Some days, Ipomoea wishes he could be as flexible, or as beautiful, or as dangerous as the island.
Some days he wishes that he were so full of magic that it bled into everything he did, dictated every word he spoke, changed the very tune his blood made whenever his heart sped up. Or what it might feel like to create a new world, to paint the hills over and breathe the meadows to life like a god To be able to become someone, something new whenever he wanted, to transform himself any time the novelty begins to wear off, and to not feel regret for any unfinished lives he may leave behind, or to wonder at the things that could have been, should have been, had he stayed.
All he ever thinks about now is how different things might have been, if he was someone else.
But then, he doesn’t think the flowers would still love him if he was always leaving them for another. Or that they would still cling to his heels if he was always imagining new flowers, flowers that were brighter or taller or more fragrant than the last, flowers that made him forget about all the other flowers he might have loved before. He wouldn’t blame them - but a part of him still wondered what it would feel like to pull their petals apart like he was searching for their secrets in the pollen.
Since the first time visiting the island he had wondered what it might be like to create a flower from scratch, one the world had never seen before. And as he stares up at a flower whose outstretched petals span wider than his body, he wonders at what kind of god or magic or florist could have designed it. And he remembers the crystal tulips of Eluetheria, and the floating orchids of Viride, and all the strange and wonderful flowers he had seen on the first island, and for a moment he wants to try -
When he leans in he expects the flower to reach for him the same way he reaches for it.
But it leans away. And then its petals begin to tremble, and one tender leaf on its stalk begins to wilt and fold in upon itself.
Before Ipomoea can think to step away the entire plant begins to shake, and specks of rot eat hungrily at its skin. And then it’s too late, and he can only watch as the flower begins to collapse in upon itself, and he swears he can hear it starting to sob when faced with death.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
For the first time, the very first time, there is life blooming up in her wake like vernal pools in spring. There are root knots tangled about her horn like chains. Every inch of her seems like a bit of sod on a battle-field, red with blood, and death, and corpses enough to feed a jungle. The crease of her spine in heavy with pollen. Strange birds, half-bone and half-feather, can be seen spreading the ichor of this island garden from wealth of her back. And Thana, brutal and viscous Thana, walks among the horse-tall grass and the moon-flowers, like the beast she has always been.
She hunts like she has been made for this world and the mountains floating above her head are nothing more than stone-faced gods come to pay homage to the monster of their wombs. And if the violet waterfalls roaring in the distance as they crash into the sea are violent, is it any wonder that each tear drop of them are same color as her eyes?
A part of her, that aching part, that love-sick part, is following a trail of moss through the kaleidoscope weeds. It turns to seed as she passes-- black to green, decay to hope. The shadow of a tree stretches long and low around her, like a moon swallowing up the brightness of the sun. It cools the out-of-season sweat from her skin and makes her long for oak, and birch, and golden saplings kissing the line between life and death. And yet, when she spots Ipomoea and the dying flower, Thana forgets that any part of her was aching at all.
It's as easy as it always is, to close the distance between them with the same killing gait she's always moved with. When she touches her nose to his cheek it feels like breathing in death again, like coming home, like submerging herself into the blinding god-water and surfacing only to see something that cannot belong to her. She's almost surprised to pull away to see only pollen dusting the pattern of her touch on his skin instead of claws (and blood, and every grotesque part of her hunger).
Thana wonders if it tastes like gold, or moonlight, or sea-salt. She wonders what it would make of her, to taste the places between them like a wolf tastes the air for the copper sting of blood.
She wonders if she would ever want to hold anything else between her tongue and teeth.
But she doesn't wonder what it makes of her to watch the flower die and think only of Ipomoea and the specks of black dusting his form. And it's the reason she only sees only the kiss of pollen glittering on his cheek while the flower rots.
Thana does not save it even though she could. Perhaps that is the only thing he will ever need to know about her.
Somewhere in the distance, a river falls to the sea violent, and violet, and it sounds like a snarling beast laying teeth against the jugular of a lamb.
Here on the island, where all the colors bleed into each other and are at once terribly bright and wonderful and so, so wrong - he feels like something more.
More than just a horse, or a man, or a king with now-rotting flowers strewn through his hair. He is a part of the colors here, a part of the magic bubbling from the violet rivers. And as he listens to the sound of the waterfalls crashing violently all around them, and as the beating of his heart settles in a rhythm to match, he starts to think that maybe he has found another home. That maybe he has found a place for the part of him that was held together by threads of magic and flower roots to feel like the wild thing he had never allowed himself to become.
The flower keeps on dying, and a part of Ipomoea is dying alongside it.
But he doesn’t feel the revulsion that he expects to feel. Maybe it only feels like magic, or like a new beginning knowing the seeds falling like rain would take root again. Or maybe all of his disturbance had already been consumed by the desert, scrubbed clean by the sand like it was trying to remake him into the thing he should have been from birth, the thing he fears becoming the most.
There’s a warning sound in the back of his mind, a nerve twinging in his neck as he leans in closer, like he ought to know better than to look for death’s secrets in the petals of a lily. Was it a sign then, that he ignored it just to know what a rotting flower smelled like? When they had only ever thrived at his touch, could he be blamed for his curiosity? He didn’t want to know the answer.
Ipomoea doesn’t have to look up to know it’s her. He knows the sound of her, the two-quick steps that always sound like she’s looking for something, like she can’t wait to catch up to it. Today he let himself believe the urgency of her search was reserved only for him.
He breathes in and the wind tastes like waiting, and longing, and a thousand things he didn’t know he wanted.
He can't decide if he wants to turn and run from the sight of her, or if he wants to press in closer and beg her to trail the pollen down to his heart. He wants to tear those leaves and petals and pollen from her hair and watch them turn to the black things they ought to be almost as badly as he wants to paint more of their colors across her skin.
“There are flowers growing at your heels,” he whispers, if only to save himself from having to decide; but he can’t help but wonder if the words sound just as hollow and envious as he feels. He never has been able to hide his emotions. “- The island loves you.”
But what he doesn’t need to say is, And I think it hates me. Why else would it drape her in flowers, when spring had always been his pride to wear?
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Like she had with the flower Thana has no inclination to save him from himself. She can almost see the thoughts running below his skin-- running, running, running like a lost and hunted thing. But there is a beauty to him with the flowers rotting in his hair and the island ringing around him like a black halo begging to swallow an angel whole. Thana crosses it, that black rotted halo, and drags her tail through it like long slashes that look like claw marks.
And there is that same cosmic darkness, that same rot and decay beneath the glimmer of pollen and seed, when she brushes her lips down his cheek. She wonders if his magic will recognize it and if it will see lover or foe come to knock on the bars of its fresh cage. It seems almost profane to her, feeling death beneath the skin of the only mortal she has not wanted to peel apart.
She wonders if it means he wants to be free now, or if the feeling is only this life magic rolling in a tide through her blood begging for a way out. Surely it does not thrive in the stain of her blood.“It does not.” She whispers against his skin. Because she has never confused life with love-- there is no adoration in the suffering of things and all the pains of growing (does a flower not feel growing roots like growing bones, does the leaf feel the unfurling like a reshaping of flesh and form?). There is only violence in growing. But once the death has been taken and the violence simmered down to a wave of blood flowing back to the dirt and mold there is only silence, only peace.
A line of pollen settles on one of his withering flowers as she rests her nose against his poll, pale as gold-dust and just as lovely in the reflection off the sun dappling their skin through the bluegrass forest. When she exhales against his poll she wonders if it might sound like the sea to him, or the wind whispering through a new-budded copse, or like a wolf preparing to bay at the moon. Or maybe it only sounds like a sigh of a thing coming home for the first time.
“But if the island loves me how does it feel about you Ipomoea, as it dies beneath your gaze?” Until she asked the questions Thana did not realized that the answer mattered at all. And pressed against him, shoulder to shoulder, lip to crown, life to death, Thana shivers.
Maybe he’s always been a part of the island, long before the day it decided to rise from the sea and invite them to it. He has always thought there was a bit of desert living in the warmth of his blood, and the forest in the dark brown of his skin; if that were the case, it would be the island holding his skin and muscle together as surely as the magic that kept trying to pull him apart.
Maybe he was meant to be reborn every time the island shed its skin.
It would be fitting, in a way. That the boy who had wanted nothing more than to be everything should grow up to live a hundred lives he didn’t want.
All around him the forest of grass is quaking, and he doesn’t know if it trembles for him or for her. He wonders what it’s saying - surely it’s saying something, screaming something, warning him, condemning him, crying out to him - when all he hears is silence. Ipomoea has never known before how many different kinds of silence there were, not until now, and this past winter. Now, it seems, all he ever hears back when he lifts his voice to the wind is silence, and the noiseless thrum of magic in his blood.
“Maybe it doesn’t think of me at all,” he tells her as she breathes against his ear, and the shiver passes from her spine to his. “Why should it give death a name now, when we never have before?”
The flower is nothing more than dust at his hooves now, and a circle of black is spreading around him. Each beat of his heart sees the death-spot growing more, like his own life is fueling the death of many. But the taste of a magic not his own has it almost-worth it, has him almost-forgetting what it had felt like to feel a sapling’s death like it was his own. And somehow, that made this feel less permanent.
So he turns to Thana, and wonders at the weight of all that pollen along her back as he runs his nose alongside it, like he’s rediscovering what she looks like beneath it. ”The only death I’ve known to have a name was Thana,” he says the words like they’re better suited to a confessional, and watches as bits of flowers that were just beginning to take root turn black and tumble away. It feels illicit, the way he explores her body with his lips before laying his head the gold of her back.
”Even so,” he whispers against her skin, ”’Thana’ has always meant more to me than death.”
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Each of his touches, each line he traces across her skin through the golden pollen, feels like a line carved into the million sharp-shards of her soul. All the pieces of her below skin, and horn, and violence, tremble finely as the grass around them when the wind comes tumbling through heavy as a stone. Thana feels reformed by the weight of his touch, reshaped and broken down all at once.
For the first time, Thana feels something other than longing, and aching, and violence. The fire running through her veins, the blaze of life hotter than a solar flare, has nothing to do with the creation of this from of hers. It's always felt like ice before, like the blaze of a tundra forming over her bones. Now it feels like creation, like a cosmic explosion trapped in the shape of a unicorn.
Thana wonders if her horn could carve out the sky now, instead of flesh and rage.
Her black-magic soul shatters. Like glass it runs through her and she presses hard against him just to keep whatever pieces are left of her from during into dust and floating away on the breeze. Would the pieces of her grow flowers like seeds, or only bones like bits of disease carries on the wind? Would she make anything at all?
“To me,”. Thana pauses, turns, and traces a line down his face to press her nose to his. She breathes in his death once. She exhales pollen, and moss back to him. Thana feels the touch down to her shattered soul. Between them it has always been more than flesh. Like golden saplings half frozen and half new-born, it has always been more. “death has always been home.”Thana isn't talking about names, not anymore. The island hold little appeal for her in the shadow of Ipomoea.
The shiver returns to her spine, to the form of her bent beneath this touch like she's made of branches instead of bone.
And maybe with him she is. All her violence torn down to roots, and dirt, and molten blood where hard, black magma should be.
For now it's enough, to forget about poachers, and the way she's killing his forest each time she lays her cheek against an oak and drifts into the horror of her dreamstuff. It's enough to listen to the violet waterfalls roaring like lions and the lamb-like sighing of dying grass against what little of their skin is not pressed together. It's enough to press her lips to his, like she's dying to find all the things called home buried beneath the soil of his form.
“Where is your home?” Thana, who has always been one moment away from devouring the world, asks the question as she closes her eyes and listens to nothing more than the rotten inhale of death in and out of Ipomoea's lungs.
She does not listen to the seed and life slipping in and out of hers.
Ipomoea feels like a moth, like he’s drowning in her ocean and longing for water. Even here, when he’s supposed to be the one bringing death and not the one wilting before a flame, still he can’t help but reach for her. And if there had ever been a part of him that had thought better of chasing after a unicorn as she left trails of rot and dying things in her wake, it was silent now.
Because when she presses herself against him like they had been holding each other together all along, he starts to feel more alive than ever before. If Thana is coming undone at his touch, he is only being put back together again, as if all the wayward parts of him that had never let him rest, that never let him stay for long in any one place without beginning to wonder what lay waiting for him somewhere else, as if all the pieces of his heart that had ever longed for another life were at last content to be right here with their skin pressed against one another. If Thana is finding any comfort in the air turning blacker and heavier with each of his breaths, it is the way she breathes pollen and fresh air back to him that keeps him from collapsing into dust.
And he starts to think that if death has been home for her, he would gladly stay here for her, stay here where the rot magic makes everything else he loves wilt away. There was a beauty he was finding in its impermanence, she was teaching him that.
Until the island reformed itself, and reformed him along with it, he could make himself forget about the killers he needed to find and the kingdom he needed to lead, and how the forest and the meadow cried out every time it saw them together.
He knows all the things he should say, and all the things he wants to say - just as much as he knows that each of them are wrong. Delumine, the island, her, Denocte, even the desert - always Ipomoea has found a way to be at home wherever he found himself, but never for long. Always he was running, running away, or back, running between homes and worlds and versions of himself. He was different between all those places, he knew, oh he knew - as if each place had managed to grow roots in him, to make him belong even when he shouldn’t/
I don’t think I have a home, he almost tells her, but that too, feels wrong, like a betrayal to all the places he has loved before the island.
”I used to want a thousand different homes, and I looked for them everywhere,” he tells her instead, ”But none of them ever felt like home for long.”
Maybe he has put his heart in too many places; but something deeper is telling him they have only ever been substitutes. He shivers against her, presses his lips to her pollen-dusted cheek, and wonders if his flowers have ever felt to her the way her life-filled moss and seeds feel to him now. And it is that thought that has him smiling against her skin.
”This could be my home, if only for tonight.”
The way he says it makes it sound like he’s talking about her, instead of the island, even as he turns and begins to lead her through the bluegrass forest, past a thousand flowers he almost doesn’t notice while he’s looking at her.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Ah, there it is.
Rage.
It's sparking in lightning bolts behind her closed eyes. There are lashes of it, like studded whips, tracing all the concave curls of her insides. There are breaths in its lungs, shallow inhales and hollow exhales. If there are any moths here, floating in her stomach, the wrath is turning to nails pinning each wing to her bones like she's made of rotten, fading wood.
Thana knows it's there because the words only and tonight are hanging in the small spaces between them like acid seeking entrance. She wants to pull them out of the air, out of his skin, out of the rotten rivers of his death magic.
She wants to devour them.
And maybe that's why she says nothing, only lets her lungs stutter themselves down to the shallow and hollow echoes of her breathing, living rage. Thana sags against him so that her muscles might not reshape themselves into the beast of her, the wrath, the conqueror. This time when she shivers it has nothing to do with the coldness of him against the creation-heat of her. This time is has to do with fire, and want, and a hundred sins that are moving through her like snakes. A part of the Thana that belongs to him recedes like a tide pulled back into the darkness and the sharks.
She lets herself be drawn away from the rotten flower and its black raining decay. Their shadows tangle together. One is full of flowers (violets, ivy and snowdrops), the other is full of rot (bones, mud and moss). Between where two meet is a swamp, murky water and whippoorwills. It's the between that fill their hoof-prints. It's in the between that Thana makes long tracks with the tip of her blade.
Yet there are still those words, and her rage, and the way she follows him with her teeth pressed hard into the curl of Ipomoea's hip.
Only for tonight. Her teeth scrape against his skin. Only for tonight.
