It is not the island he’s thinking of, when he takes his first step onto the pristine beach. It is a field of jewels, scattered like stars thrown down by the heavens, cast out to live their lives like mortals on the earth. He can still see them in his mind, swimming across his vision until he’s looking out through a rose-hued lens. Their petals are as bright as sunlight, reflecting off cold, carved edges.

He can still feel their touch, the way they had leaned in against his skin as he walked amongst them, the way the wind had made them sing as it passed through their midst. Their song had gone deeper than words, cutting through his heart like a knife and echoing throughout its remains. They had been alive, feeling, knowing; they had sung stories of the heavens and the impermanence of life, even while they had grown upon grasses soaked in the blood of fallen warriors and slain queens.

It had been magic that had cultured them, magic that was as wild and unruly as the gods who wielded it. They had been the first clue that something was not right in Novus.

He supposed it was the same magic that would have created this place.

And even while his own magic reaches out, inspecting the island with its strange flowers and strange birds, the magic of the island is reaching back out to him. It tugs him forward, deeper still into the heart of this strange new world, and he is powerless to stop it (or perhaps he simply didn’t want to.) The trees close in overhead, casting the regent into a depth of shadows so thick they blot out the twilight sky, and not even sound can penetrate the forest. He walks in near-silence on a strangely muted carpet of thick soil, unsure of which direction he’s heading, simply knowing that the magic of the place has convinced him that it’s the right direction, and that’s all it needs to tell him.

He’s not sure how long he walks, or how long he’s alone for, before he finds the doe. She waits amongst the trees, and overhead a single ray of sunlight breaks through the leaves to fall upon her crown.

Her back is turned to him - it is not Ipomoea she waits for.

He comes to a stop, and all at once the pull of the magic dissipates like waves crashing upon the beach. He waits and he watches, wondering if it was the doe he was meant to come for, even if he is not what she came for. Together they stand, she in the sunlight and he in the shadows behind her, as magic thrums in the air around them like a pool that has yet to take form.

She turns her head and looks, at what he cannot see. But she stares and she stares, and he wonders how the intensity of her stare doesn’t burn up the object of her interest in all this time before finally she looks away, moving for the first time since he’s arrived and taking her first step deeper into the forest.

She looks at him only once as she passes, her gaze smoldering and stealing the breath from his very lungs. He’s caught in her eyes, unable to break free for a long second, his chest crying out for air -

- and then she is gone, and the burning fronds she leaves in her wake fills his nose. Only then does he see the bay man, and realizes what she had been waiting for in the forest.

"Asterion," he says with a smile as soft as smoke. It curls at the corner of his lips, taut and nearly hidden. He knows he should be surprised, or at least pretend to be, but he’s not and he can’t. "It seems all of Novus have found their way here. It’s a wonder the island is big enough to hold us all."

He steps forward, so that the sunlight that had crowned the deer strikes his own brow. "It’s good to see you." It’s good to see someone I recognize.

---

Ipomoea. How long had it been since he had last heard his name, his proper name, spoken in full? Since Delumine, his mind answers him, and a knife laced with guilt impales itself into his heart. The syllables seem foreign now, as if he’s outgrown them. They speak of a boy crowned with flowers, a smile on his lips as he dances through a forest; they speak of a boy, saved from death on the highest peak of Veneror and named after the flowers that grow there in the thin, weak air, flowers that opened with the morning and followed the sun across the sky.

He used to be that boy. Now - now he’s not sure who he is. Now he doesn’t even wear the flowers he so loves.

To anyone who asked in Denocte or here on the island, it was simply Po, a title he’s taken up as easily as breathing. Few were none the wiser; he had yet to be recognized as the runaway regent, off to save the world with a bouquet of daisies as his only weapon. It was for the better, he’d told himself - although he couldn’t help but wonder if Somnus had not yet sent out news of his apology and disappearance, or if his court thought anything of his absence. He had always been prone to wanderlust, but did they know that this time, he wasn’t sure when, wasn’t sure if, he would return?

His own uncertainty was turning into a monster inside of him, its venom more potent than the fragrance of the tropical flowers drifting on the breeze around the two stallions.

Maybe that’s part of the magic. One ear tilts in the bay’s direction, mottled and amused. “The gods have outdone themselves.” There’s a hollowness in his tone that he’s not used to - empty words without any hint of sentiment behind them, as if spoken through automation alone. He shakes his head and looks amongst the trees and their shadows, his wandering eyes avoiding only Asterion.

But at the bay’s next words, a smile that is as swift as it is serendipitous takes him by surprise, arcing across the young regent’s mouth. “No,” he admits. “I’ve read fairytales, of islands that float in the clouds and wander the earth, and volcanoes that have turned entire cities to stone. But nothing… quite like this.” There were entire sections of the Delumine library that he had not explored - certainly he could spend a lifetime there and still not even break the surface of its alcoves - yet somehow he already knew that he would find nothing of the sort hidden within its corridors. If there was, someone would know of it - and secrets were never held long in the Dawn Court.

He turns to face the other stallion then, pleased by the like smile he finds dancing like smoke along the planes of his face. Ipomoea follows the bay’s gaze into the forest, along the shadows the doe had disappeared. A single broken twig, hanging haphazardly from a bush, is the only sign of her passing.

“Should we follow her?” He asks, turning back to Asterion. And there’s a hint of mischief, of adventure and daredevil hiding in his eyes.

---

Ipomoea is not sure when his mind first began whispering doubts into his ear, or why. He knows they were there when he came to Denocte, and when fires tore apart the Viride. He thinks they might have been there before that, too, when he walked alongside Somnus and all the other regimes to meet a god. It was hard to say for sure; they had crept in so quietly at first.

It wasn’t until they had built themselves into an army, and screamed as one for blood.

Only then did he hear them for what they were. There were times when it was quiet, when he was alone with his flowers, that he heard them most clearly. They took him unawares, when he was pruning away dead leaves or packing fresh soil into a vase. And then once they had his full attention they tightened their grip like a vice around his heart.

So at Asterion’s quiet acceptance, at the soft wondering he finds in his eyes, Ipomoea can only smile wanly. Perhaps it is, he says to himself, or perhaps we’re all blasphemers and the gods are plotting our demise. There was only ever one way to know for sure, he supposed; and once you were there, once you found yourself on death’s doorstep there would be no second chance for redemption.

Their only chance was here, and perhaps it was for that very reason that the island existed. It had a way of bringing out something childlike in him: a sense of adventure, or thrill-seeking. All of his emotions felt stronger here, as vibrant as the brightness of the leaves and the water and the sky. The island was a place of extremes, he had found, and there within those extremes he could only feel things fully, or not at all. “Would floating to the clouds be so bad?” he asks Asterion now with a laugh, and lifts his head towards the canopy. “I suspect the world appears far different from up there.” Not for the first time, Ipomoea wishes he had wings that had been built for flying.

But he does not. He has only his legs and his mind, and those alone would be enough to explore this island.

And it was, indeed, time to explore.

“Let us see where her story takes us then,” he says with a smile, and he falls into step beside the king. Be it to something great or something terrible.

The forest path is far more welcoming than it should be, with the tall shadows the trees cast over it. The palm fronds she passed through are still smoking when he reaches them, their edges still limned in glowing embers. It feels like the beginning of an adventure as he passes between them, like the smoke that wafts over him is cleansing him from the inside out.

As they walk the trees seem to shiver, the branches and brambles clearing themselves until a pathway remains in their place, the island’s way of inviting them forward. And yet with each step they take, with each stride that carries them deeper into the forest, the trees lean back in behind them. With a sigh and a rustling of leaves, as more of the forest opens before them - more of it closes itself once more behind them. And all the while there is no further sign of the doe, besides the occasional smoking leaf that flutters down to their hooves.

“It certainly is a strange place,” he muses aloud as they walk, glancing at the bay man from the corner of one eye. His voice is oddly hushed, as if by speaking the words too loudly he might somehow offend the magic of the place. “I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason for all of this, for this place. It seems too wonderful to have all been made by chance.” Too wonderful, too terrible, too magical.

---

His smile is crooked and boyish, a smile that seems to know more than it lets on. “Me too,” he says, and leaves it at that.

But in his mind he can see it, the way the earth might see from the clouds, the way a bird might see the rest of them far below on the ground. He wonders how far the sky goes, and what he might see waiting on the horizon. And in the lack of knowing, his mind builds all sorts of fantasies to amuse himself with.

He thinks he might ask Florentine later about the worlds she’s seen, and how far away they were. But for now he walks and he daydreams and he follows the doe like a hound follows a scent. The dappled light of the forest makes it hard to see her trail, but the smoking palm fronds and the occasional cloven hoof print lead them on all the same. Deeper into the forest, deeper into the mystery - and Ipomoea does not stop to consider that they’re walking into the unknown (foolish as it may be.)

He steals a glance at the king, his eyes dark beneath the forest’s veil. “But do you think she would tell us if we asked?” He hoped she would - where would be the fun otherwise? - and yet there’s a part of him that suspects this was one mystery designed to be only that. A mystery, a tale without an ending, a riddle for them to make up their own solution for. Was a bad answer better or worse than no answer at all?

But before he gets a chance to say more, something shifts in the air around them, something sharp now carried on its undertone. He can feel the wind lifting his mane from his neck, and a shiver raises the hair along his spine. 

Light is streaming through the trees ahead of them and, quite unconsciously, Ipomoea quickens his step. The forest gives way to a meadow, small and flanked by trees. And he thinks, as he steps into the light, that the shining gem he sees laying upon the grass is one of the gemstones from the doe’s antlers, and a part of him thinks he sees the shadow of her hiding behind the trees at the far end.

”I think she’s close,” he whispers when he comes to a stop. The trees shiver around them, and his eyes search quickly for movement beneath their outstretched arms.

---