Maybe he’s looking for her, when he goes to the forest.
When he sees the light streaming down between the tree trunks he imagines what it would look like to be broken by a unicorn’s horn, and how it would feel to have shards of shattered sunlight raining down against his skin. He hopes it feels more like rain instead of glass. He wants to test it.
The trees sigh a welcome to him as he passes beneath them, their branches raised like outstretched. Always reaching, always scratching - and now so many of them bare, their leaves reduced to a dry, dull blanket that covers the ground. He knows that the trees deeper in the forest are still crowned with green and gold and red, but here they look far more like skeletons. And for all the sunlight that floods this place, the forest has never felt darker or colder.
A trail of flowers follow him and for the first time, they feel out of place. As if his magic doesn’t yet understand that it’s almost winter, and things are supposed to be dying, not blooming.
He wonders if the trees would tell him what it feels like to die, if he was brave enough to press his skin against them and made himself listen. He wonders if it scares them, too, when the days grow shorter and the nights colder, or if the young saplings tremble when they lose their first leaves. Do they call it the long sleep, when they turn in upon themselves and wait out the cold?Do they somehow know that it’s only impermanent, that it’s only a matter of time before the sun and the warmth return?
It makes him feel a little better to imagine the taller trees, the ancient ones, as old housewives standing around gossiping for an eternity. Perhaps they laugh at the young saplings, or reassure them that the winter doesn’t last forever, or twist their roots like they’re holding hands beneath the earth.
He knows it’s only wishful thinking - Ipomoea knows enough about the trees to know they are braver than him, and while they might quake before a fire the cold is hardly a threat to them - but today he doesn’t care. Today he lets his imagination run wild and fill in the gaps between the trees, the spaces where the leaves ought to be.
And for a while he pretends that he’s a unicorn, too, and that his horn is made of wood and his life started as a tree.
Because sometimes pretending to be someone else was better than being who, and what, he truly is.
The fallen leaves seem to be laughing with each step he takes, and for a while he runs fast enough that the flowers struggle to keep up. But when he finally slows down again, they catch up to him. Like they always do. Like they always will. And despite the way they press hungrily against his fetlocks he’s alone, standing between the winter trees and the spring blossoms.
She knew the moment she killed the first flower who was in the forest. She followed the trail of them anyway, never once pausing to wonder on the way they all turned paper thin and black-veined the further she walked into the garden in the sleeping forest.
Overhead there are empty birch branches echoing the sunlight back at her like pearls. Maybe she should know it as birch and the dead leaves whispering underneath her hooves as winter. Maybe she should know a hundred things about this forest that still doesn't feel like home. All she knows is that she can feel the fear of the forest pressing in, how it feels nothing like frost when she pauses to press her nose into a scar running long and jagged down the side of a tree.
Thana only touched it because it reminded her of lightning, of running tough the nothing like a bloody wound cleaving open the white.
She knew the tree would start to die instead of slumber and she touched it anyway .
Ahead of her the last golden and red leaves are falling down, down, down like feathers plucked. For a moment she pauses to watch them drift down. She admires the beauty of it, the loveliness of the leaves during their last moment alive. When she inhales just before they hit the ground she can taste the rot of the dead-flower trail and the sting of winter's promise.
It reminds her of home, of death, of how it felt to look over a cliff at the sea and wonder.
The blackness barely makes a sound as she starts to walk again, to follow that trail of flowers like a wolf following a wounded stag. Later she'll tell him how the flowers gave him away, how easy to was to follow his trail of beauty, how easy to was to make it wither at the slightest touch. She wonders how quickly he can save it all-- all these dying things spreading out like a flood from the rain of her.
Soon it's not leaves floating down around her but the weight of him and the forest pressing in. This air tastes like spring and hope. It tastes like a hundred flavors she will never know the name of. It tastes like color. She moves closer to him, close enough to count the flowers on his crown and the bones hiding just beneath the healthy glow of his skin.
She knows she should ask him what it means to be a champion. Because she wonders if he knows she cannot name the feeling blooming red in her heart even though she can name a hundred ways in which to spill his blood in great gardens of life upon the forest floor. She knows she should ask him a hundred things.
All that comes out is a whispered, “Ipomoea”, across his shoulder when she presses her lips to it.
He’s never thought of the way that the trail of flowers always led to him. He can’t even remember the day they first began to follow him, his earliest memories are of turning around and seeing them there, waving at him with their petals and dancing on their long stalks. They’ve always been there, always been a part of him, ever since he left the desert.
But he’s never thought of the way they make it impossible for him to hide, how anyone who knows what they’re looking at knows that he is never far from the trail of blossoms. Ipomoea has only ever run for the simple pleasure of running, never for his life, never out of desperation - so when they shiver and tell him that something, that someone is coming, he does not fear them. Or stop to wonder why she’s here, or how she’s found him, or whether she’s come looking for him. Even if a selfish part of him hopes that she’s run all the same paths in the tangled forest that he has, that she’s returned to that golden, trembling sapling and hoped to find him there.
Because he has. He’s done all those things and more, since she left him standing there in the broken sunlight.
Despite the flowers’ warning, he does not flinch at all when she comes up beside him, and whispers his name against his shoulder.
A part of him wonders if her touch will be withering, if the petals on his brow will finally wilt and tumble as dead things to the ground. But they don’t, and the only change is the way his heart speeds up. He isn’t sure if it does so because it’s resisting death, or trying to catch her - he doesn’t ask it why it skips a beat.
“Thana.” He says her name like he was expecting her, like her name tastes more like life than it does like death. Like he doesn’t mind the way she kills everything he’s brought to life.
Overhead the leaves are still falling around them like a rain shower, but beneath his hooves he can feel the blades of grass clawing their way up to catch them. He tilts his head back to watch them, and for a moment neither of them speak.
“Do you ever wonder why the seasons change?” he asks her, without looking at her. “Or why it can’t always be spring?”
And he wonders if the questions sounds more like flowers blooming or trees shaking their skeletal branches at her.
The first leaf to fall on her spine and catch there turns to dust. The second turns to rot. The third, oh the third, turns to frost as if the winter in her bones is clawing viciously out of her skin. For a moment she's tempted to catch a leaf in her mouth, turn it to black rot ink and paint swirls of images that haunt her each time she closes her eyes to sleep on his neck. She wonders if he would understand it: the writ of her old world, the beast in her blood that calls through the shadows over and over again until she's shaking with the sound of it.
She wonders if he would see the art of it or the decay.
Instead of painting she only presses their shoulders together beneath the rain of the trees. The leaves sound like small bones crunching beneath the weight of her when she shifts. When the wind comes to shake the half-sleeping branches, Thana thinks it's not the wind at all but the forest screaming warning to its king. And oh she's glad he's not listening to the roots and the bark and the loam beneath her hooves crying out when winter comes early to this copse holding them close. She smiles and she knows the bark will see only the teeth in it-- not the sorrow, not the aching, only teeth.
Her tail drags a track through the leaves and it looks like a wound of leaves parting open to reveal the flesh of the earth below it. His eyes lift up toward the falling leaves and this time Thana does not follow the track of it. All she can see is winter anyway, winter and the way the branches look like bones tearing at the blue sky. A small part of her breaks that she cannot see whatever beauty it is that he can see.
She's always breaking around him.
It's cracks she's thinking about when he starts to speak, and for a moment she wishes that he would whisper it against her skin instead of the sky. Grow roots in me, she wants to say. Or maybe it's the need to say tell me what flowers bloom in winter, that circles around and around in her chest like a carrion bird over a corpse. “No.” Thana gives him the truth because she's still clinging like a dying thing to all those wanting words in her heart. The ones that are picking clean her rot.
She has never thought to wonder about the seasons the way she has wondered about the urge she has to cut open the secrets of this world. Thana has only thought to ponder the way of blood, and bone, and death, and wanting. Like a beast she's always wondered about the dark shadows rooting below the red leaves. And she does not need to ask Ipomoea which part of the forest he sees in winter.
“Would you not miss seeing the first bloom break through the snow? If it was always spring there would be only life and nothing for the forest to fight for.” This time she doesn't say the words against his skin nor does she paint in in rot across the plane of his cheek like she's aching to do. But she thinks the forest will know the difference when she looks at the knot of a tree looking back at her like an eye.
Ipomoea has never been foolish enough to believe that anything could live forever. As a boy he had often found himself wishing so, in his naivety imagining a life where the flowers bloomed year round and the nights were always short and warm. His daydreams had always been the opposite of his reality, the opposite of Solterra, creating a world that was as far removed from his actual childhood as he could make it. Sometimes he isn’t sure which came first - the desert rejecting him, or his musing of another life.
He thinks he can hear the desert laughing at him in the distance, in between all those leaves falling around him. ”Stupid boy,” he listens even when he doesn’t want to. ”You never should have come back here.” Maybe it was right. People like him never lived for long in places like that.
When he breathes in his lungs feel heavy, like they’re filled with sand. Even back home, even here in Viride the desert is still trying to drown him.
“No,” she tells him, and he thinks she would have done just fine in Solterra. The leaves are still falling down all around them, each breath of wind sending them tumbling from the branches. He can see more sky than forest now, but he’s tracing those pale arms above him with his eyes, sorting out the tangle of interwoven branches. Ipomoea knows that if he whispered to them, they would come awake at once. They would untwist each bough if only he asked, and if he pressed his skin against their bark they would replace all their falling leaves with fresh, green buds.
He doesn’t. He only lets them sleep.
But he wonders if he could convince an aspen to grow a rose, or a sunflower, or a locust blossom. He’s never tried before, never asked a tree to be anything other than a tree - the forest as it is has always been enough for him. But now he wonders. Would a sapling change into something else for him?
He wants to tell her that it would be okay if the forest had nothing to fight for, if it could simply be for all its life exactly what it is now. But the words turn to ash before he can say them, because he knows they would be a lie. Even wildfires, in all their destruction, allow for new growth in the end. And the next generation always rises up to take the place of the ones that die.
So he doesn’t say it.
“Would you?” he asks her instead.
The words sound something like the falling leaves, like wondering, in the moments before they hit the ground. In that instant where they aren’t yet sure if they’re living or dying, when the air is so full of red they think they might still be on the tree. It all sounds like winter, when he should be sounding like spring.
“Would you miss seeing something green, if everything turned to rot?”
He wants to whisper the words against her skin, to brush the dust and the rot and the frost away from her spine with his lips. But the forest is watching, and waiting, and Ipomoea knows her answer matters more to the forest.
Because she could still make the trees either love her or hate her, but Ipomoea has already lost his choice.
@thana
how many times can i say "all those falling leaves" in one post
If there is a winter in his voice instead of spring she does not hear it. Each word, each flare of a nostril, each curl of a lip, each kiss of wind lifting up his mane only seems to her like a sapling in the golden-ray. Above them the branches are still stretching out like bones and below the roots like veins aching beneath the weight of her horror. And despite it all there is only that pine eye watching the way she breathes in the sound of his voice like it's the west wind and she's moonlight hidden behind a cloud. Like she's waiting. She's always waiting, waiting, waiting.
She breathes in again, pulling him into lungs made for running until sweat forms patterns across her chest. And when she touches him again it's with lips made for tasting rot, and blood, and death (not skin, not spring, not Ipomoea and still she traces the curl of his mane anyway). Her tail, made for rending muscle from bone and bark from trunk, wraps around his ankle like another root of the forest begging to keep him. “Before you I didn't know that green was anything but something begging to die.” Thana breathes the words into his mane and it ends in teeth when she scrapes a path down to the skin hiding his heart from the end of her horn.
His heartbeat pulses beneath her nose and her own heart stutters, rattles, and starts to sing a new song. Her soul thinks it sounds like running, and hunting, and becoming. Thana thinks it sounds like the woods curling like a cage around a golden sapling with frost wrapping tenderly around its leave. It is a brittle song but she pulls it down like the desert pulls down water.
A seed in her belly starts to grown roots.
“I was not made to miss the green.” Her voice is as glass-thin as the song singing in the crevices of her heart. She knows, oh she knows, that she was made for horror and gore, for killing and taking. But she wants the green of his crown as much as she wants to sink deep into the white-waters that hurt again. She wants. She aches.
Thana plucks a flower from him crown, because she doesn't know how to give as well as she knows how to take. “But I would miss it because of you.” She whispers around the flower.
And then she presses Ipomoea's own flower to his lips--
Llewelyn didn’t often spend her mornings without tea and golden paint in her company, but something about the way the horizon had lightened from black to grey that morn had inspired her.
It was the first time that she had stepped beyond the protective embrace of Delumine’s walls, and instead of the paralyzing fear that she was anticipating, the maiden felt a sense of exhilaration. The world, which had before seemed so small, confined as it was to the capitol and Veneror’s Peak, was now something that Llewelyn couldn’t help but view with a renewed curiosity. The onyx splashed femme has found herself wandering into the Viride, admiring how, as she traveled deeper into the forest, winter left a smaller and smaller mark until it was as if spring lived eternally beneath the trees.
The maiden lay down upon her side, slowly reclining backward until the side of her face rested upon a soft bed of mosses. For what felt like years, but may have been only hours, Llewelyn lay there, her breaths deepening until she fell into an almost trancelike state. Absentmindedly, she pulled up the trampled grasses and fallen leaves strewn about her body and tossed them into the air, the invisible quality of her innate telekinesis giving the impression that it was the wind that flung the foliage about.
Soon, both Llewelyn and her emerald cloak — the velvety fabric of which had been half-trapped beneath her body and half spread behind — were dotted and piled with forest matter, thoroughly mottling her silhouette. Distantly, the scholar considered the risk of someone coming along and stepping on her prone form, what with her scent most likely being muffled and her body almost hidden by various twigs and forest-leavings. Yet, the thought remained distant and the courtier found that she appreciated the sensation of anonymity and lack of identity that she found ensconced in the wilderness and laying upon it’s breast.
She had even thought she may fall asleep there, cradled as she was against the beating heart of the earth, and golden eyes had began to drift slowly toward close when she heart the hoof falls.
Blinking into awareness, the mare didn’t move, and hardly breathed; some deeper instinct guiding her actions. Through the distance and latticework tangle of undergrowth, Llewelyn spied the wing-legged form of Ipomoea. A grin sprang to her lips and she inhaled a breath to call out a greeting when the wind shifted and the spicy-sweet scent of another mare whipped through the wood. Smile slipping from her lips, the scholar felt her brow furrows and golden eyes narrow as a horned form slipped into view between thin limbs.
Thana.
The name came to the maiden in a rush of recognition — she had heard the servants talking about the unicorn who could kill with a touch. But why was she here, alone, and following Llewelyn’s sovereign? For a moment, fear blanched the lass’ face; what if Thana was going to assassinate Ipomoea? What if she was the Poacher? Ears tilted and lay flat against the femme’s delicately shaped skull, righteous anger bubbling up from her belly and into her chest until...
Until.
Llewelyn swallowed, surprise lightening her golden eyes into an almost shimmering glow.
At the first kiss, the second — the scholar stifled her gasp — pressed against the sovereign’s shoulder.
At the leonine tail wrapping about the stallion’s ankle, anchoring him to the moment.
At the unmistakable intimacy.
This was something Llewelyn was not supposed to see, an interaction so secretive that the forest sounded almost louder in it’s presence; as if the land itself was trying to cover up for the patriarch’s transgressions. The maiden’s mind raced. How was she to leave here without being discovered? The wind was bound to change, the huntress bound to find her there, prone and guilty of accidental eavesdropping. What would happen then? She had thought she had Ipomoea’s measure, thought she knew him to be honest and virtuous, thought his love for Messalina to be honorable and true.
She shivered and climbed to her hooves, taking care to silently remove the leaves from her hair. When the courtier was satisfied that she looked like her usual, manicured self, she began to move. Each hoof fall was casual, the tilt of her head imperious and so, so very like herself. Indeed, Llewelyn felt as if she filled her own skin with an ease that she had lacked in recent weeks. Her steps, while not crashing, would be easily marked by a hunter’s ears and she moved markedly toward the pair. The Appaloosa’s path would hopefully keep her enough out of sight to make a convincing bid for a simple passerby, and the haughtily disinterested expression plastered over her multicolored features should drive home the impression.
Llewelyn silently thanked the elements as she made her exit, for she remained down wind and — she prayed — unidentified.
Forcing herself to continue her leisurely pace even as she moved beyond any reasonable distance of hearing or perception, Llewelyn tried to swallow and found that her mouth was dry. Even as the edge of the forest loomed before her, snow littering the earth between boughs, she maintained her role. Hooves at last crunched into snow and the tree cover slipped away almost reluctantly, and Llewelyn still did not give any indication of what she had seen.
The stroll back home was going to be hellish.
@Ipomoea and @Thana ..hope this is alright! Thanks for letting me join in :)
In the space between her words, between the weight of her tail settling around his ankle and her teeth scraping across his skin - in that instant, Ipomoea thinks he knows what it feels like to be wild. And in that time he can hear the sound of his own heart beating, like it has been sleeping with the trees and only now realizes it’s time to be awake, and alive, and that it should be running instead of resting.
He wants to run alongside it - even as the line she drags down his neck ends with teeth - to run until his lungs ache and the flowers that follow him stumble and run out.
But only if she runs with him.
He knows it’s her and not the forest holding onto him, and still he presses into her touch. And this time he doesn’t stop to wonder if her kiss will leave a black mark against his skin, or if her breath will dry him up and crinkle him like so many dead leaves. He doesn’t consider what it feels like to be something dying, not when all he can feel is his heart thrumming the way it is. There is nothing in him that is dying at her touch, even if he knows he should be.
Ipomoea doesn’t want to be the wildflower today, or the sapling, or the azalea.
He wants to be the baneberry with its toothed leaves and its poisonous berries. He wants to be the oleander and the hemlock and the nightshade, and all the things that take instead of give. Today he wants to be something selfish, because maybe then he would take what he wants instead of wishing for it. And when she plucks a single flower from his crown he half-wishes she would tear the whole thing free along with it, as if taking it away would let him become something, someone, else.
So he leans in, and his eyes never leave her’s when he presses his lips to the flower and imagines that he’s kissing her, instead. He wants to know if her skin is as soft as the petals before they turn brittle, and pale, and flake away to dust.
“Then I’m glad it’s winter.” He breathes the words into the petals, and Ipomoea does not notice the way the trees shiver at the sound of them.
And when he smiles there’s a quirk to his lips, as he takes the flower and passes it back to her like it’s a secret they’re sharing, just the two of them. “- For now.”
@thana @llewelyn
that poor flower is probably having the worst time between their magic
also po is blind and does not notice llew at all
Thana has not often paused to wonder at the things that live beneath a canopy. There has always been the wild in her, the instinct to hunt and pull the world apart. There had been moments of death, of aching, of flesh and bone and all the things caught between it. Even when she looked at Asterion once, with light dripping from her horn, there had only been the ache to pull him apart bit by bit and send all the pieces of him home.
But this,
This,
This kiss between them that lives more in a dying flower than in their flesh makes her wonder. The wild in her blooms like a flower given sun because a great oak tree has died. It grows teeth, and claws, and it wants something more than flesh. It wants a hundred different things that spiral in Thana like disease, a hundred things she does not know how to name. This is the first time she has ever felt what might be a wanting of her own, a want that has nothing do with death, or war, or hunting.
What she wants has to do with fire and ice. And maybe there will be death still, because she cannot become something else (even for him, she cannot), but when a petal of the flower caught between them turns to rot even as one turns to seed Thana starts to think that there can be life too. Life in the fire and the ice, where she can burn hot as a war and her magic slumber.
When she catches the flower between her teeth and tucks it away on her tongue it dies. But the flavor, oh the flavor. She's about to tell him of it and braid his mane with the remnants of seeds caught between her teeth and tongue. She's about to tell Ipomoea of all the things she wants to learn about him-- how to live, how to love a forest instead of consume it, how to love, how to love, how to love. All the words she's never learned how to form are in her eyes when she looks at him. Each word is a flash of a constellation, of magic rotten and broken, of Thana who sometimes wants to only be a mortal thing.
But the words never come.
There is a crack in the forest, the subtle sound of hoof and loam, and everything in her forgets all about fire and ice. Thana becomes death (it is the only thing that comes easy to her, in the end there is death and nothing else for her). Her horn swivels at the sound and her eyes mark the movement of horn above the small copses around them. Part of her wants to call out, to run after the horse passing by them until she can make out the exact way their bones move beneath mortal flesh (until they have been hunted, to the ends of the world, hunted).
Were it not for the taste of seed and rot on her tongue, where it not for Ipomoea and the dull edges of her hunger that want to learn how to burn, she would remain death for the rest of the day. Instead, because she still wants to braid seeds and ice into his mane like an arcane poem, Thana takes a bit of his mane in her teeth.
And then she starts to pull him into the darkest parts of the woods like the savage, selfish, monster she is.
He is not looking at the other horse walking through the trees, or at the leaves falling down and landing like dust and snow across their backs, or even at the flowers that are wrapping their petals around his fetlocks, begging him to fall into them. He doesn’t hear them, but whether it’s because he doesn’t want to or because the way she looks at him is deafening, he’ll never know.
All he sees is her.
So when she turns her head and stares like something wild into the forest, he leans in. Her mane pulls away to show the white streak running down it like something bright and furious and ripping the canvas of her in two, and Ipomoea presses his lips against it. He thinks he can feel her blood thrumming, just there beneath her skin, and he imagines it’s something equal parts rot and life and screaming to be let out.
He does not know what if feels like to have an entire forest dying around him (everything has always been blooming, and growing, and reaching). But he brushes the dust away from her spine like he knows, like there’s something inside of him that is aching at the sight of all that green clinging to his heels. With her Ipomoea can pretend he knows the sound of dying things, and that he doesn’t hate it when he can’t make everything live.
He traces the white streak with his lips from end to end, from the point it appears at her wither to where it disappears in the hair behind her in. He does not ask her what she sees between the trees, the same as he does not ask her to stay beside him. But he holds his lips to her skin and breathes her in while he waits for her to decide.
And when she pulls him after her he turns, and Ipomoea does not think twice before following her into the dying forest. He doesn’t stop to consider that if he tried, he might bring it all back to life. He only runs, and runs, and runs, and the flowers follow him.
