flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on

---

He knows he shouldn’t be alone in the forest, not now, not today. Seir had told him as much, as had Emersyn, and the guards who had frowned at him when he dismissed them in the meadows and continued on alone. He knows it the way he knows that the peace he feels now as he walks between the trees is nothing more than a fallacy, like a rope that’s fraying and about to snap. The silence has always hidden more than it gives away.

But today, he doesn’t listen.

The ground is hard and cold beneath his hooves, and the branches creak stiffly overhead as he passes beneath them. It’s all too easy to lose himself between the pines, to lose track of his surroundings in the many shades of green that make up the forest. Ipomoea can feel himself slipping into a lull as he walks, until the rhythm of his hoofbeats echoes the sighing of the trees.

And for a while, it’s easy to almost-forget that he’s here looking for bones, and blood, and bodies; that the snow covers a graveyard and the winter pretends it’s not hiding the tracks of a murderer. Here Ipomoea can almost pretend that there are flowers in his chest instead of rage. But when he looks over his shoulder and sees the dandelions and the violets and the asters clinging to his heels like they can’t bear to exist anywhere other than within his shadow, he can’t help but feel like it’s only fear that draws them so near to him, not love.

So when he sees the girl wandering through the trees, he is not sure if it’s with relief or disappointment that she appears to only be lost, and not the poacher.

“Hello!” his voice sounds far more even than he feels, as he turns to intercept her. “Can I help you?” And when he looks at her his heart starts to ache, like it already knows that she’s not simply passing through.

For a moment he can only look at her, and feel like the flowers in his chest are crumbling to dust petal by petal. When his heart starts again it’s painful, lurching forward in an uneven beat with each word she speaks.

Ipomoea knows what it feels like to lose a bonded.

“Hey don’t worry, she can’t have gone too far. How long has she been missing?” He can feel his heart pounding in his chest as he casts his gaze around the forest surrounding them, as if half-expecting to see the crow perched peacefully on a tree, waiting for them. But the woods are quiet, and still, and empty - and he can’t help but think how terrible of a time it is to lose a friend, and what else it might mean.





@corrdelia

flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on

---

Two days. Ipomoea doesn’t need to wander at the sort of anxiety or fear that must have consumed her in that time - his own heart is already constricting painfully at the reminder of his own experience. And it’s a struggle to not let his mind wander to the fragile bird stature still keeping a silent watch over his desk, to not think of his own lost bonded (even if Odet was lost in a different way than this stranger’s bonded.)

But he doesn’t need to tell her what the chances of finding her bonded again are (especially today, especially in these woods, especially with so many other animals turning up dead each morning-). It’s written already in the lines of her face, in the uneasy way that she paws at the ground and glances too quickly back at the sky. He knows that feeling, he knows that haunted look; it makes his heart twist like something dying in his chest.

The flowers are still blooming, pressing their trembling petals against his heels and his fetlocks, but he does not feel them. If it had been another day, if they had been standing together a year ago, he might have plucked one to give to her (flowers had always been a symbol of hope, hadn’t they? Even when he stopped feeling it himself?).

“I do,” he finds himself telling her instead, but had his words ever had the same effect as a flower? “These woods are my friend; I did not see anything unusual on the way here, she may be deeper in the forest.”

All around them are waving trees, and soft sighs of the forest, and frost creeping over the blades of grass sprouting around him. The forest feels cold, and he does not like it.

But there’s something there still, running like a tremor beneath his hooves, something not-yet-dead. And Ipomoea, while his heart trembles like something that is afraid of the death it knows to be inevitable, steps forward to the nearest tree. The bark is cool and rough against his shoulder, scraping a line into his red skin, but he doesn’t mind. Because somewhere, deep in the sap-filled veins of the tree, he can feel something stirring for the first time all winter.

“This way,” he whispers to her, as he starts to follow a path he knows she wouldn’t understand. But the trees know the path the crow’s wings traced through the air, and he knows it because of them - and for the first time in a long time, he is speaking the same language again.





@corrdelia

flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on

---

The shadows deepening in between the trees feels like an omen, have felt like an omen ever since the frost settled in the woods. It’s hard still for him to shake off the weight that has made a home inside of his chest, the pressure filling his lungs so that each breath felt heavy. It’s harder still for him to ignore the shadows between the tree trunks, and the emptiness of the branches overhead.

But when there’s a murmur in the roots wrapping around his hooves, everything else becomes noise in the background. And the aching inside of him begins to lessen, if only for a moment, if only because his connection with the earth has returned, however tenuous it may be.

“Always,” he tells her, and his voice is little more than a whisper, as if he’s afraid that too much noise would drown out the small voice of the forest entirely, and then he might never find it again. “Ever since I was a boy, when I first left Solterra -“ Funny, how he never remembered the flowers or the trees or the music of it all when he lived in the desert. It had always seemed to him as if his life had only ever begun outside of the Day Court.

Perhaps, in a way, it had; and perhaps that was why it had seemed to stop again after he returned last fall.

“My adopted mother used to have a favorite saying,” the words slip out before he can stop them, and he takes a half-step to turn and smile back at her. “There’s no sense in worrying about the unknown. Better to let it be a puzzle to unwind. All we can do is keep looking. And besides,” a tangle of roots smooth out in front of them, clearing a path that leads deeper into the forest.

“- The trees are on our side.”

And he turns down the path without hesitation, slipping easily between the shadows and the trees. In his mind he can see the crow flying, a dark spot against the morning light. And for half a second he feels something else, something darker stirring in the pits of his chest - a hunger that tells him to press on, a feral edge of teeth that makes him feel not like he’s chasing, but hunting. The hair lining his spine stands on end, and his wings flutter like broken things; but his feet skim the ground even faster, giving in to the urgency of the forest’s memory.

Half-running, half-fighting the urge to relent and become the hunter he half-felt like.

Stop, the command felt like it echoed through his body, locking his limbs in place. Stop… As always, he was quick to obey the forest, sliding to a halt at once as his heart leapt into his throat and his chest heaved violently.

…And look.

For a moment he couldn’t make sense of the sight awaiting for them, crowned by a semi-circle of trees. Had the sun been shining it would have anointed the bits of feathers and flesh in liquid gold; as it was, they nearly blended into the shadows of the forest.

Ipomoea stepped forward slowly, and all the forest seemed to go silent at once. Only the leaves crunched underhoof, and somehow, he didn’t need to ask Corrdelia to know her bonded lay in pieces now before them.

Bile rose in his throat.




@corrdelia

flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on

---

She makes small talk, as they walk through the woods together, the trees guiding him. With each step his heart begins to tighten, with every whispering tree they pass he sees more and more shadows where before he had seen only sunlight. They feel like an omen; the forest feels like it is hiding a secret from him. So he is thankful for the distraction.

“My name is Ipomoea,” he tells her, trying to ignore the way his throat constricts around the words, choking him. “It is lovely to meet you, Corrdelia - I only wish it was under better circumstances.”

But the distraction is fleeting, because all too soon they reach the copse, and the secret he knew the trees to be hiding becomes all too clear.

He knows, in the same cold and terrible way by which the trees are pulling their roots away from the tainted soil around that corpse, that they are too late.

He knows the crow is dead. And he knows the hollow look in Corrdelia’s eyes as she looks upon the remains of her bonded. His own heart beats painfully slowly, like it, too, has forgotten how to beat with a piece of his soul missing, like the reopening of his own wound is draining the blood from his veins. He wonders, distantly, numbly, if the trees would pull their roots away from his blood, from his body, if he were to die in these woods. Perhaps a stone death was a mercy after all.

Ipomoea lingers near the trees as Corrdelia steps forward, one shoulder pressed against a birch to hide the way he trembles like a leaf caught in a storm. The pain is too familiar, too sharp and dreadful; the forest presses in around him, the trees are suddenly too close. He wants to run, to forget this forest and all the dark secrets it hides; and yet he stays frozen, as immobile as the trees, rooted to this spot and his memories.

His heart starts to race again; the tremble he tries to hide shivers down his spine.

And when a flower presses against his ankle in comfort, he crushes it beneath his heel.

“I’m sorry.”

His voice is as dry and paper-thin as the bark sloughing from the birch trees. He knows the words wouldn’t, couldn’t make a difference to her; how could they? There was nothing in the world to replace what had been stolen from her, this he also knows.

Bile rises again in the back of his throat, his stomach twisting itself around a knife of guilt. But with it, too, rises the anger that is now almost-familiar - how long, he wondered, how long would the forest bleed, how long would a murderer leave bodies like gruesome presents between the trees? It was starting to feel like he was allowing this to happen; by not catching the poachers, by always being one step behind them, Ipomoea was the reason the cycle continued.

Despite the blood, despite the smell of death and rot hanging thickly in the air and making his lip curl, he steps forward. Too-quick steps bring him to Corrdelia’s side, where he leans against her. Too long, too long, too late, his heart thumps out a mantra in his throat.

“Don’t look,” he says hoarsely, “it’s better to remember her as she was.” He doesn’t know if he believes himself, if he would listen to his own words if their places had been reversed. He still keeps the stone remainder of Odet on his desk; still looks at him every day when he rises. And yet a stone seemed less permanent, less real, than the mangled body they look upon now.

“I don’t know who did this,” his voice wavers, and the trees seem to shudder and whisper we know, we know, oh we know- “But I will find out. I will find them for you.”

And they will pay, for Hāsta, for all their sins, he doesn’t need to say.





@corrdelia
sorry for the wait!

flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on

---

Even while he is telling her to look away, he cannot manage to do so himself. He stares at what remains of the crow and tries - but fails - to not think of what remains of his own bonded. Eyes that will never open again. Wings that will never rise. A heart that will never beat.

Sometimes, he wishes that it had been his own heart that Raum had turned to stone. Perhaps it would have been easier that way, maybe then he would have been able to stalk the woods and hang a killer without asking all the terrible what if’s, without feeling like his chest might burst from all the aching and the wondering.

But Ipomoea has learned that monsters, no matter how terrible, could be killed just as easily as any others. And he has learned that waiting for others to kill them only makes the suffering worse.

So he looks at the crow, at its feathers and blood and bits of bone, and marks it down as one more tally against the monster’s soul.

“You can stay as long as he likes,” he tells her, pulling away. “I hope Dawn gives you more peace than pain.” The aching returns to his heart, as he faces the woods again. He can feel the trees trembling, can hear their branches trembling above them - winter was here, and it had brought war with it. His magic, his once-beautiful, blossoming magic, turns black and hard from it, thorns wrapped around it.

As with all things in life, disuse had turned his softness weak with disuse. And yet -

Before he leaves, Ipomoea has one last gift. He whispers to the dead and brown grasses, to the roots lingering in the frozen soil, to the seeds hibernating in the cold. His magic, the parts of it that have not yet grown thorns, reach out and brush the dust from their faces, and coaxes them to rise, to thrive, to live. They respond eagerly, and the snow begins to melt away as around Hāsta’s body, dozens of wildflowers begin to bloom.

“If you need me, you need only call and I will come,” he promises. And when he looks over his shoulder at her, he prays a silent prayer that she will not end up the same way as her bonded, as a nameless unicorn, as a thousand other bodies buried between the trees. But as he makes his way back through the forest, he knows it is his job now to make sure she doesn’t.

And so Ipomoea does not return to the capitol.

He hunts.





@corrdelia