The desert was calling.

He can hear it even here in the forest, where the branches muffle the sounds of the sand shifting in the distance and spring blooms in every shade of green. And between the petals of every wild flower that rises up on trembling stalks, he sees the grains of sand shining golden and bright. When he closes his eyes he can still see it, lying like an ever-tightening noose around his soul.

Even here in his burgeoning garden the desert has followed him. Even here with his magic growing roots like anchors, he cannot escape the desert forever. His heart may be a garden now but the desert was in his blood — it would always be in his blood.

For hours he stands there in a clearing listening to it. His flowers wrap themselves about his ankles in braids of color. Stay, they beg in tomes of pollen and paper-soft touches, do not leave us. But they are not enough, not today, not with every chamber of his heart filling with sand and magic like an hourglass running out of space. Not when the song that moves in blood instead of words only grows, and grows, and grows, it grows a dozen mouths and each of them set to gnawing at the forest of his ribs.

He does not remembering leaving them there, petals folding in upon themselves and crumbling without him beneath the weight of all that golden sand. Ipomoea only remembers looking up, and up, and up at the walls of the canyon opening like jaws reaching for the throat of the sky. And he remembers pressing his nose down to the trail of whispers racing along ahead of him like sacred daturas unfurling for him.

Golden poppies and carmine paintbrushes bloom against his skin when he leans his shoulder into the red sandstone walls. And they tell him the truth of it: the king that disappeared into the night, the golden sovereign who loved the sea too much to forget it. And oh, oh —

oh! How his magic rages because of it!

How it turns into a feral thing and grows thorns, and nettles, and teeth that it rakes through the bloody dust of the canyon. If he stopped then to look back at the desert flowers he would see the way they cowered before him now, the way the spaces between them were being filled with weeds and cactus.

But it is another magic that is echoing in his bones like a war-cry when the dust at his hooves begins to tremble. And every drop of that magic, every terrible mile of it blooming in cactus spines down his neck, all of it echoes that call of the desert. It's all tumbleweeds and chalcedony, the echoes of old death and agony and wounds re-opened. In it he can feel something in his heart breaking, and something deeper, something harder, rising up to fill the cracks of it. The sand filling up his heart makes him want to roar, and snarl, and lay his teeth against all of that death and pain until it submits.

He does not want to recognize this part of himself but oh, he does. It is the part of him that never left the desert, that never had a chance to grow soft.

And he wonders now if Orestes had ever known this anger, this feeling of being so close to death; he wonders it it would have been enough to make him stay and break the cycle of kings and queens who were not enough.

He wonders if this is why the desert has called for him.

Maybe there was a time, once long ago when he had stood in a forest raining in golden colors and thought only of the warmth of it against his skin, when he did not intimately know the way sand burns in the sunlight. If there was he has forgotten it now, forgotten it as though he had always been a desert-creature raised between these sandstone walls. Now he feels only a grim understanding blossoming in his soul at the whispering of the sand against his skin. He can feel the petals of it tapping against his heart like the wings of a teryr learning how to fly for the first time.

There is something terrible in the feeling of it, in the way it buries down into each of the cracks of his soul.

The sand is still whispering to him when the stranger appears at the end of the canyon (and at first he thinks it only the flowers, only the petals, only the life). And the whispering grows louder, and louder, and louder still instead of fading away into the dust.

The magic is growing teeth like cactus spines and setting them against his throat. When he swallows he can feel them scraping all the way down, can taste the blood and the dust and the rust of it. And he does not smile as the stranger approaches, does not pull away from the sandstone wall that is running now like blood down his shoulder. He only watches the man come closer, and closer, and something in his eyes is begging him to continue walking, to leave him where he stands, to save himself because Ipomoea feels less and less every day like the savior he had once wanted to be —

he doesn’t.

His voices is gentle, and softly wondering, and Ipomoea’s teeth ache because he wants to snarl, and rage, and roar like a lion into the desert (like the lion that had chosen Orestes, Orestes, the man borne of the sea, the man who returned to the sea and left a city broken behind him.) He wants to bare his teeth to the sun and scream at it in a way he has never screamed before — the way he might have, had he stayed in the desert where he was born.

He wants to carve the light from the sun and ask each golden shard of it am I enough now? do you regret it now?

But the sun would not care. And he knows, oh he knows he would not find his retribution in its ichor. He knows in the way that all things born from the desert know that he was owed nothing, deserved nothing, would be given nothing.

He would have to take it, if he wanted it. And he wants it — but he is not sure he wants to want it.

“Your king is missing,” his voice trembles like the last leaf clinging to a birch tree in a storm, “and you wonder if everything is alright?"

Your king, he had said. Not our king. Orestes had never been a king to him, not even when he had pulled the flowers from his mane and pretended to be a citizen wandering the gutted streets of a capitol torn apart by a tyrant and his monster. And he wonders if he will ever start to feel soft again, if he will every smile, really smile, again. He wonders if he will ever look at a stranger of this Court and feel more than distrust rising like an ocean in his chest.

He hopes he will. For the sake of the stranger caught in his wrath.