there is fire everywhere
and i am lost in it

e can still feel the heat from the fires, the brightness of the flames forever imprinted into his mind. It seemed his life was one fire after the next now; Solterra, Delumine, Denocte. No matter where he went he found disaster, in a world torn asunder.

Smoke lingers in the air, the sharp, acrid smell of burning buildings filling the street and replacing the scent of spices by which he had always known the market. Snow and ash; he can’t tell the difference between them anymore. Both are white and falling, both are coating the ground in a thin, ever-growing blanket.

There’s a hollowness in his chest, an empty space where his heart should have been beating. He thinks the fire may have burned it away, like the raiders had cut it out and tossed it upon the woodpile to burn it with the rest of Denocte’s chattels. And in its absence, he feels nothing - nothing except for the bile rising slowly in his throat.

And the anger that accompanies it.

It feels as if he’s standing in Viride all over again, staring at the blackened shell of a once mighty forest. The leaves and color had been stripped away, and all the joy and warmth and life along with it. It’s similarly muted and somber here, where the markets are hushed and the stalls closed and everything is covered in white.

But here the trees are replaced by houses, and the flames were no accident. White ash coats his hooves, white snow a blanket across his back, white-hot blood singing the inside of his veins.

Where he had felt sorrow back in Delumine, Ipomoea feels a slow-burning rage now. It’s a foreign feeling, one made all the more intense because of it. It streaks through his mind like a ghost, filling the empty spaces of his chest with a fire not dissimilar to the fire from the raid.

This is why you came, the remnants of the fire tells him.

This is why he left his home.

To fight fire with fire, to act when the rest of Delumine was silent. He wants to bring this picture home with him, he wants to show his family the destruction they had turned away from. Don’t you know it’s only a matter of time? We won’t be immune forever. He wants to grab their shoulders and shake them to awareness, to stir them to action, to make them understand that this ruin was not confined to Denocte, that it would spread like a plague until everything and everyone was as hollowed out as the markets.

He wants to scream. He wants to cry and rage and flee, but he doesn’t. Ipomoea stands in the market, willing his magic to bring the life back, but he thinks he may have cut that part out of himself, too. His magic is quiet, the flowers decorating his brow wilting and dropped dead, browned leaves to the streets. He wants to make it beautiful again - but this time, he can’t.

So he lets the fire within him burn

there is fire everywhere
and i am lost in it

rom within the expanse of white comes a streak of blue, vibrant and lovely amidst the rubble. Odet stands out easily here, with his broad wings and his warbling song, flitting back and forth from one destroyed market stall to another. He lands briefly, a puff of ash and snow rising into the air around him.

A moment later he’s back in the air, winging his way back to his bonded, something red bright within his beak. He flies through a small crowd of children, who cry out in laughter as the wind he makes tousles their baby-fuzz manes. It’s a strange sound, Ipomoea thinks: one that doesn’t quite belong here in the markets, yet one that blossoms hope in his breast none the less.

The songbird alights on his bonded’s crest, light as a feather as he tucks his wings in neatly. With a muffled chirp and a couple hopping steps, he leans down over Ipomoea’s brow, tucking a small sprig of winterberries into his mane. A smile, small and wispy, finds its way to the appaloosa’s face.

“Thank you,” he says softly, as Odet takes flight once more. A bright, mimetic chirrup is his response, as the steller’s jay returns to the air.

He hasn’t been standing there long when another joins him. Ipomoea watches the silver-haired mare from the corner of his eye as she comes up beside him and stops, an eagle tucked away on her back. He wonders briefly if they’re bondeds, like himself and Odet; or maybe the eagle had been injured somehow, and she is a caretaker looking after it. Either way it’s clear the mare is protecting the avian, and even without knowing her, Ipomoea is glad to see her.

”Such destruction on such a peaceful night.” She, like the rest of Denocte, is still grieving the attack from the night before. It still feels surreal; Ipomoea had come to the Night Court knowing they were on the brink of war, but seeing an act of such destruction was another thing entirely.

For a moment he is silent, mulling over her words, remembering the sound of her smoke-choked voice.

"It certainly was," he says softly, and his voice is nearly as hoarse as her’s. He was there that night, witnessing the fires firsthand. He had gone in to save as many supplies as he could, before Fable had brought them water from the lakes - he’ll never forget the taste of smoke, rich with burning fruits and grains. The smoke from Viride had been woody and piney; but the smoke here had been cloying, burning his lungs until they were blackened with tar.

"Sometimes, I wish we could stop time like Tempus," he starts after a pause, turning to examine the stranger beside him. "That we could just watch the snow fall without worrying about the winter that comes with it." A winter with less food, and an enemy that strikes in the dark. He hoped Delumine was faring better; the harvest had been delayed due to the fires, he knew, and when the snow came, it came with force.

Ipomoea shook his head slightly to clear his mind. It was no use fretting about things he didn’t know; until the next letter from home came, he would focus on the work left to do in Denocte.