The wind was a hungry thing, tearing hairs loose from his carefully plaited braids and sending them flying wildly all around him, like a dark, ever changing halo. Snow was stirring about his hooves, each step cold, each hoof crunching through the ice. With his small wings wrapped about his cannons, Ipomoea hurried across the plains.

He couldn’t say what exactly he was doing out here, so far from the capitol, and so late at night. He had woken from a fitful sleep, and without stopping to think, without stopping to question the strange yearning that had taken place in his chest, he’d thrown open the window and breathed in the clean, crisp air. 



For a moment, he had been still. But not for long.

The night sky had called to him, and he had answered it not with words, but with steps. One hoof after the other, his stride hardly contained to a trot, he had shrugged off the confines of the buildings and the markets and the streets and made way for open country. His heart beat in time with his gait, encouraging him step after step after step.

The court was a glittering thing behind him now, its bonfires still lighting the night air and its drum beats still echoing across the ground. But here, the smoke and firelight faded and the stars reigned supreme. The starlight had turned everything silver out here, so it was both strange and exciting everywhere he looked. But even as the walls slipped away and the only noise that graced his ears were the whisperings of the tall prairie grasses and the distant hoot of an owl, he pressed on. It wasn’t time to stop yet - but why he knew so, he couldn’t say.

His blood was hot and fast, searing his veins from the inside out. Faster and faster, his body responded to its bidding, building up and up to reach its crescendo. And only then did he stop, only then -

- the sky exploded with light.

Ipomoea stopped at last, eyes cast heavenward, watching in awe as blue and green and purple cut the sky in half, more vibrant and lovely than ever he had imagined. They sway and dance, tendrils of light weaving about each other like a couple spinning into each other’s embrace.


It reminds him of pink river dolphins, of comparing illustrations to the real thing. And a stray smile tilts his lips.

”How lovely.” Only at her words does he realize that he’s not alone, that in his rush he had failed to realize he was intruding upon someone else’s moment.

But the wonder on her face strikes a chord within him - so Ipomoea moves closer, returning his gaze to the dancing borealis.

“I never thought I’d see them in person,” he whispers back. His voice is hushed, awestruck. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.” The lights were a rare sight in Delumine, even more rare than the fabled dolphins; he knew of only two others who had claimed to see them, and both had set their stories in the very northern reaches of the court.

He falls silent again; letting the beauty of the lights speak for him, declaring their magnificence in a way that words could not capture.

Their breaths are visible in the cold night air, twisting like ghostly snakes into the sky, spiraling around each other into they’re indistinguishable. And then they slowly, slowly dissipate, as if chased away by the brilliant colors overhead.

Ipomoea drifts ever closer, until the warmth of her skin is palpable in the space that separates them. All the while his eyes are turned to the sky, even as his ears tilt to catch her words. He wants to ask if the lights were the same, in her other life, in that other place, but something in her voice stops him. The wind steals his voice.

”Did you come to see them?”

He freezes subconsciously at her words, looking at her, briefly, from the corner of one eye. She could just as easily be asking about tonight and about the stars, as she could be talking about Denocte itself. Does she know that the Night Court was not his home, that he was a run-away, an orphan, a renegade? That he was the Regent of another Court, a Court he loved yet abandoned? Does she care?

He looks away.

Of course she doesn’t, his mind chastises him. She’s at least as much a stranger here as you. He supposes she wouldn’t have asked, had she known. There was a shyness in her voice, but a friendliness that drew the smallest of smiles to his lips.

“Yes,” he hears himself telling her, his mouth speaking of its own accord now. And he makes no effort to stop it. “We’re in a Court that never sleeps; even the sky dances the night away. I supposes I wanted to see them for myself.” He smiles absently, watching the colors expand across the sky, further and further like fire on the horizon. Like fire in the markets…

“I’m Po.”  

His voice is warm, far warmer than the cold winter air. Again his breath appears before him, frosty and spectral. He lets the silence stretch between them, the air static, the sky alive, and the wind a constant whistle in the background.

“You’re not from here.”

It is not a question; he was not from Denocte, either, so she would find no judgement in him. And yet when he turned to look at her, there was a curiosity in his gaze, a hungry look to his eye.

“Did you come here to see them?” He echoes her own question, a smile playing at his lips.