Tonight, like most nights, sleep does not come easy for him. His dreams are full of wild things, of full moons and rivers that burn brighter than the sun, of songs that sound more like screams echoing in the dark, hollow spaces between his lungs. And above it all, a question —

Something was calling for him.

He has heard it before — in the forest, while tending his gardens, while watching his daughters learning to run on legs that grew inches at a time, years passing in days. Sometimes he thought it was always calling for him, like a lamb at his turn for the slaughter, a sacrifice about to be made. Three times he has died, or almost-died (or was it almost-lived?) and now — now, perhaps, it had come knocking.

He can feel the rattle of it in his lungs, each time he breathes too deeply. And he can feel the heaviness of it pressing in around his heart, closer and closer with every beat.

But it his death was drawing near, it was only to whisper to him not yet.. He knew of course, from watching Thana — you did not always feel it coming. There were some lambs that would forever be surprised to see their own blood running away from them in little rivers, or old men who expected to see just one more sunrise.

And if it was death knocking on the door, he should not rise so easily, so readily, to answer it.

But he does. He rises when he hears the call of it, with notes that ring in every root-filled chamber of his heart instead of in his ears, a language of which he would recognize long after it fades away. It makes him feel something like a wolf, rising to answer the call of his pack beneath a full moon. Rhoeas scrapes the tines of his antlers down the corner of the castle, and in the sound of bone against stone there is that question again: the question a monster asks its creator when the noose around its neck slips.

He shivers, and begins to run. Ipomoea runs, and he runs, and he runs and he is chasing after something more immortal than the hunt of wolves. He is hunting memories and monsters; he is finding the answer to questions that have not been finished. And when the grass brushes his ankles and he grows thorns from every wildflower, the forest knows better than to try to stop him.

Soon it is the desert spreading out before him, pale as bone in the moonlight. Bits of desert weed and sandstone crumble beneath his hooves and there is a part of him, a distant part of him, that begins to cringe the moment he feels the heat of the sleeping Mors.

But it is the immortal rest of him that smiles as he walks onward, through the sand that shifts restlessly while he looks at the shadows they create like they are maps instead of darkness closing in. And he does not take his eyes off that place on the horizon that turns lighter and lighter with every step he takes, bruise-blue fading to gold. He does not stop chasing.

Yet when a shadow flashes on the sand that is not caused by the dunes rearing up above him like a mouth, he can’t help but turn to it. Only Rhoeas runs on, as every bit of moss and flower begins to dry along his ribs and flake off like scales. Ipomoea does not know which instinct it is that has him turning to the mare instead of following that immortal call that runs free beneath his bonded’s shadow.

Maybe it is because he recognizes the ghost living in her as the same one that lives in him.

Sometimes he feels more a ghost than a man. When he looks at another ghost haunting the desert with a look that tells him he does not belong, and all the memories of the sand come flooding back in to choke him beneath the weight of it all. Sometimes Ipomoea wants to peel back his skin and ask the world if it can see that he is more sand than blood now, if it can understand the way he has never left the desert and how it has never left him. He thinks maybe he has always had more sand in him than he thought — that he is only now learning how deep the feral earth runs in him.

Sometimes, it makes him angry.

He wants to ask her it she remembersrare embers how they fought a war together, if she knows that he was born here in these very sands. He wants to tell her that he can finally hear the dunes singing for him now in a way he never knew he needed to hear but oh, he did.

But Ipomoea cannot, will not, be so cruel.

The war is still in his veins, in his bones, in his skin, lingering like a disease he is not sure how to be rid of. And the desert is still singing him a song, welcoming him home, home, home. He can hear each note of it in his souls in the rush of his blood that is sounding more and more each day like an earth quake when it echoes against his bones (and they feel so very hollow in the wake of it.) The marrow of him is aching with the melody and it feels - 'a little like day and sweat has dried on his skin, as if he is nothing more than the bitter earth seeding his sorrows into the sand in place of flowers.

Somewhere, deep down, he knows his soul is singing back to it. It should make him feel happy. Somewhere the slat-ribled ribbed orphan of him that grew up in the desert is smiling and kissing the sandsaid and whispering over and over again like 0a prayer: thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Ipomoea is not sure when he started feeling less like a man trying to find his way home and more like a god of this bitter earth. But he feels it now, in the way the sand rises at his sides and sighs (and sings, and sings, and sings.) He can feel it in the way it trembles beneath his hooves and leads him ever deeper into the desert. Sometimes he thinks that between him and his magic he's the real teryr who belongs to the all of this violence.

It seems strange now to have ever been so sure the desert had not wanted him all those years ago, that he had been made ever been weak enough to have been left for dead. When he pauses and lifts his head to look in the direction of the capitol, hidden by the sands but which he knows to be towering above it, the thing that blossoms below his magic feels primordial. It feels like the earth is inside of him, a world of blooming and rotting plants growing from the unforgiving sand of his bones.

But Ipomoea does not tell her any of this. Ipomoea does not tell her that he’s going to save this desert (and her, and all of them), or that he can already feel the rust of all the blood he has and will swallowed coating his throat. Instead he steps closer, and a gazelle fawn raises itself from the sands and brushes against her shoulder. It walks between them for a moment, nose lifted to the wind like a thing coming home, before it slips back into the golden dust beneath their hooves.

And when he asks her, “why then, does it feel like I am home?”, that too feels as right between them as all the sand turned silver in the moonlight.

Ipomoea looks up at the golden claw marks cleaving the darkness of Seraphina’s face (and those two have been turned silver in the night, like wishes instead of scars, starlight instead of the sun.) And in his eyes there is a little bit of gratefulness, a little bit of the softness he thinks he has all but carved away, a little bit of a thank you for the company whispered not in words, but in their blood.

He knows better to ask her if she has been well — have any of them been well? — it’s there in her eyes. That haunted look that mirrors his own. The memories, the hurts, the aches and hungers they do not know how to let go even knowing they cannot move forward until they do. So instead he lets the silence between them drag out, broken up only by the whispering of the sand beneath their hooves and the song of it that only he can hear. And he tries to keep the earthquake out of his gaze when he turns back to Seraphina with her haunted eyes.

“It’s a little late for a stroll out in the desert.” The space between his teeth feels hungry when he says it like he knows this thing between them is a hunt only pretending to be a walk, and it makes his magic coil in his chest, and more sand-creatures shiver to life.