a garden of endless flowers

he flowers are the first to tell him that she has come back.

He is in the garden with them when she does, wandering the rows of flowers and trying (and failing) not to turn east. The soil at his hooves rises gently like a wave, as roots slip through its loam and flowers unfurl themselves upon the peak of it. Around him he can feel the earth sighing — he can feel it welcoming him, pressing itself to his skin with a peace he should feel echoing in his bones.

But he is not sure he does.

There is something other in it, in the way the soil shifts like a restless thing, like a secret it is struggling to keep from him. There is something of a warning in the way the leaves of the rose bushes begin to curl like the soil they are rooted in is seeded with disease. There is a warning racing through his garden that he cannot place in words, but in a feeling that runs somewhere beneath his soul. Every time he tries to place it, to pull it out like a weed, it slips away.

Still, he searches for it. He searches between the rows, beneath the roots, in the secret places their leaves shelter, in the center of every perfect flower that unfurls at his touch. And the longer he looks, the longer he cannot find it —

the more convinced he becomes that it is not the soil, or the water, or the sunlight, or any speck of disease pressing in on the stems.

It is him.

And the whisper of the earth, when it comes to him, crashes against his ribs like an earthquake opening ravines in his heart. She is here, it says in dust that spatters against his side like rust, like blood that has dried. She is here. And he knows what they mean to say is, she is hurt. He knows it in the way the dust on his lips tastes like blood (like her blood, her violence, her love.)

The flowers are forgotten behind him when he follows the trail that races ahead of him like lions. He follows the sound of old death, of dead gods, of the lack-of-magic that makes his heart feel like a dying thing caught on the cusp of winter. His heart breaks a little more because of it.

He does not stop to see the way the threads of the drapes are still bright, and new, and hanging around her like doves. Or to look at the flowers and the vines that have not yet begun to wilt even when death sleeps so near to them. He does not pause to think of how quiet it is, or that something is both wrong and right in their room.

Ipomoea sees only her (it is always her) curled in the middle of their bed of silks that are freshly stained with blood. His sand-and-soil heart starts to roar, and snarl, and tremble in his chest with something that is as black and dangerous as it is soft. And his teeth feel like broken things when he presses them to the blood of her side and whispers, “Thana,” as if speaking to her soul instead of the heart just on the other side of her ribs.

His magic wants to snarl and tear the sand from all of the mortar of the bricks holding this castle together. But instead he begs it to bloom in layers of moss upon the windowsill, and to grow wildflowers, and herbs, and poppies overtop it. The bee balm unfurls the brightest, begging to become a salve.