The flowers were calling him.

It has been so very long since he last heard their voices. But with winter nipping at his heels, it feels like only yesterday.

It feels like it was only yesterday that he was returning home with a desert wind at his back and sand filling the chambers of his heart. He had learned something about himself, there in the desert; and he had learned something about what bravery meant, and honor, and the difference between right and wrong, and all the things they were supposed to teach you as a kid.

He wonders now how different things might have been, if he had had parents to tell him so. He wonders if the flowers and the forest might not have gone silent, when he first invited not one monster, but several, all the ones that lived inside of him and surrounded him, all the ones he had invited to make their homes inside of him. They haunt him still, when he looks back and thinks of all the monsters he had not recognized, and the perilous what if’s come creeping in to sow doubt. Questions that make him forget he learned how to be brave once, shooting arrows at a willow tree and pretending it was a basilisk.

And yet, none of that seems to matter anymore when the flowers call to him. All that matters is the way they turn their faces to him and smile, and whisper against his skin we have a secret. Follow us.

They do not have to beg. Ipomoea will not make the same mistake twice (at least, he will not make the same mistake *so close on the heels of the first.)

He follows them when they lead him out of his Court, and only once does he look back and remember kings are not supposed to run or leave behind their festivals. But the thought is short-lived, and before he knows it he is running, running along the river, running through fields of white-and-yellow dandelions that laugh and twirl through the air alongside him. He is running without knowing where he is running to, or why - and while he knows that alone should be reason to pause, he runs all the faster because of it as the grass turns to soil and the night is covered by aspen leaves dancing overhead. And for the first time in over a year, he is chasing only the flowers, and joy, and perhaps a little bit of the hope still clinging to his heart. He doesn’t stop to wonder at the trail of light-flowers that lead into the forest; the earth had never lied to him.

It is only when the trees suddenly part that the flowers stop whispering for him to come forward, and begin giggling amongst themselves. He stands there, breathing heavily in the silver moonlight, and asks them, what’s the secret?

And they say, look.

He looks, and through the trees he sees a meadow filled with light.

He looks closer and sees the lights are only flowers hanging like leaves from the tree sitting at the meadow’s center, glowing gold and silver like a beacon calling the lost forward. When he steps forward among the roots more flowers blossom around his hooves like miniature stars coming to life in the night.

But it is not only the tree calling him forward, but the figure sitting in the roots surrounding it.

"Half my life I've spent in Viride, and still it manages to surprise me," he says quietly, and feels the air shiver like something alive around them. Maybe it is — maybe it’s the magic lingering in the air. Or maybe he’s found that other world at last, and stepped through the veil separating the ghosts from the living.

"Do you know what this place is?"