Private a walk in the woods [patrol]

she was powerful not because she wasn't scared,
but because she went on strongly despite her fear.

He was altered now. All those delicate and yielding curves of his body were sharper now. Those features that had laughed and waltzed with Maerys' words once had since hardened. She had met Ipomoea when he was a Denocte commoner, not a Delumine sovereign, and the difference between the two felt starkly opposing at that very moment.

But it made sense.

In Delumine it was familiar to awake to a range of daffodils where each shoot was a classic golden horn amid a fanfare of nimbus corolla and still feel bile extending skyward in your larynx. All the citizens wanted to shield this court, to build walls around its border and keep all the wicked things out, but how could they deny travelers a tour of land's blooms, a living ocean of light? What if the darkness was already within the borders, amongst them? Then what?

Now the silver-haired dun could hardly lay her mauve sights on the wintry area without welling up. It was lovely, something she could not begin to replicate in a thousand lifetimes, but the world knows no sentiment it seems and that meant love for this land was a weakness just as much as it was a strength.

"Aye," she agreed quietly to Ipomoea's plan, her eyes never turning to his, but rather the leisurely evolving area around them. She remembered Emersyn's map well - all those crimson points and that one profane x.

Meadow filtered effortlessly into forest as Maerys followed the sovereign's lead into the shadows that recently had only known melancholy and tragedy. This forest, once so alive, now brought chills to her slender body. The trees that had sheltered so many with their spreading canopy of green and provided so much are now listless phantoms of their previous glory.

Vradara, who had been sitting quietly on Maerys back, unraveled her wings into the brisk air and jumped upwards, her appendages catching the breeze and ascending her skywards. The dragon clicked and screeched as she circled them from above, her keen eyes watching the area with an acute precision most flight creatures could only dream of. The gold and mauve mottled animal communicated with Maerys what she saw, which at the moment was not much, her view somewhat obscured by the leafy boughs of the dense Viride trees. Maerys hardly acknowledged Vradara or her actions (if at all) for Ipomoea would surely know what the divine creature was doing from the heavens.

"Hast aught new been revealed that couldst aid in our search now?"

She yearned he would respond yes, but inevitably if there had been any new revelations most would have known by now.

M A E R Y S

@Ipomoea

code created by kaons and modified by me

RE: a walk in the woods [patrol] - Ipomoea - 01-10-2020

flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on

If there’s any peace in the quiet the snow has created across the field, Ipomoea does not feel it. He misses the brightness of spring, the melody of birdsong drifting from the tree line, the whistle of wind as it weaves through the wheatgrass and the poppies. The white is blinding; the silence is deafening; and Ipomoea picks his way gingerly as if he’s afraid that at any moment the ice beneath his hooves will snap, and the cold will swallow him.

But he tries not to think of that, as the cold seeps into his hooves and snow clings to his fetlocks. Ipomoea tries to think only of the map Emersyn had drawn out for them, with its red dots and red x’s breaking up the green of the treetops. He memorized it upon the first time seeing it, and while the thought of adding more to it makes him sick -

- He knows there is no other choice, if they hope to resolve the mystery once and for all.

Perhaps Maerys had been right, perhaps there was more they could be doing. But if there was an easy answer, Ipomoea and his regime had yet to find it.

“No,” he tells her, and although his voice is little more than a whisper it seems impossibly loud beneath the quiet of the trees. Ipomoea casts his eyes towards the canopy, catching a glimpse of Maerys’ dragon through the interlocked branches.   Shrugging his shoulders, he continues. “The snow hasn’t helped - it covers any tracks we may find, and who knows what else may be buried beneath it.”

Although he wouldn’t admit to it, sometimes he wondered what the ground they were walking over during the patrols looked like. Was it bloody, covered in bits of feathers and flesh that had been hurriedly cleaned up? Were they following the tracks of a poacher without realizing it, stepping into his very hoof prints? The thought sent a shiver crawling down his spine, one that had nothing to do with the cold.

He looks sideways at her, as they trudge side by side through the snow. “We’ll find something soon. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow - but with all of us looking, they won’t be getting away so easily as they think.” And he tries not to let the word soon sound so final, like even considering the words will somehow create another pit filled with discarded parts and red, so much red.

@Maerys