At first Ipomoea came to the towers only to see the patterns the tulips made, planted in their rows so far below him. To see how the world looked, in the way the steeple, or the bird, or a god looking down might see it. He came to remember.
His footsteps sound like hollow things on the staircase and, for once, there are no flowers blooming beneath his hooves. Mice gather in his shadow but only stare as he passes. Dust lining the steps stirs but does not rise, or form itself into shapes, or breathe as a living thing might. It all settles in his wake, and falls to silence as it watches him climb. And the silence, too, feels like remembering.
Remembering when he had raced through this very castle as a boy, coaxing a songbird to fly on its mended wings. And the gentle press of a cool cloth to his fevered forehead, and the quiet of the gardens where he rested. Remembering girls with winter in their hearts, and pegasi with flower petals in their hair, and boys whose dreams flew higher than their wings could take them.
The climb feels endless.
The remembering seems to go on forever.
It feels like a lifetime ago, when he had come here for the first time as a boy. But sometimes when he feels the rattle of his lungs, or listens to the creaking of his bonded’s ribs, or sees a black-crested bird flitting from branch to branch — sometimes he slips away into his memories.
And now each step is like a memory as he climbs. He is loosing himself in them, loosing himself in the endlessness of it, in the spiral of the stairs as they wind up, and up, and up. Part of him wants to turn back, to return to the earth and all its sand and soil and flowers, where he can fill the empty spaces in his chest with all their whispers. In his bones he can feel the call of it — the way the tether wrapped around his heart grows tighter and tighter with every step.
He almost listens to it. But as the staircase spirals on he sees a boy draped in gold and forest browns. And it is the ache of his memories, and the familiar unfamiliarity of the wildling boy’s face, that have him stepping forward to fill the emptiness with company.
“Are you going up?” he asks. His hooves still sound hollow on the stone staircase. Sand glitters like gold dust, forming into small mice and sparrows that collapse nearly as soon as they are formed (his magic feels so weighted here, too heavy to move, so far from the earth).
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He stands, halfway up the spiraling staircase that rises up into the Terrastellan sky. Gazing higher up the spiral steps, up to a small window that breathes sunbright air in through the thick stone walls of the tower, he is full of remembering. It is just one memory, an abstract thing really. It is strange, even Leonidas thinks, for it to be caught within a wildling boy’s mind. But it is there, uncovered at last by the roots and weeds of forgetting.
Within his mind’s eye, that place of remembering, Leonidas is a boy running up these stairs with laughter in his throat. It spills from his tongue as he runs higher, higher, chasing amethyst petals, chasing the star-scattered black of a king’s tail. At his heels a sister runs too, her feet a whisper over the stone steps. She is silent as a fox, but upon her lips is the echo of her brother’s laugh. The children chase their mother and uncle up and up and up…
Are you going up?
Oh, and this is the present breaking through. It strikes upon the surface of his memory, scattering it like water. Leonidas looks down and does not know how close he came to being a prince just a moment before.
“Yes,” the feral boy murmurs and continues his climb, listening to the whispers of sand mice forming and un-forming around him. Now, it is not petals that float down the spiral staircase, caught upon the window’s breeze, but earth and leaves, pulled free from a fae youth’s antlers. Now, it is another king who follows a wildling boy up the stone steps into the Terrastellan sky.
Leonidas wonders as he climbs, if he will find his memory at the top, or if that brief flash of remembering is all he has allowed himself. When he spills out upon the top of the turret, gold feathers caught in the mid-spring breeze, he looks out across the tulip fields. Their myriad hues steal any hopes he had of returning memories. He forgets that Terrastella is his blood and looks out over the tulip fields and thinks of how it is all so orchestrated. He has seen these flowers growing secret and wild within the woods, a surprise and delight to stumble across; a secret smile from an even more curious wood.
“They are not wild grown.” The wildling youth says as the wind teases beneath his wings and urges him to jump. Because recklessness is in his blood too. He looks down from the carved tower and loathes how enclosed he is, how rigid the walls around them are. “How can you live like this?” Leonidas groans to the man and means: how can you live around others, how can you sleep entombed in carved stone, how can you not wish to sleep beneath the stars and find tulips growing wild and free.
There are memories dancing in the air, echoing off the stone steps and dusty walls.
He can hear laughter, and footsteps, and the scolding of a castle maid after two children racing each other up, and up, and up. He can hear the dry flutter of wings snapping open, of wind coursing down immature feathers. He can hear the way it makes their footsteps lighter, like sunlight instead of shadow.
When he blinks it is as if he is living that memory, if only for a second. The dust rises up in the shape of it before him, swirling around like two pegasi daring each other to fly.
But when he blinks again there are only the dust motes chasing each other around and around, caught in a ray of sunlight.
He does not know that it is the boy’s memory (he looks too wild to belong here, too wild to have once been a prince of anything.) He thinks he should recognize him, with his sunbright wings and his antlers of gold, with his eyes so full of life like another pegasus he knows. “Do you mind if I join you?” already he is stepping along after him, tucking his own wings close to his ankles.
The climb is always better with company he thinks, as they follow the spiraling staircase up (and up and up and up, as if it might never end—)
But it does end.
And together they spill out like two ghosts of the earth (of the forest) onto the terrace at the top. Ipomoea’s eyes feel like hungry things as they look out across the fields of flowers, like they are searching for something he is not sure they will find. He thinks there ought to be a pattern to the flowers; that if he looks close enough he might find it.
He flicks an ear to the wildling boy. For a moment only the wind answers him, and Ipomoea, too, imagines he can hear its urging.
“How do you imagine we live?” his voice is quiet, like he is still a ghost of a memory. He can see what he means, when he turns to him and sees the recklessness shining in his golden eyes. “Most do not think it a prison, but safety. They long for the community. A shared life with those they love.”
He does not tell him that he feels it, too; the cold, unyielding stone, the too-perfect flowers that did not choose the pattern to grow in. He does not tell him that he looks for the pieces of wild growing in the rows, the in-between things that others think of as mistakes but he sees as beauty.
Ipomoea does not tell him that the boy with his wild look reminds him of someone else. “What is your name?” he asks, and again —
he thinks he is more familiar than he ought to be.
