I P O M O E A

—

t was tradition to leave out one item on the first night of spring, and hope for the morning sun to bless them as it rose.

All day Ipomoea has seen the offerings of his people laid out in shrines around his city. And all day he has watched as the shrines grew larger, and more decorated, and more diverse — but more than that, he had watched the people who came to leave them. The girl who brought a blank diary, and asked to fill it with happier stories than the one from the year before. The young soldier who had brought his father’s blade and begged to be as honorable with it as his sire. The old sculpture who had left his tools and prayed for inspiration.

And looking at each of them had felt as though he was searching for bits of shadows gathering between the cracks of a broken mirror. And he feels like he wants to learn how to bury himself in all those dark places, to fit himself into all their rifts and crevices like a bit of scar tissue holding them together.

Before he leaves for the meadows he places the statue of a steller’s jay with wings spread in mid flight atop a stack of parchment. And he does not look back.

~~~

Ipomoea joins the dancers in the meadow, and presses his shoulder against their’s as they circle the bonfires. Tonight he moves not like a king, but like another fallen star from the black sky that is burning, burning, and burning with all that it has left because it knows tonight is all it has left. Tonight he moves like there is not a war beating inside of his chest but a flame that is being rekindled. And when the firelight flickers against his coat and turns it red, and blue, and golden — it feels like he is being reborn.

It feels like freedom, to both lose and find himself in them.

He is looking for the fire with the the silver-eyed watchers before he knows he is. But when he sees them, the flames that reach out like he has only been but a bit of kindling for them to consume, he almost trembles. He wants to feel the heat of the flames against his skin as a reminder that winter does not last forever, wants it to melt away the last of the frost that he could never seem to scrape from his heart.

So he lets himself be pushed closer and closer by the crowd, and lets the shed star’s silver eyes call him forward like a promise. But before he can reach the tent —

He turns to the man who steps forward to intercept him, and Ipomoea cannot help but look at the slash of black dividing his face and wonder what the mark might mean to the diviners. If it was a scar or a stain, a symbol of bravery or the sign of a higher purpose. Perhaps it means nothing at all, perhaps it should mean nothing at all — if it were not for that look in his eyes.

It is the look of a man who is searching.

“They say if you speak a wish out loud, it will never come true.” There is only the smoke from the bonfires separating them when he steps closer. And still he watches the way the light of them casts their faces into planes of light and shadow, the way every edge is sharpened and every hollow above their eyes deepened.

He can taste the ash between his teeth when he follows Pravda’s gesture with his eyes. “Do you believe it?”

§

a garden of endless flowers
@pravda

I P O M O E A

—

pomoea has always known there were secrets to be found in fire. In the flames, and the smoke, and the scent of incense burning, in herbs tied with wishing string, in the shed star’s silver eyes as they look up, up, up and tell them what the patterns the smoke makes between the stars means.

He knows it, because he has felt them. Those same secrets that live in the earth that trembles beneath his hooves, in the flowers that turn to smile at him with pollen faces when he passes. The whispers that come to him at night when he is restless and cannot sleep, of a sleepless unknown that is calling, always calling, in the spaces between his heartbeats.

And Ipomoea is thinking of those secrets in the night-blackness now, of darkness, of shadows thick and consuming. He is thinking of rituals and magic and the sound the earth makes when it thinks no one is left to listen to it crying out.

But he is listening. And he is thinking, always now, of how easy it would be to change the world into a thing where secrets walk in the daylight like mortals walk through a garden.

He likes to imagine the sound of the earth is there in his voice when he answers, petals instead of blades, curls of smoke instead of the bite of the fires flames. “You must not believe in magic then, either,” or dreams, or prayers, or miracles he does not say. But still he wonders if Pravda has ever stopped to listen to the earth and only the earth — if he has ever found secrets buried in the gentle unfurling of a morning glory.

He wonders if he has ever felt that sort of surprise, that awe, in his studies.

Ipomoea tilts his head, pulls a scattering of rose petals from his crown, and tosses them into the flames before he turns to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with Pravda. He can hear the demand in the other man’s voice, although he does not say so, and he knows that tonight he’s supposed to be a king (not a ghost looking for the memories of his past life in the flames.) So he lets the smell of the roses turning to ash remind him. He lets the smoke wash over his skin and cling to him like a promise, like he has only ever been a king who loves his Court and not an orphan who is always running, always searching.

He walks between the fires and is not looking into them. He is only looking at the faces of his people illuminated by the flames, searching for the secrets they hold in the corners of their eyes that only the firelight can reveal.

“To show you would take more than one night, and to tell you would take more words than I know.” Ipomoea wants to ask him how the grass feels beneath his hooves, how the smoke tastes between his teeth, if it makes his skin shiver like branches at the end of autumn. Instead all he does is smile with his teeth flashing like bone white flowers opening in the night and say, “if you stay long enough, perhaps I can teach you.”

He almost does not recognize the curl of hope stretching out its wings in his lungs like a butterfly crawling free. It surprises him then to feel it, to hope that Pravda will stay.

And it is that hope that makes him bump one shoulder to the paint’s like a friend welcoming him home, and ask him him, “Where did you come from?”

§

be a garden of endless flowers
@pravda