The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.
T
he bonfires cast dramatic shadows; the elongated light dances alongside the oppressive darkness, until the clashing of opposites creates a mural of blinking, still-framed images. The festival is full of hope; is full of growing. A poet sings of spring and children laugh aloud, among the high bright flames. Pravda might have once marveled at the flickering orange flames; or, certainly, the indigos. The kaleidoscope of colors is at once unimaginable and right before my eyes; blue flames, or green, and yellow too.
He does not marvel at them now. Perhaps it is because he feels separated from the occasion; the fires dance, but not for him. There are lovers singing poetry, but not for him. There are children laughing, but not for him. There is a race, but not for him.
The devision is stark and impenetrable; he is something, someone other, and these joys do not—should not—belong to Pravda, or so he believes.
Yet, he is enticed by one fire in particular. Perhaps it is because of the size; or simply that it is the only bonfire in the vicinity that seems to burn as normal flames do. Pravda is not typically impulsive; but something urges him forward. Perhaps it is the way the men stand there with bright silver eyes. He watches from afar, initially: but when they reveal tarots and delve into oomancy and divination by eggs, he is increasingly intrigued. There must be something to write about this experience. (After all, is not the most profitable knowledge rooted in experience itself?) Pravda steps forward, and then—hesitates.
He had not, at first, seen Ipomoea. But the other stallion emerges from the darkness and, before he can reach one of the Shed Stars, Pravda intercepts.
“Sovereign,” he greets curtly, but not without politeness. The light glances unevenly in Pravda’s strange eyes. His expression is marble, and spilled ink. “What are you hoping they tell you?”
He has never been one for social courtesies. Pravda gestures towards the Shed Stars and their divinations with a sharp motion of his chin; it had been clear that was where Ipomoea had been going.
But, Pravda supposes, it had been his intention as well.
t was tradition to leave out one item on the first night of spring, and hope for the morning sun to bless them as it rose.
All day Ipomoea has seen the offerings of his people laid out in shrines around his city. And all day he has watched as the shrines grew larger, and more decorated, and more diverse — but more than that, he had watched the people who came to leave them. The girl who brought a blank diary, and asked to fill it with happier stories than the one from the year before. The young soldier who had brought his father’s blade and begged to be as honorable with it as his sire. The old sculpture who had left his tools and prayed for inspiration.
And looking at each of them had felt as though he was searching for bits of shadows gathering between the cracks of a broken mirror. And he feels like he wants to learn how to bury himself in all those dark places, to fit himself into all their rifts and crevices like a bit of scar tissue holding them together.
Before he leaves for the meadows he places the statue of a steller’s jay with wings spread in mid flight atop a stack of parchment. And he does not look back.
~~~
Ipomoea joins the dancers in the meadow, and presses his shoulder against their’s as they circle the bonfires. Tonight he moves not like a king, but like another fallen star from the black sky that is burning, burning, and burning with all that it has left because it knows tonight is all it has left. Tonight he moves like there is not a war beating inside of his chest but a flame that is being rekindled. And when the firelight flickers against his coat and turns it red, and blue, and golden — it feels like he is being reborn.
It feels like freedom, to both lose and find himself in them.
He is looking for the fire with the the silver-eyed watchers before he knows he is. But when he sees them, the flames that reach out like he has only been but a bit of kindling for them to consume, he almost trembles. He wants to feel the heat of the flames against his skin as a reminder that winter does not last forever, wants it to melt away the last of the frost that he could never seem to scrape from his heart.
So he lets himself be pushed closer and closer by the crowd, and lets the shed star’s silver eyes call him forward like a promise. But before he can reach the tent —
He turns to the man who steps forward to intercept him, and Ipomoea cannot help but look at the slash of black dividing his face and wonder what the mark might mean to the diviners. If it was a scar or a stain, a symbol of bravery or the sign of a higher purpose. Perhaps it means nothing at all, perhaps it should mean nothing at all — if it were not for that look in his eyes.
It is the look of a man who is searching.
“They say if you speak a wish out loud, it will never come true.” There is only the smoke from the bonfires separating them when he steps closer. And still he watches the way the light of them casts their faces into planes of light and shadow, the way every edge is sharpened and every hollow above their eyes deepened.
He can taste the ash between his teeth when he follows Pravda’s gesture with his eyes. “Do you believe it?”
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.
P
ravda has catalogued, rationalized, placed every aspect of his life into uncomplicated segments. There are chapters. Moments, dissected and studied. Mistakes revisited. Triumphs stored in pristine corners. Every event contains a corresponding lesson; every tragedy has become a teacher; every hope, every dream, mere ink into diaries. This is how he lives: pieced away into controlled memories, thoughts, intentions.
(How else can he live, with the aspects of his past that haunt him? How could he ever be an administer of judgement, of justice, if he are a man first and a judge second?)
It had never worked that way.
Pravda had never been a man first; a man with hopes and dreams; a man with wants and desires; a man with a heart and soul.
He had never stepped back to marvel at firelight and stars; he had never thought to regard them as anything other than objects to study, characters to catalogue in a vast store of knowledge.
At least, on the precipice of spring, that is what he would have you believe. At least, when he turns those mismatched eyes and that jagged face toward Ipomoea, the light transforms him from man into statue; from soft into hard; from dreamer into stone.
The man within Pravda had wanted to surprise him; but when Ipomoea pivots to respond to him with the calmness that bespeaks of his Sovereignty, Pravda is reminded of pride’s foolishness. The air between them reminds the scholar of fables and poetry; mystic, smoke-filled, more opaque than clear. Pravda steps closer to answer—
“No,” he says. “But perhaps that is only because I do not believe in wishes at all.”
Znaniya, from where she dozes beneath the trees, stretches out and plucks a dandelion from the soft loam.
“What should I wish for?” she asks, with childish enthusiasm.
Pravda does not know how to respond. He looks at her and then, impulsively, says: “Us.”
In this light, Ipomoea is marked as dramatically as Pravda; his pink eyes seem almost feverishly bright in the way they catch and flicker.
“Only actions,” Pravda adds. “Can make events transpire.”
There are moments, like this one, when he feels as if his words are inadequate; as if there is a sea behind them, turbulent and expressive, that cannot be conveyed by speech.
“May I walk with you? I am still new to this land. Please, show me what you love about Delumine.”
Although phrased like a request, he cannot quite keep the thinly veiled demand from his words, softened insomuch as a blade kept beneath a pillow.
pomoea has always known there were secrets to be found in fire. In the flames, and the smoke, and the scent of incense burning, in herbs tied with wishing string, in the shed star’s silver eyes as they look up, up, up and tell them what the patterns the smoke makes between the stars means.
He knows it, because he has felt them. Those same secrets that live in the earth that trembles beneath his hooves, in the flowers that turn to smile at him with pollen faces when he passes. The whispers that come to him at night when he is restless and cannot sleep, of a sleepless unknown that is calling, always calling, in the spaces between his heartbeats.
And Ipomoea is thinking of those secrets in the night-blackness now, of darkness, of shadows thick and consuming. He is thinking of rituals and magic and the sound the earth makes when it thinks no one is left to listen to it crying out.
But he is listening. And he is thinking, always now, of how easy it would be to change the world into a thing where secrets walk in the daylight like mortals walk through a garden.
He likes to imagine the sound of the earth is there in his voice when he answers, petals instead of blades, curls of smoke instead of the bite of the fires flames. “You must not believe in magic then, either,”or dreams, or prayers, or miracles he does not say. But still he wonders if Pravda has ever stopped to listen to the earth and only the earth — if he has ever found secrets buried in the gentle unfurling of a morning glory.
He wonders if he has ever felt that sort of surprise, that awe, in his studies.
Ipomoea tilts his head, pulls a scattering of rose petals from his crown, and tosses them into the flames before he turns to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with Pravda. He can hear the demand in the other man’s voice, although he does not say so, and he knows that tonight he’s supposed to be a king (not a ghost looking for the memories of his past life in the flames.) So he lets the smell of the roses turning to ash remind him. He lets the smoke wash over his skin and cling to him like a promise, like he has only ever been a king who loves his Court and not an orphan who is always running, always searching.
He walks between the fires and is not looking into them. He is only looking at the faces of his people illuminated by the flames, searching for the secrets they hold in the corners of their eyes that only the firelight can reveal.
“To show you would take more than one night, and to tell you would take more words than I know.” Ipomoea wants to ask him how the grass feels beneath his hooves, how the smoke tastes between his teeth, if it makes his skin shiver like branches at the end of autumn. Instead all he does is smile with his teeth flashing like bone white flowers opening in the night and say, “if you stay long enough, perhaps I can teach you.”
He almost does not recognize the curl of hope stretching out its wings in his lungs like a butterfly crawling free. It surprises him then to feel it, to hope that Pravda will stay.
And it is that hope that makes him bump one shoulder to the paint’s like a friend welcoming him home, and ask him him, “Where did you come from?”
