His name was a whisper on the wind, a sigh of the trees that wave gently at him from the distance. His name, spoken by the earth; how long had it been since anyone had last used his name, his full name? It took him too long to recognize it as his own now, but the call. of the forest was unmistakable, reverberating through his bones. He stepped into a trot.
The grass of the plains tugged at his fetlocks, begging him to stay, but for once he did not listen. He shook off their grasp, and the ocean of wild rye parted before him, leaving a trail. The forest edge was in sight, a dark strip that lined eluetheria and separated the court from the freeland, stretching as far as he could see in either direction. He hurried towards it, his heart lurching like a wild thing inside of his chest. His wings strained, struggling to fly, to carry him.
Ipomoea.
The wind pushed at his back, tossing his loose hair until it floated like a dark halo all around him. Each step brought him closer, and closer, and closer still, until the distance shrank and the grasses thinned and the cool darkness of the forest reached out to embrace him. And then, only then, did he force himself to walk, not run. The branches wove themselves tightly together overhead, blocking the sky from view. But here and there the sun crashed through in dazzling, unbroken streamers, suspending dust motes in its golden rays.
A dusting of wildflowers followed him as he ventured deeper into the forest, where the trees seemed to hum with delight and warblers and finches perched as noisy sentinels upon each bough. The trees grew older and taller around him, as the rest of the world faded from view and all that was left was Ipomoea and the forest.
Thoughts of the desert and of Raum and of the island and of Denocte faded from his mind, taking with it his rage and sadness, casting away any part of him that was not content to simply be him.
He stopped beside a large conifer, muzzle brushing against its bark, and shivered as the tree’s ancient thoughts pressed against his consciousness.
His voice, when he spoke, seemed impossibly soft beneath the evergreens. “We made it, Odet.” The statue did not answer him; the stone had no ears with which to hear his words, but he spoke to it as if it did. And all around him the forest seemed to come alive: the branches overhead began to shake of their own accord, their leaves sighing. Animals forsook their hiding places and crashed through the underbrush with wild abandon. All the world cried out, in welcome and homecoming.
A smile, small and fleeting, took the place of a shout on his lips.
Thana can hear no sound from the forest but the soft knell of a lament. She can feel nothing but dirt, and rot, and blackness beneath her hooves. There are no animals to welcome her, only the soft sigh of them moving through the thicket and the shadow. Each step blooms a bruise on her heart, soft blues and blacks that are never old enough to yellow. Even still she brushes her nose against the bark and the leaves reaching heavily down towards her. And she tries not to watch the way her touch brings winter-grayness.
On and on she walks with her bruised heart. She continues until what few boundaries she recognizes in this place are forgotten. There is only the scent on the wind of magic, stone and something fever warm, leading her deeper and deeper in the forest.
Until she sees him. Then it is something more than stone and wind. Thana tracks him like soot tracks a fire, all ash and blackness to the bright heat.
She had seen him in flashes, on the island, but even then she knew he was not for monsters to hunt. He is not for unicorns that kill the jungle even as they lick the humidity of it from their lips like nectar. And yet--
Thana cannot help but follow him.
If she could cut out whatever it is the trees are saying to him she would carve deep into the bark and young wood just to hear the magic. She can see the song him and the forest are singing in soft touches. She can see the notes in the way the woods yearns and lean into every empty space left around him. He sings the forest the same way she sings to rot, hunger and want.
There is no part of her that is content (only wanting) when she walks out of the darkness when he stops. All of her strains to hear the words he whispers to the trees and to a strangely shaped bit of stone. She wonders if he is mad, or sick, or something too innocent and wonderful for her to understand. Thana does not stop until she can count continents of dirt brown (like rot crawling across a bone white stone) on the curl of his hip.
She wants to swallow the taste of him and the forest that hasn't yet died beneath the shape she makes on the moss. Thana tries, but instead words fall out from her fever quick. “Did you whisper to the tree or the stone?” The answer shouldn't matter, but it does.
he leaves are rustling overhead, branches shivering at the ghosting kiss of the wind. His heart quickens, leaping to action inside of his chest. Together the branches and his blood beat out a rhythm, a melody that twirl hand in hand between the trees, leaving all else (himself included, he thinks) far behind.
He’s about to tuck the stone creature away when she appears, stepping out from beneath the shadows. The bird floats in the air beside him still, hovering the way he used to when he had still been alive. But those grey wings don’t beat, and the eyes have lost all their brightness; they don’t look, the way Ipomoea looks, at the blood-red girl who draws near to them.
Ipomoea does not move, does not speak as she approaches. His eyes follow her across the forest, following the light as it traces gold and green dapples down the length of her horn. When she stops he holds his breath, and the forest itself feels like it’s waiting - for him, for her, he isn’t sure which. A flower presses soft petals against his ankle.
“To the stone,” he tells her, and he isn’t sure he wants to tell her how it didn’t answer, wouldn’t answer, perhaps ever now - he only wants to tell her that it once did. That once it wasn’t a stone, but a bird, and his friend.
But instead he swallows the words down, and tilts his head back to see when the sun breaks - briefly, quickly, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of way - between the trees in a sheet of gold. It catches a sapling in its spotlight, once hidden in the darkness beneath the canopy.
“But it’s the trees who whisper back.”
Even now he can see the way a new bud is unfurling from one of the young tree’s slender limbs, as if encouraged by the brief ray of sunlight. A distant part of him is happy at the sight, part of his heart is beating in tandem with the earth - but another part still aches.
“I don’t know you,” he says suddenly when he looks back at her, and he can't help but wonder if he should. There's an echo of a memory drifting through his mind, whispering something he can’t quite hear. He isn't sure if the voice is his or the forest's or the flower's, or if there's any difference between them. And when his lips part and he asks, "Who are you?" it feels as if they're all asking her, through him.
When he tilts his head back Thana follows the curl of his throat laid bare. She tries to trace the path his eyes are taking and her own eyes ache to watch him. It feels like roots are growing out of her, tugging and tugging and begging her to become dirt, and bone, and rot beneath the moss. The dirt sighs under her hooves when she steps closer still, close enough that her horn runs through that bolt of golden-light.
Oh what she wouldn't give to be warm with something soft and gold, something not molten like wanting, and hunger, and endlessness. Sometimes she wonders if it's not blood running through her veins but winter just brave enough to brush the edge of spring. Would flowers even grow in the spring of her, or would it be only bones blooming through the dirt like stems?
“What do the trees whisper?” Her voice is as dry as a dead leaf and as wanting of water and food. And when she turns her horn to follow that bolt of golden summer it points at the sapling, and the promise of life, like the frayed end of a noose swinging in the breeze (swinging, swinging, swinging). If there is joy to be felt, or hope, or something kind, she does not feel it. All the dappled gold only makes her feel sorrowful and monstrous.
His eyes feel like judgment when he swings them back to her, almost like he knows something of horns that point like frayed ropes. It feels like each tree, each flower, each hawk in the canopy, has turned their black eyes towards her. Thana blinks and tries to bury the violence that rises in her with a look like his, she tries to feel like nothing more than a unicorn in the forest with a crown on thorns. Her teeth ache, her heart aches, every bit of her aches. “No one does.” She bites her cheek until blood blooms metallic on her tongue. The sting of iron settles her.
She inhales and it's golden. “I'm Thana.” She answers with a sigh of her bladed tail against the moss and dirt (like it wants to be roots instead of death). There is enough golden on her tongue to keep her bruises from saying I am magic and death too.
e can feel the trees whispering overhead, the way a bird might feel an updraft pressing on her wings. They rub their leaves against one another in a feeling of excited anticipation, like the forest is plotting something great or terrible. He tilts his head, to listen, to focus, but all he sees is that golden sunlight and it fills his ears like the roaring of the wind.
Perhaps if he had tried harder to listen, he might have noticed the way her horn catches the light like the edge of a knife as it carves a bloody path through the air. Maybe he would have seen the sapling shiver beneath the weight of her stare. But he doesn’t - Ipomoea only sees the way her horn seems gilded in gold, like the sunlight has folded itself around her like a cloak. He only sees the white coursing down her neck like a river when her mane is lifted, momentarily, by her movement or the wind he isn’t sure.
No one has ever asked him before to interpret the trees. No one has ever cared about how a morning glory might feel when the sun and heat begin to rise, or what a young redwood might think when it stands so small before a grove of towering ancients. He doesn’t think many know that the grass watches them when they walk past, or that the trees stand as immortals that keep scores.
He presses his shoulder into the tree, and the branches overhead seem to shiver, and a curtain of dry leaves rain down amongst them.
The consciousness presses against his like the gates that once held a river at bay are now being opened. He feels it slowly at first, almost subtly; but then the weight of all that water presses in against him, and for a moment he thinks he might be drowning in it all. In the desert he had only felt cacti and fig trees and other small shrubs, who he realizes only now are like ants in comparison to the wealth and immortality of a tree that has lasted centuries. He can feel the trees roots like they are his own, intertwined with the roots of all the trees surrounding it, mingling until the grove they stand within seems more like one single living thing rather than dozens.
He closes his eyes, just long enough to settle himself, to remind himself that he is a horse and not a tree.
He feels the wind on bark and the way his entire body swings gently from side to side. He sees himself and Thana the way the trees see them, as pressure standing overtop their roots and a breeze that moves past them. And he remembers how similarly they feel to other horses who have walked these leafy halls, and how insignificant it seems when all he needs is the sun and the rain, and when he’ll outlast them all anyway.
There’s a knowledge of life there, and also a fear of the death amongst them, and he thinks it’s just the memory of the fires in their roots (it’s not).
"They say we look like two others that once came here," he says, when he opens his eyes and blinks. "Although it’s been decades since they last saw them. They say we sound the same." The trees don’t tell him what happened to the two, although a rush of emotions leaves him feeling suddenly disembodied.
"Half the time what they say seems meaningless," he says, softly. And he wonders if she, too, thinks it all seems meaningless, when to him it feels like the most important thing in the world.
When she gives him her name and he pulls away from the tree, he isn’t sure if it’s the forest that trembles at the sound or himself. Because he’s looking again at the white that splits her neck in two, and he thinks for a second that he could at it forever and still find something new in it.
And his name, when he says it, sounds more like what he is than who he is. "I’m Ipomoea."
There is, in the way he touches his shoulder to the tree, an entire world Thana knows she will never reach. When the leaves fall to the ground like dying stars she can only see the way they are going to die and evolve into dirt. Perhaps there is beauty there, or growth, in the cycle of it or the way the tree shivered against him until bits of it fell like tears. But it's all part of that world, that secret, of which she will never be a part of.
It hurts even though she knows it should not.
She wants to walk towards him until they're pressed against the same tree. Or until she can feel the same things that make him sway and close his eyes like he's drowning. She wants to drown with him in the roots connecting like rivers racing for the sea. The golden sunlight is a weight on her back when she moves towards that sapling wavering in the breeze. Thana hopes it is young enough to know nothing of wild unicorns who walked here with death in their eyes.
Although she knows, the moment her shadow falls over it like kolosos, that it will learn (it will wither but it will learn).
“It's not meaningless to me.” She wants to move away from the sapling to him. Thana wants to whisper in his ear, like a secret gateway to her world of death, and rot, and wildness, that it should be meaningless. Perhaps he would tell her them how cold she felt-- like winter. Or how hot her eyes looked-- like amethyst comets crashing down like dragons. Maybe he would smile at her and say, not to us.
But Thana is made for monsters and saplings bowing in the wind like wheat. Not for mighty sentinels that know (she is sure they know) she is nothing good come to the dappled sunlight of their sanctuary.
The wind rushes in and the humid curls of her hair move with it. They tangle around the purple stone laying at the base of her horn, hiding the one lovely piece of her from this stallion and his trees. And when she tosses her head, like wolf just waking up, sharp needles of feeling make her quiver as the knots pull and snag.
She tells herself that's why she's trembling like a leaf-- the pain and nothing else.
He is an easy thing to look at, she thinks, when she swings her gaze away from the sapling back to him. Her horn points at him like judgment. “Ipomoea” His name is a sigh in the wind, tattered and torn like a leaf long reaching for the ground. It is something dark on her lips, a prayer to something feral and wild fluttering in her chest. “Can you save it from death?” Thana inhales until she can feel rot pooling in her lungs like fermented fruit--
She lowers her nose to touch the sapling wavering in the golden sunlight.
And even though her touch is as gentle as a fawn she knows that rot and ice will soon turn all those perfect leaves black and brittle. Thana has never hoped as fiercely as she hopes in that moment between her caress and the creeping of death.
Her hope feels like a white-hot star throbbing where her heart should be.
or a moment, it feels like time may have stopped, and they are wading far too slowly through air that is as thick as sap pouring out from the wounds of the trees. The forest is golden, so golden he thinks they have been trapped in that sap, suspended while it turns to amber all around them.
It’s not meaningless to me.
She wouldn’t know how alive those words make him suddenly feel, like a part of him that he’s hidden away is waking up at last. He takes a breath, and the forest air feels right when he inhales it and wrong when he exhales, painful and wonderful and crisp.
Maybe if he had listened to the forest when she first set hoof into it, he might have known what to expect. Maybe the trees would have told him that death had stepped into their midst, and then he might have feared her, too, and he would have anticipated rot instead of hoping for growth. But he does not know, and as she turns back to that slender sapling that burns with sunlight and life, he leans forward with hungry eyes that betray his expectation.
For a moment, nothing happens.
And then his heart sinks, as ice creeps over the fragile stalk and turns the edges of those bright leaves black.
Later, when he looks back on this moment, Ipomoea will not remember what he said or what he thought. He remembers only how he rushed forward, breaking the sunlight across his back and falling to his knees beside her. He remembers how close he had been to the unicorn who brought death with a caress, and how the plant had shuddered to feel both of them touching it at once.
The leaf still turned black, curling in upon itself until its petiole snaps, and it falls with a final sigh to the ground, taking his heart with it. For a moment his heart stops, and he can’t bear to breathe.
But then another leaf takes the place of the first, small and green and alive, and as more leaves fall, more take their place. Ipomoea’s heart shudders back to life alongside them, as the tree can’t help but accept life and death as one, and experiences both at once (but was there ever any other way? Maybe that is how life has always been.)
He looks up at her, and he’s near enough to see the way her horn is spindled, peeled back like tree bark in the spring. And although he knows the forest is chanting at her to leave, even while the canopies seem to be shifting overhead in sudden turmoil, his eyes are begging her to stay.
“Thana,” he whispers to her from across the sapling. “Will you come to Delumine with me?” It feels almost wrong to ask, but this time he does not care to think about what might be right.
He only thinks that a unicorn and a pegasus might both learn to speak a new language, the other's language, the language of life and the language of death.
This is how Thana discovers she's a monster, by the way his back breaks the sunlight like an arrow. She learns in the way he falls to his knees before her like she is the true death god and she has just set her hungry teeth against the throat of something he loves. She can read in the way the forest shivers not in fear but in some slumbering sort of rage it is just learning how to awaken from.
She is the wicked thing in the wood.
The trees hate her. She can feel it in the quiver of their roots that her magic is trying to drink life from. It's in the way she's breathing winter against their summer-green leaves no matter how hard she tries to breathe deep enough that warm air and pollen are they only things she can possibly exhale. Its all seems impossible now, to imagine that she could be anything bathed in gold between a cathedral of ancient oaks. How foolish it seems now to wonder on the way she trembled like a doe when he talked to her of the way the trees spoke.
She watches him grow leaves to replace the ones the she exhaled death over. She knows it's not the same as saving the sapling, because part of it is already dead and the new leaves surely cannot have the save memories as the rotten ones. But it feels like he saved it when the sun strikes golden again through the enraged canopy and makes each leaf gleam as bright as emerald.
Ipomoea looks up at her from beyond the sapling and the stone on her brow has never felt so heavy as this. And she knows it's not the stone but her heart that feels like a world pulling her down. It's so much easier to blame it all on a thing hanging below her horn. She feels a little like that monster of a god again, when she looks at him with his flowers and his small wings laid so low before her.
Thana wonders if the dead leaves feel cold beneath his knees, or if he can hardly tell them apart from all the loam and pine-needles.
“I would bring nothing good to your city.” Each word does not fall like a stone (although she wants them to so badly it aches) but it's a whisper of sound barely loud enough to sound like more than a sigh. It could so easily have been, don't let me leave, for all the darkness and hope blazing the start of a newborn universe in her gaze.
She turns back to run away from the canopy rustling out a warning to her (she can hear it like a roar echoing in her bones). But before she does, Thana steps close enough to press her lips against the tip of his ear. She exhales, just once.
And then she's gone racing away from the dead rotten leaves and the man with the power to do something that feels almost like salvation.
e knows he should be running in the opposite direction, away from her, away from the rot. Delumine is still waiting, the court has been waiting for too long already; he knows the longer he waits the closer his home inches towards its own death. But he lingers.
In the space between heartbeats, when he breathes in dead things and blackened leaves and his lungs ache with rot - in that space, he sees only her eyes. There is no hint of green or gold in them, even when she looks into the light coming down between the trees. They are only violet, and as bright as any flower had been on the island.
And he thinks that even in a forest filled with wildflowers and light and bright red trees, she is the only thing he wants to look at.
So when she leans in close and her lips brush against his ear, he does not run. He’s breathing in even while she’s breathing out, and he wonders (for only a second) if her touch will turn him to rot the same way it turned the leaves black and dry.
But when she pulls away he’s still himself, and he feels both relieved and saddened by it.
And when she first begins to turn and run, stirring leaves and dirt in her wake, all he can do is stand there and watch. He isn’t sure if he’s imagining the trail of black that seems to follow her like a shadow, or the way the trees momentarily pull their branches away so the tip of her horn won’t graze them. Maybe he doesn’t see it at all, because he doesn’t want to.
He isn’t sure when he decided to follow, or when he told his legs to run. But the dirt is soft and cool under his hooves, as he follows the trail she left. Ipomoea can’t see her anymore - he waited too long, he ran too slow, the forest seems to have swallowed her whole in shadows - but still he runs. He runs until he thinks his heart might burst from how hard it starts to beat, and he runs until he comes to the small meadow that was once filled with wildflowers.
All that’s left of it is blackened petals that coat the ground that a black blanket.
And that’s where he stops, surrounded by rot and staring after her.
