petals tumbling like tears. “You make beauty where it’s needed most.” Her voice is a whisper and she drinks in his meadow, his fatigue, the dark of his once gleaming eyes.
he air stirs when she arrives, sending a fresh scattering of petals over him and through the forest. He can’t help but breathe in deeply, his lungs crying out for something other than ash and smoke and charred flesh - and he is not disappointed. Florentine brings a breath of fresh air with her; however short-lived it may be, he plans on taking full advantage of it. His lungs sigh with relief, his heart steadies its frantic beating; and he is comforted by the familiarity of his friend, standing with him in this forest that had become a stranger.
His inhale is sharp and painful when she comes beside him, but it doesn’t burn quite so much as the tears that threaten to pour from behind his eyes. He blinks them away quickly, angrily, hoping she wouldn’t see how his eyes turned so red at the edges.
His response is a nod, a shaky tilt of his head. Does such a tragedy need anymore explanation? The evidence was in abundant display. “I heard about Terrastella’s floods, how the ground gave way underhoof.” Maybe he should consider himself and his Court lucky; or at least no worse off than the others. They had all suffered this past year, each in a different way.
He couldn’t help how much more personal this felt; he had tried to keep up with the other Courts, he had wanted to check in on them. It was the emissary in him, or maybe the philanthropist, that made him need to know what was going on elsewhere in the world, to offer his help and support.
But his own grief hadn’t allowed him to. Ipomoea told himself that he had stayed home because he was Regent now, because Delumine needed him more than the other Courts did. But really it was a far more selfish decision on his part. He had stayed home to mourn, to wallow in his own self-absorbed sadness while he ached for the beauty that Delumine used to be. True, not all of the forest was gone: the northern reaches were largely untouched, and the fires had not burned quite so far to the west, either.
Only most of it was gone.
”You make beauty where it’s needed most.”
Ipomoea finally lifted his eyes, meeting the flower queen’s violet gaze. He can only swallow thickly, wings fluttering like broken things at her touch. “I only wish I could make more,” he heard himself say, with a voice so tinged with sorrow he did not recognize it as his own. “A mini meadow can hardly replace a forest.”
He casts his gaze down, away from Florentine, and can’t help but focus on the petals she has brought with her, how they stand out so vibrantly against the grey of the ground.
A breeze causes them to scatter, sending them tumbling, rolling through the ash, and they too are turned black.
“Tell me something good,” he finally begs, breaking the silence again. There’s an unspoken desperation in his eyes, a plea for her to bring some joy into this place to accompany the flowers he’d made.
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They talk of floods and the grief in Flora’s heart is enough to drown them both. It is a rushing river, wild and churning, biting and thrashing. “It did,” Flora breathes. But I did not see it. She does not say. For that grief holds her fast, quickly tying her tight and pulling her under its wild flood. Florentine was bed ridden when her court was failing, she woke only to give her brother her crown when all around them was falling to ruin. Terrastella was at its lowest and she abandoned it.
Her eyes close tight, lashes pressed upon her cheeks as knees before an altar. If she closes her eyes hard enough, if she prays fiercely enough, could she wish it all away? Her breath rattles in her chest, the chain of a thurible pulled tight. Her sorrow is the incense of Po’s fragrant meadow.
Ipomea’s sorrow is bitter upon her tongue, she tastes it with the clarity of sweet spring grasses. But there is nothing glorious in their meeting this day. Flora sways towards the flower boy, his presence an embrace into which she would truly fall.
“No,” She agrees. “It cannot.” Her eyes open, to settle her bruised gaze upon Ipomoea. A Dawn boy before a Dusk girl, their sun shining above the horizon. Was it rising? Was it setting? “But you tried, Po. Hope is a flowering meadow and hope always springs from ash.”
Tell me something good.
Florentine touches him, lips beneath the red of his eyes and her forehead against the curve of his shoulder. What words does she have for him, her oldest friend? What good can she bring him now?
There are no gods within Florentine’s heart (except a once-god, and not even he will bring her to her knees in worship). She is a godless girl and she prays to none as she lays her head against her dearest friend. Yet she wishes she might, just then. She wishes she could hold a god tight and beg they hear her call. But she calls to magic and begs for something more than grief…
Her eyes open as a shadow flies and her eyes tip up, up, up. Flora lifts her head from Po’s side and smiles into the sky. “Look!” The girl implores her friend, “Not all is lost.” And an eagle flies idly above, its dark eyes searching far below. It watches the flower horses below and maybe it recognizes them, from the day Ipomoea first met Florentine.
t did,” she tells him, and his pain is a sigh lost on the wind. He had been so busy grieving for Delumine - for it’s fires and it’s loss and it’s tragedy - that he had forgotten to grieve for the rest of the world, a world that was rapidly changing. It was selfish of him, a former Emissary, to care so little about the other Courts.
”I’m sorry,” he says, but nothing more.
Once upon a time, he would not have hesitated to run to Terrastella. Had the letters of their plight come a year or two years ago, he would have been there by the next day break, ready to help in whatever way he could. He was not blessed with healing magic to help others, or earth magic to remold the earth; he was not even blessed with flight, and his magic was almost wholly useless. Still, when there was a will, there was a way, and he would have helped.
But this time when the letters came, not only from Terrastella, but from everywhere all at once - he had chosen to remain silent. Had the will vanished? Had he forgotten the vows he’d made to never turn away someone in need? He had told himself it was for the sake of Delumine, but the Dawn Court had Somnus, and a god who actually cared to help. From what he had heard, the other Courts were alone. It makes him feel guilty, and ashamed, and further profounds his sorrow. He can’t even look Florentine in the eye when she looks to him - how could he, when he had abandoned his duty and her Court, and her along with it?
She tells him he tried, and he chokes back a bitter laugh. What does it matter if it comes too late? He wants to ask her - the words are scalding on the tip of his tongue, burning him - but he can’t. His mouth is silent, even while his eyes scream and rage and sob and ask a hundred answerless questions, all of which start with why.
The flowers are whispering to them, twining around his legs, pressing their petals into his skin. But he has nothing left to say to them. His wings tuck themselves into his fetlocks, finally still.
He closes his eyes when she touches him, unaware that he was holding his breath until he released it in a sigh. For a moment it is only them leaning into one another, standing amidst a ruined forest in the center of a flower circle.
”Look!” He lifts his head alongside her’s, as the shadow of an eagle covers them. The shadow it casts turns its body dark, but the sun outlines its wings in gold. Light engulfs it in a soft, pale aura as it dips one wing and turns.
The barest of smiles hides itself at the corner of Po’s lips, and his eyes soften.
“It’s been a long time since you last visited Delumine,” he says softly, and he finally turns to look at her. Florentine looks the same as she always did, the same as he remembered. Her curls are as golden as ever, her petals especially refreshing and vibrant here in the skeletal remains of his forest. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed her, had missed her kind words and companionship.
“I’m glad you’ve come back,” he says at last.
He’s afraid to ask why she’s here and not there, where her home is also struggling. He’s afraid to know of all the things that might have happened since they last saw one another, and why her brother wears the crown she once was given.
He knows she’ll tell him in time, but for now he’d rather sit and watch an eagle fly, the way they had all those years ago.
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Ipomoea is tight beneath her touch. Sorrow is bitter upon the air and how it holds him as still as stone beneath her embrace. Yet slowly, slowly, he unspools his sorrow at her touch. His sigh leaves him like a flock of birds set free from an aviary. Florentine hears the flutter of their wings pressing against Po’s lungs as he sets them loose.
Her eyes stay open even as they grow heavy with the weight of this reunion. How could she ever let them close when her friend has made a meadow enough to rival the gods? She drinks into her eyes, her heart, her soul, every flower painted in so many colours that Florentine is sure they have no name yet. Is this the courage of stars and worlds? To make from nothingness something beautiful?
She does not draw from him, but finally closes her eyes as she feels him lean in to her. His tears are still bitter upon her lips but she holds them there for time will dry them, like dew from a petal. Her breath rolls over the curve of his shoulder, warm like a consoling touch. Oh, could they stay like this forever? Would they find this flower girl and flower boy woven in roots and vines, twined together in their lament for Delumine. Flowers and leaves adorning their torsos and petals falling like tears.
No. Neither were made for sorrow such as this.
Slowly Flora steps from him as he looks to her and how a piece of her pulls free. She might never get it back, she knows, but she does not worry. He is softer now, wearing a smile as tentative as the dawn. Her own smile greets it in golden sunlight.
“Too long,” the Dusk girl agrees. “But we had to tend to our own homes. Each of us.” She says, as if she might know the guilt that haunts his dark gaze. She is not sorry it has been so long and she is not sorry he had not come to help Terrastella. Why would she be? Her curls press and brush about her throat and already there is a pillow of petals at her feet.
She watches their bird, the tip of its wings, the way sunlight pours liquid and bright across its body. It spirals and is gone and at once the forest seems more still and more quiet than ever before. “You could not keep me from you if you tried, Po.” And the flower girl presses a kiss upon his cheek.
he longer they stand there within each other’s embrace, the more the magic flows from him. Each shuddering breath brings forth new life, blades of grass springing to existence and clawing forth from the blackened earth, clawing for the sun like newborn warriors. Inch by fragile inch, the meadow grows.
The progress is slow, and shaky; sooner rather than later the magic will run itself out, and his energy will expire. He’s never held it for so long before; but he can’t stop it now, nor would he want to.
Even if it took him a week, a month, a year; Ipomoea would be here to regrow the forest the fires took from him.
Her touch is golden and warm, each word she speaks a melody that banishes another cobweb from his heart. There’s a hollow feeling inside of him, one that has persisted since that first meeting on the summit of Veneror, between himself and the other Regimes. It’s carved out some piece of him, so subtly he had not noticed the beast’s progress until he woke up one morning and was not happy to see the sunlight streaming in through his window. It had seemed too late at that point to care.
But as the petals and leaves rain around them, and her voice is sweet as honey, warm as sunlight, he feels refreshed in a way he hasn’t in ages. The guilt is still there, in the back of his mind, but fading; how could it not, when his friend is here to tell him he’s forgiven?
“I still should have come,” he presses, but not with the quite so much heaviness as before. If not during the fires, then after. As an Emissary, he would have; but as a Regent, he had been too fearful to leave.
He knew now that life was a journey of mistakes; next time he would be better. For himself, for Florentine; for both of their Courts. Of course, he desperately hoped there wouldn’t be a next time, or a reason to put his newfound knowledge to the test; that was the naive summer child in him, always hoping for the best.
But Ipomoea had been born in the cold winter, and this coming season promised to be colder still. Optimism alone would not be enough to see him through this time.
”You could not keep me from you if you tried, Po.”
He couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled past his lips from her statement, leaning into the kiss she presses into his dark cheek. “I should have known so,” he quips, trying to contrive the same airiness in his tone that he hears in her’s.
Overhead the eagle tips its wing, spiraling away into the distance, and the spotted boy shakes the idleness from his bones.
“You didn’t come to see a dead forest,” he says, and it isn’t a question. His pink eyes turn to look at her, and his smile turns a little more sweet. “Did you forget the way to the Court?” his tone is teasing as he bumps her with one shoulder.
@Florentine | "speaks" | notes: this post is very different from the last one but i’m rolling with it.
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There, in the tight of their embrace, Florentine feels his magic flow stronger and wilder. In answer the whisper wood rouses. Flowers and leaves knit together before her eyes. The magic paints them in unearthly colours that not even this time-traveller-girl could begin to imagine them. Oh this boy’s magic is a wondrous thing that slips as rich as golden vines along the silk of her skin. Florentine relishes it for it is as cool water upon the burning of her skin.
Then her eyes close, for to hear a wild wood grow is more fascinating that to see it too. Scents bloom, cathedral rich and it is too much to keep her eyes in the dark. So they open, amethyst bright and drink in the trees that turn from charcoal black to sated mahogany. Bark grows rough and vibrant and drifting ash is swallowed in the air, replaced with swirling pollen.
He asks as he works and his magic slows. Beneath her cheek, against her shoulder, across every part of her that touches him, she feels his muscles slacken. His weariness bleeds into her and her wing reaches over him, sheltering, strengthening. “You are right.” She agrees with him, her voice gold to line and gild every part of him that weakens. “I have not come to see a dead forest. I have come to see a living one, and I am.” Her smile is against his cheek, her breath pressing life into him. Oh if only could give the energy of her own magic! “I shall bring you seeds from other worlds, Po.” She hums, her eyes electric bright, filled with wonder and splendor. “Yours will be a wood none have ever seen before. Come and see a world with me? Pick the flowers you wish to grow here..”
Her invitation hangs. It is overflowing with its joy, laden with its hope that he might join her. “I want to give my child a flower of their own. One from another world, but, I would not know how to make it grow here, in Novus.” She pulls back a step, her eyes seeking her friend’s, holding, hoping. “Would you help me to make it grow here?” Her gaze follows the curve of his flower diadem, it trails like a finger along each fine petal edge. “I know of no-one better.”
And despite her hope, despite the joy that simmers with her words, with the declaration of her impending motherhood, Ipomoea’s grief still lies upon his spine, heavier than the world. Oh she feels it, where her wing bends over his back. “IF you had come, what exactly would you have done? What could you have done? I did not come to you either, Po. Do not carry this guilt, it will eat you alive.”
No longer is the smile upon her lips, but a sanguine curve of her gilded mouth. Her eyes are dark with warning, sadness heavy as an ocean.
is energy is nearly spent; his magic saps the strength from his bones like water, flowing freely without a dam to stop it. It stutters and dies, and the growth of the forest stops. Lonesome flowers dance in the breeze, bending towards their creator on long and flexible stalks. Ipomoea shudders.
“I would have done something,” he insists, his voice hardly above a whisper, determination in his voice. He’s a child of the dawn, after all; optimism warms his chest, even in a situation as dark as flooding, as precarious as gods meddling.
He leaves it at that, and says no more. He doesn’t question Florentine’s own choice to remain at her home Court - his guilt, his blame is reserved for himself and he alone.
But he won’t allow it to eat him alive, as she suggests and fears. No, Ipomoea would let it burn inside of him, a flame setting fire to his selfishness and cowardice alike. He would learn from his mistakes.
He can’t help the smile that blossoms at her words, small and shy and tired though it is. He leans back into Florentine, feeling the strength of her wing as she draws him close. His own small wings open and close, like fingers reaching out, clasping and holding onto each other. His breath is a sigh, lost on the wind that pushes them close together.
“I would like that,” he whispers, and it nearly shocks him. The temptation to go pulls strongly at his heart, a need to wander and experience the world taking root. How long had he been in Delumine? He was a Regent now, and the Court was his home - but still he ached for the days of his youth, when each sunrise saw him somewhere new, and each sunset was filled with mystery and the unknown. Po had grown restless here, despite his love for the Court.
His imagination goes wild in the absence of his magic, petals of all colors, shapes and sizes taking root in the hollowness of his mind. A wood like none have ever seen before… Is it wrong, the jealous pride that he feels then, even at the mere prospect of creating something beautiful and unique?
“I will see a world with you,” he promises, turning to press his cheek into the soft skin of her neck. But there’s a sadness still when he closes his eyes and breathes in her petals. “When our world is at peace, when we no longer have to worry about floods or fires or the magic of rogue gods. Then I will come with you, and we’ll explore a new world together.”
He doesn’t know if that day will ever come - Novus is too fickle a land. But still he hopes, and still he’ll fight to make it a possibility. If he can spare even a day he would go, always with the promise of return dancing upon his lips, just as it had when he was but a boy.
“Come,” he says, and takes a step forward, out from the shelter of his wings. His legs are still weary, but the smile that sneaks onto his lips when he looks back at her is anything but. “Come and we’ll talk about the flowers I would choose, and imagine the ones your child will love the most.”
@Florentine | "speaks" | notes: rearranged his responses slightly (moved the last one to the first) because I thought it flowed better! and I thought here might be a good time to begin closing it out <3
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When our world is at peace, when we no longer have to worry about floods or fires or the magic of rogue gods. Then I will come with you, and we’ll explore a new world together.
Oh she smiles small at that. Laughter is upon her lips but it is small and sad. “Then you will never come adventuring with me, Po.” The girl of worlds sighs softly. “No world is ever free of risks. We will always have things to worry over.”
I wonder if my child will be able to travel like me, or if Novus is to be their only home. Will it protect them? Such fears they are that gather in her heart. She has seen the way death has stalked through Novus’ streets, leaving bodies broken in its wake. She has seen the flood waters rise, even as she lay broken herself. “Our fears will never be gone.” She says, with her eyes closed tight, shut against the world, against the fears that now bloom for her child’s future.
Slowly she breathes. Her lips press upon his brow before her lips lower and her brow rests against his. Yet Ipomoea is moving, beckoning her after him. She watches, for a moment not moving, just stood, with the world arcing above her and the dance of dappled shadow playing across her spine.
When he beckons her, her eyes dwell upon his smile – oh his smile! Her lips form an answer of their own and she steps forward, into light, her footsteps falling into place behind his. Reaching forward her chin rests upon his haunches as they weave along a narrow path deeper into the forest.
“Can you imagine what a flower from another world might look like?” She asks him curiously, wondering if he might have ever considered it. “Some do not look like flowers at all…” the girl muses, “and some look like the flowers in Bellum that one time… and thousands more look like everything in between-“ And this is how she goes on as the best friends weave deeper into woodland, searching for flowers and unknown truths.
@Ipomoea - I am happy to call it a day here - that they go roaming into the woodland in search of flowers we can fade to black? xD
