Some mornings he wonders if he could raise the sun by himself.

He is thinking it now, as he rises in the dark and walks through the halls of the castle like another midnight shadow torn free from the rest. It feels like religion, like a new-god blinking itself awake in his marrow and chanting yes, yes, yes to every question he did not know how to ask. Like a promise written into his bones that he is only now learning the pattern to. And when he stops to look out the eastern window (always, he is looking east), it is only to wonder at the way he might hold the sun between his shoulders and rise with it.

Ipomoea knows he was made for the earth. Made for the sand and the soil and the things he might grow from them. But still — but still — there is a part of him that looks at the cold and dark horizon and thinks how much easier it might be to ferry the sun across the sky.

But he cannot look at the horizon without thinking of the desert. And he cannot think of the desert without mourning every piece of his shattered heart that he is leaving behind.

His heart breaks a little more, as he wanders the twisted roots of the castle that no longer feels like his. Now he is not sure it ever felt like his, not in the way it mattered — not in the way the desert has always felt both like and unlike his home. The ivy-and-wisteria-covered walls sigh as he walks past them, leaves and curling stems reaching out to brush against his sides like they, too, know if will be the last time they see their king of flowers.

And when they touch him leaf to skin, they whisper against him the story of a boy with flowers on his brow and wings at his heels, who had stood outside these very walls like destiny and thought himself like a tree, concerned only with sun, and wind, and water, and all the ways he might root and belong. And of a boy before him crowned with moonlight, who had learned to love the wild and left his flowers for the forest. They whisper to him of growth and becoming, of long springs and longer winters, of the wild that lives now like a seed caught between his teeth.

It feels now like he has always been that wind-caught seed, destined to never find that bit of soil to sprout in. He thinks maybe he has wandered too long, that he is doomed now to never grow into a home the way he had once wished (the way he sometimes still wishes, when he stands beneath his trees and tells himself this is enough, this should be enough, and feels more and more like it is a lie he has woven for himself. As if saying it over and over and over again can make it true.)

So now when he pulls himself from the vines tangling like chains around his legs it is with a sigh of his heart tearing itself in two.

As the horizon turns from almost-black to bruise-blue streaks of rose and gold, as the light falls on a court again-transformed into a festival, he turns at last to the fate he has been running from. He knows he is out of time when the bells begin to toll, and the morning court comes awake to witness a dawn like none before it. Blackened roses lift their heads to watch him go, and desert poppies unwind themselves like smiles raised to the dawn. He hopes he sounds still like the forest, when the doors open before him and the too-familiar paths lead him to the heart of it.

It is there in the garden (his garden, the part of the castle that will always feel like his) that Danaë waits for him. He finds her there in the bruised light, framed in almost-darkness and flowers. “Danaë,” his voice is just another sigh of the garden when he goes to her, nothing beneath the layers of music rising in the courtyard behind him.

For a moment, when there is a lull in the songs and the wind, he thinks he can hear the heartbeat of the earth running beneath their’s. He wants to sink into it, to root and grow and twist his legs into branches that stretch over the garden. He wants to be like Ellery, singing himself into a tree. For a moment he wants to stay, to run through the garden and tell every flower and leaf and vine and root to wrap itself around his heart and never again let him go. He wants — oh he wants a thousand things, but he knows he sounds more like the desert now than the flowers.

And he knows his daughter’s story will begin and end here, in a way his never can.

“I am glad —“ his lungs feel like flowers trembling in the desert sun, and when he breathes and breathes there is not enough wind to fill them. “There is no one better to be the next queen of the morning.”

Behind them the music starts again, and each note is like a hourglass counting away his seconds. So he breathes against her brow once, only once, his lips brushing the bloody spiral of his horn before he turns to face the dawn rising like a new promise over them.

“They are waiting.” He does not ask her if he is ready. He already knows he is not.

There are memories that he might not have remembered were they were not printed into his bones like scars. He can feel them aching there like places for the magic to gather in, to bleed out from the gaps like sap from the wound in a tree. Ipomoea wonders now if they were where his magic came from all along: from the broken pieces of himself he is still trying so hard to put back together. If with each break, with each fractured part of his soul that he tears into wider and wider cracks each time he has to choose between the forest and the desert. If by doing so he is swinging open the gate holding his magic at bay and allowing more and more of it to bleed into him.

Had he been born anywhere else, had he found a home instead of looking for forever in temporary places, would he have ever found the depths of his magic like he is now?

Because now, oh now there is magic enough to create the world anew that lives in his blood like gold, running in rivulets of sand and petals down his cheeks instead of tears. It burns more than it should, cuts lines into his face for more magic to pool in. And if there is an end to it, if there is a bottom to all this wanting, and aching, and desperation Ipomoea knows he will only find it when his body becomes sand and roots burrowed in it.

He wishes he could be made of the softness of a rose and not the thorns of it. He wishes he could tame the wildness of the earth into something that is content to be only a garden and not the thing a garden seeks to hide. But if he could take back the violence of it and leave only the beauty, he thinks he would not know how to recognize it.

So he smiles where he feels only sorrow, and swallows down the wild parts of his magic that do not know how to be satisfied. “The morning will be whatever you wish for it to be.”

Behind them the garden is still weeping pollen, and before them the music is still dragging them forward as if to make up for the lost way they move towards it. And flowers are still blooming around each step that he begs to press against her ankles instead of his. He hopes she can find an end to her sorrow, that she will fill the places it leaves behind with something other than magic and hunger.

“All you have to do—“ he weaves black and bloody poppies around her horn like an anointing as they walk, presses his lips to the hollow above her eye like it is the promise of the world that he is giving her and not a goodbye, “—is ask. So tell me your dream Danaë, and then you and Isolt will grow it into something beautiful and strong. She will listen to you.” He thinks it a good thing, that they were born two halves of one whole; that one daughter would not destroy this part of the world if only because the other asked her not to.

It should feel wrong, to feel like he is not-himself anymore. It should feel wrong, that he cannot hear the forest whispering for him to stay, or the flowers calling him back when they leave the garden, or the headless wheat sound of his daughter’s steps. He cannot hear any of it over the sound of his own blood telling him to go, go, go. As every bit of sand in his blood turns to a sea of gold that is crashing against his ribs, calling him —

he knows it is not home that he is turning to, each time he lifts his eyes to the sun trembling below the horizon (if there was a home for him in this world, it was wherever there was sand and soil for him to grow a garden upon.) But he thinks it is close to one; he thinks an ocean of sand might be enough to press into his scars and pretend they were healing him instead of burning. And he thinks it is better to give a home to his daughters to root and bloom in, than to let them grow into something like him.

The music and the crowd are waiting, as each step brings them closer to the inevitable that he only now feels brave enough to face. But when he turns to the lost look of his daughter’s eyes he thinks that this, this is the one thing that could make him want to stay when all the rest of the world is calling.

“I promise it will not be a goodbye. There are too many pieces I am leaving behind to not come back. I will — if you need me to, I will.” Even if he does not want to — even if he does not know how to pull himself back from the sands and the violence of it — still he will. For Danaë, for Isolt, for the garden that welcomes him back each time even when it should not. He does not tell her that he asked Rhoeas to stay, but that, too, is another thing that will call him back again and again the way the desert calls to him now. Like a god returning to the eden of his creation, he would come back.

They make it to the gates, around each twist and curl of iron black roses and ivy is woven. It seems a strange thing, to think that fate lies on the other side of it; for her, a kingdom, and for him, another broken thing to put back together. And when he should feel sorrow at the sight of it, he hears only the fury of the sand and his magic begging to be let out.

On the other side, the sun is ready to rise.