so lay me down in golden dandelions 

At first, it felt a bit like falling.

He was sleeping in that great grass sea when the mist first began to fall, dew drops settling like a thousand frozen tears upon his skin. The grass flutters their blades nervously all around him as the island shudders, lacing their fingers together in a veil hiding him from the eye of the moon looking down upon them. As the mist draws closer and Ipomoea slumbers on, the grasses begin to tremble and whisper to one another.

They already know what comes next.

When the darkness comes it swallows the island whole, consuming the grass forest protecting him. And as the shadows fall hungrily against his body he jerks awake, and for a moment he forgets how he had run for so many yesterdays through an island made of magic, and how that island shed its skin like the snake it wished to be. He struggles to his feet, reaching for the grass and the flowers that had cradled him only moments before - and finds nothing. Nothing to stand upon, nothing to grow roots into, nothing to stop him from floating away into the encroaching darkness.

The magic in him snarls; and he thinks he can hear the magic of the island snarling back.

But when the first spark of light appears before him, shining like salvation in the nothingness - he can begin to also forget the way he wanted to tear a whole through the magic. His heart slows its frantic beating, and in the spaces it leaves he feels only wonder. The star drifts closer to him,  winking and blinking like it’s struggling to contain all the secrets wished upon it while it fell. And Ipomoea steps forward to meet it.

A thousand colors shine from the heart of the star, fracturing into a hundred thousand strands of gossamer silk spiraling from its center. The colors flicker; fading and swelling, humming with energy, captivating him. And as the star glides to a stop before him, purring in the same almost-soft tones of a feral cat, he reaches out. The surface of the star is soft and warm, like gold upon flesh, as he lays his muzzle against it. But at its touch it begins to simmer, sparks tearing free from it and spiraling away into the nothingness surrounding them, heat pouring off of it in waves. His eyes begin to water.

And then the colors begin to flare, like a miniature sun exploding. The air around him burns, drops of color sloughing off and falling like tears to where the grass had been. Each one sizzles when it hits the almost-smooth glass beneath his hooves, and there it runs like the most brilliant blood he had ever seen.

As the rest of the nothingness begins to burn with a thousand more stars, fashioning themselves into constellations of flowers and leaves and lightning arcing over his head, Ipomoea begins to walk. And when another star explodes into tears, he wonders if the island is crying all the tears he’s forgotten how to shed.

His magic begins to weep with it.



@lyr
”here am I!”

so lay me down in golden dandelions 

It seems to him that there is a message in the pulsing, flickering lights of the stars - a message wrought without words, without language, with only instinct. His own heart aches alongside it, a steady pang that beats in time with the explosions.

He thinks he should know, looking into those flickering colors, that if this were the end, he should look away.

But he only presses in closer, and deeper, and cradles the star against his chest as it weeps for the world and sheds every last dream that has ever been wished upon it. He counts them as they flake off, bits of star dust that catch fire and burn themselves to nothingness. He wonders if this is what it looks like for a wish to come true - but he knows it is only dying. The stars, the wishes, the island, all of it is dying, and his heart is aching alongside it. Somewhere his magic is curling in upon itself (there are no roots or seeds for it to cradle here, no flowers to coax open or grass to braid into crowns.) But when he lets the star float away into all the nothingness around them, he is not thinking about forests and meadows.

“There’s always a way out,” he says, but his voice suggests he does not wish to leave even if the island were to collapse in around them then and there. Ipomoea has run from the island as it sank once before - and all the while, he had wondered what would have happened had he stayed. He had wondered of a world under the sea, where saltwater filled his lungs instead of air and barnacles grew upon his brow instead of flowers. Ipomoea has wondered at a thousand different lives - but wondering alone has never changed the life he lives.

If the the island were to sink again here and now —

He thinks he might sink with it.

If only to see. If only to know what other lives he could live if not this one.

“Would you like to stay a while?”

He turns to the other stallion then and smiles (although it feels like a hollow smile, like it is not Ipomoea smiling, but someone else). He doesn’t see that their eyes are the same color, and he doesn’t think that it kindles a sort of kinship in his heart — perhaps he would have, if the darkness of the island did not cast them both in shadows that were only black and grey like the apocalypse. Or perhaps he would have seen the cold, detached look in Lyr’s eyes and known the apocalypse did not live here on the island, but in a person’s soul.



@lyr
”here am I!”

so lay me down in golden dandelions 

Maybe later, after he falls asleep in a bed of wildflowers and weeds and tangled prairie grasses, he’ll think back on today and wonder about the red-eyed ghost he met in between the stars. Maybe then he’ll think there was something familiar about those eyes, or something unsettling about that first, pointed question.

Maybe later he’ll feel it as it was perhaps meant to be felt: a knife, slipping smoothly between his ribs to his aching, falling-apart heart.

But for now, he is watching only the stars, feeling each explosion and transformation echoing between his lungs. And even when he stops to think what a strange question, there is none of it in his eyes when he turns to regard the other stallion quietly. Red eyes. White coat. He does not smile — and somehow, somehow that feels significant to him.

“And I am Ipomoea,” his voice is hushed, nearly lost beneath the sounds the stars make in their dying and rebirthing. And yet when they suddenly grow quiet (in between bursts), his voice seems to echo through all that blackness, all that silence, all that empty space like the ending note of a song. “But it would seem you already know that.” And he wonders that maybe he is that final dying chord, fading into the shadows.



A pause — a heartbeat — a breath.

“What good is a king, if he does not love his kingdom?” He does not say he thinks it will be the death of him, one day. Around them the stars are a burst of color and he, for perhaps the first time in his life, thinks he must look like so many shades of gray beside them.

“Why—“ there are as many questions in him as there are stars surrounding them, pressing in against them, light against flesh, searing. There is starlight in his eyes and stardust on his teeth, and oh it starts to taste a bit like blood when he swallows.

“—do you ask?”



@lyr
”here am I!”

so lay me down in golden dandelions 

There is suffering on this island. The sounds each star makes as it shatters echoes inside of his chest until his heart aches, until the magic is bleeding and bleeding and bleeding out from him --

and there is nothing for it to bleed out onto.

There is only the spaces between dying stars, between one heartbeat and nothing, and oh, it burns inside of him. It burns at the corners of his eyes and spiderwebs like lightning across the backs of his eyes, it makes the blood in his veins turbulent and froth like the sea at high tide. He can feel the agony of it, of all those dying stars, but more than that -- Ipomoea can feel each wish crumbling to ash and dust on his tongue.

He turns to it. He turns to the agony, and the suffering, and for each star that dies he draws another line across his heart and whispers the words a unicorn had taught him all those years ago beside a silver lake: that is enough. Ipomoea is no unicorn made for tearing worlds apart and carving ravines to catch the runoff and tears and blood but oh, oh --

oh! He is made to grow gardens, to pluck the weeds and let the flowers stand tall and bright. And he has learned how to be brave, and sharp, and how to cut his teeth against diamonds so that others might never learn how it feels to bite down on bones. So he is not thinking of this red-eyed stranger when he leaves him there, or when he catches dreams between his teeth and tucks them close to his heart (because the gods had never done so, but he will, he will, he will.) He is only thinking of all the ones he was not able to save.


@lyr
”here am I!”