She chases erasure, flushed and fingering loose the tight knots of her heavy once-was. That which wraps around her like an overbearing, unwelcome caress. It does not love, it only greeds. It folds her under the weight of itself, making her smaller and smaller in the process. Subsuming the tangled, delicate lights of her astral soul; ebbing, like hungry, swart mouths, all the marvellous beauty that came before. (Long before…) It makes her, it; a singular being, swaddled too-tight in memory, creasing the lovely lines of her face and mooring her spirit to a tombstone of moss-grown marble and far, far, far too many names to count.
Were her lips not black, they would be stained a pale pink, phantoms of a deep red with hints of oak. As it is, her breath is a sweet bouquet of smoke and vanilla, her eyes a little less focused than they ought to be. She smiles, twirls; laughs as she passes by merry-makers in clutches of moonlight, they themselves liquid and fruity; dry, astringent, soft, delicate notes of horsehair and sweat and spirits spilt on yellowing grass. Lute sounds like violet, flute like bright, bombastic pink against the blackened blue of night. A septillion blinking stars (nameless, unknown, strangers in a strange land) gyrate around a single, indeterminate point it space, swirling against the bright, impressionist sky.
She disappears into it.
She disappears into it, her tail – (too long; and how annoying, the braids are falling out, letting loose; oh well) – carving the curved meander she makes into the dirt and clusters of light-hewn poppies, mallow, and beardtongue. She follows not the stars tonight (for the refuse to stand still) but the distant sound of music, a much more earthly thing than the star-gazer is accustomed. She smiles – it is a watery, bright smile – as she skips towards the bank of the Rapax; her astronomical instruments thumping precipitously against her sides, the agouti and white fur shifting on her back. She takes a moment, never stopping just shifting ever-more sideways, to reach back and pull it straight with her teeth, giggling softly. “Manere posuit.”
It is the strings of lights, like processions of fae in the night, that catch her eye, head jerking up to watch with silent, gaping awe. They furl themselves around the throat of a nearby woman, like a necklace of argent starlight; crown a man like living, illumined jewels. She steps forward, head tilting, fur shifting, instruments thumping; silver hooves tracing a small, inelegant pirouette. They unwind, in a tightly choreographed gesture, from the hair of a stranger. Slipping through the chill air, with the faintest hum, they find her jealous skin – curling up her leg and breastbone to touch with tickling tenderness the swanlike curve of her neck.
She giggles, pale lashes fluttering shut as she begins to hums an old trapper’s ballad – of maidens bonny-wild upon bedsheets of bear-pelt – and to her bawdy delights they flocks, festooning the nooks of her form in light.
he longer he lingers here beside the river, chasing after fireflies and dancing in their light, the more he can feel his tensions easing away.
He stands there knee-deep in the water, chest heaving, watching as the current parts around them. Dozens of fireflies buzz around him, and this far from the lantern-light they are the brightest creatures around. They press in closer and closer to him, and as Ipomoea watches the first of them fall against his skin like a sigh, he wonders if it is the water or the fireflies that has him trembling in the water. Maybe it’s just the magic of the night, running fever-hot through his veins.
Maybe Ipomoea is remembering what it’s like to be one of the living.
The lantern-light clings to him like a second skin and makes him feel almost-holy. Even when his breaths turn to gasps and his sides begin to darken (with sweat or with river-water, he is not sure), even then he dances still. In dancing he can almost remember how he used to be, how as a boy he could go to a festival and not wonder what the bright lights and the exuberance might be distracting him from. He loses himself in the game, and never once asks himself if it’s a game worth playing, or what the purpose of it is, or all the terrible what if’s that keep him lying awake at night.
He’s not thinking of the forest tonight (or the shadows between the trees, or the blood soaking through the soil, or the monsters he hunted just the night before). Ipomoea is not even thinking of the morning (it feels so far away tonight, like time exists only for counting fireflies and dancing in the river.)
For tonight, he is only thinking of the way the water makes him feel almost-clean again, like he has never heard the words death or murder or justice. And he gives in only to the delight that blooms like a flower in his chest each time a firefly kisses his skin. He forgets everything but the trill of the lute and the thrum of his own blood, the song that pulls horses and fireflies alike to the water.
In the morning perhaps, when there is enough light to see the shadows for what they are, perhaps then he will remember that he is as much broken as he is whole in the remaking.
But tonight, he dances.
When he stumbles from the river at last, all he can see are the fireflies. He sees them wrapped like a crown upon another man’s head, shimmering like bands of gold around a young girl’s legs, pooling in the creases of another’s spine like fire rising from their flesh.
It is on the bank that he sees the girl who looks more like a horse made of light, nearly hidden beneath the endless strings of fireflies that cloak her. He watches her, as the notes begin to warble and the musicians begin to play a different song. The fire-light seems to flare, like the bonfires know what it’s like to be alive and ache from the sound of music alone. And as the song turns into something almost-slow, Ipomoea finds himself moving through the crowds as solos become duets.
"I don’t think this song is meant to be danced to alone." He comes alongside her, bending his body against the light. When he smiles the light flashes gold in his eyes.
"Can I have this dance?"
§
you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
@Stellanor
She is consumed—every fine, level line of her cloaked in a shifting, blinking brightness. Star-like; earth-bound, she pirouettes, and despite herself—despite the sweet, fermented tang across the breadth of her tongue—each whirl become more fluid. More elegant. More and less controlled at once until she has mastered the undoing of herself. Taken command of that which rebukes any sort of direction. Free. Free—something she has not felt that in some time. Free, all while darkness dogs and desires and seems intent upon feasting not on the margins, but on the heart.
Tonight is not made for such things.
For worry, and the way it creeps as finger across the throat.
For memory, and how it grows like weeds in the darker places.
For omens, and how they splay across the whorl of the sky above her, indelible as tattoos and unknowable except that she knows she has seen their make and measure before.
Not for blood, or monsters; or worlds left bone-white, colourless—as if each mountaintop and dell, each inlet and copse of birch, were rendered ghost-made. Soul-things, devoid of life, but existent in skins and bones of ash and ichor and anamnesis.
She twirls faster.
Ducks and throws her delicate head.
Hums until only that and the lute-strings and the soft singing somewhere below exists, painting with colours previously unknown to her on canvases of black. Illuminations of her girlhood. Of her and Kyrr. Of her father, slipping a sharped hunting knife across the belly of a deer, spilling from the surgical opening a galaxy of pink, orange and violet. Of the northern lights, moving like blades or souls across the sky. Of Nordlys as it was. Of Edana as it was. Of everything as it is not anymore, until she is heaving and damp in the nooks with sweat and she comes to a still for a moment—huffing and humming quietly—a string of fireflies loosing from her ornamentation and casting off to another merrymaker.
Her swimming eyes find him, beautiful and crowned in flowers of blooming light and in strings of noctiluca, as she is, for they find home on his unremembering, too. She smiles, steadies herself against the dizziness. She finds within herself the yearning, heavy feeling of loneliness and quells it; promises it free reign when the night is over. But for its sake, she laughs lightly and takes a step towards him, bowing her head with some flourish. “Why, of course,” and it doesn’t matter that she does not know him, or that there is such unspoken darkness wreathing their illuminated bight of river, only that they both desire the unravelling tonight has offered.
A rare gift. “I’m Stella…”
Her bright, blue eyes blink with a sort of childlike mischief that is no longer characteristic, and she tosses her long, wild hair—scattering some bugs into the night before they race to alight upon the slipping braids—before she tilts her head to the side and winks, “let’s go!” Almost, so very almost, brushing him as she passes, she rushes off, bucking and striking out, an errant ember; indulging in the delciousness of running from something.
e does not feel like a king tonight. Kings did not dance in the water without worrying about how it might look; kings did not dip their heads below the waves to look for forgiveness along the riverbed. Kings did not strip themselves down to the bone and show the world the worries written in scars across their heart.
But he does.
In the river he becomes someone else entirely. He is not Ipomoea the King, or Ipomoea-who-is-pretending-not-to-be-King. He is not even Ipomoea the orphan, or the flower-picker, or Ipomoea-with-flowers-at-his-feels. He is —
He is—
“I am Ipomoea.”
And that alone feels like enough.
And in simply being, he finds freedom. In thinking of only who he is and not want he is, or was, or will be — he can almost remember. He did not know he should be missing this, missing looking at the world like it was the first time seeing it, like the fireflies were the first source of light he’d experienced. He did not know he should be trying to be soft instead of sharp, calm instead of the storm — he supposes that, after so long spent fighting, he forgot it was okay to rest before the next battle. His memories, his jagged edges, his tired heart, he leaves it all in the river.
And who steps out of the water and asks a stranger for a dance is someone he thinks he recognizes. An Ipomoea from another time, another life, another version of himself he did not know he should be trying to hang onto all those times he told himself to be brave.
She is playing the same role as he tonight, in this game of almost-forgetting and half-remembering. Her smile makes his feel softer; her bow makes her own movements less stiff. And the childlike-mischief in her eyes is bright enough to overlook the shadows that linger still in the corners. Even when she tries to hide them, they’re there — the light cannot exist if not for a little bit of darkness.
But when she dissolves into a flurry of movement and laughter, pulling him along like a moth after her flame, he thinks to himself that some lights — maybe their lights — can burn brilliantly enough to overlook the shadows they cast.
So he loses himself in the place where the light touches the darkness, in the thrill of his bare hooves beating the earth, in the thrum of his blood in his veins and the song weaving through the air. The fireflies follow them into the darkness and there they make their own light, their own dance, and a new version of themselves that is both a revival and a rebirth.
There is a moment, when he pauses to catch his breath and count the fireflies, when he looks at her and thinks she is an ember torn free from the fire. Maybe they both are errant embers tonight, burning, burning, burning their memories and their griefs and all the things they could have been but were not.
“Are you from here, Stella?” he asks, teeth flashing in a smile. “Or only visiting?” Below the words is humming — the song, the magic, the fever of the night —
and Ipomoea burning up like the desert.
§
you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
@Stellanor
