Isra and the garden crown
"Fireflies. Fire flies. Fire, fly”
There is an echo of magic in the air, the same dark delight that hangs in the jasmine smoke of Denocte every time the moon rises. It covers my skin like satin. It welcomes me home as much as it begs me to fall deeper, and deeper, and deeper in the blackness.
And I want to listen, I want to cut open my skin and answer the magic with magic and the darkness with sea.
But it is not the magic that brings me to the river, nor is it the roar of a distant waterfall (where the river plummets into the meadow) that echoes not-quite-right in my ears. I am looking for a trail of poppies, or posies, or lilies weaving along the rock shore. I am looking for thorns and willow-trees spring ing out of boulders. I am looking for Ipomoea who had once learned to be brave with me as the sun rose dew-gold over the tips of our weapons.
I am looking for the man with desert in his heart and flowers on his crown.
I follow the soft purr of the music, and the steady glow that flickers just ahead like a fresh-placed horizon. The stones stay just stones as I walk (although mica rises in their cracks like water) and the grass remains just grass when I walk further from the water. Tonight my magic is silent, awed perhaps by the weight in the air in the itch under my skin that is chanting hurry, hurry, hurry like a black-sea song.
When I see them, the fireflies lighting holy lines across the mortals singing and dancing by the shore, I am glad I listened to my eager blood and my hungry magic. I do not remember deciding to join them, but between one blink and the next, I am standing knee deep in the water beside the singers. The water whispers against my skin, begging me to lay my head beneath it and let it carry me back, back, back to the sea.
The current is still whispering to me when I deny it and lift my nose into the air thick with magic and flickering fireflies. And when I exhale I turn the molecules of the breeze into glitter before the fireflies lay themselves around my horn like it's a garden instead of a weapon.
t is still hard for him to walk between the trees and not search for blood staining their trunks. He has to remind himself to relax the arch in his neck to something that does not make him look more wolf than horse, to not stare at the shadows in the distance like they’re a feast and he a starving man.
Even when the beech trees lower their branches and sweep their blood-red leaves against his sides like a lover, still he stands there and thinks only of the bodies that had been stained the same color. And when they whisper against his skin it’s okay and you can rest now, he cannot bring himself to believe them. He only presses his cheek against a knotted, woody scar, and relives the cutting blow that had made it.
He has spent too long staring into the darkness he knows, he knows. The world outside seems too bright now compared to the forest, the sounds of laughter from the festival too loud when he has accustomed himself to the silence of death.
Ipomoea does not know how to stop hunting, how to return to the normalcy his court aches for.
He does not want to rest.
And he does not think he remembers how to. Not anymore.
He watches the firefly game from the safety of the trees. It makes him feel other somehow; like he has become the monster hiding in the shadows. But the flowers are there to press themselves against his ankles and remind him: they would not love him if he were. They are there to press their petals into his skin like memories, their touch reminding him that he once knew how to dance, and sing, and laugh while chasing fireflies. He’s still that same boy to the trees; their roots remember him, remember the feel of his hoofbeats over the earth from past festivals, and the sound of his voice lifting with the music.
It feels like an echo; or like another Ipomoea, standing in his skin, stepping into the lantern-light. Go, the flowers whisper. And he goes, stepping in the hoofprints a younger-him left all those years ago. He goes to the river, and this time it is not to seek forgiveness (there was none for him to seek).
He doesn’t recognize the music, but he dances along to it anyway because he used to know it, and he used to love it. He dances along to the music and each step is a prayer, each bob of his head an invitation, begging the fireflies to come near to him. A few do; he feels their wings brush like gossamer silk against his skin.
But most of them drift past him like he is not there at all, like they know he is only a ghost.
They drift past him and wrap themselves like a blanket around a unicorn’s horn, until she is the brightest thing standing in the river and all her reflection looks like is light. But beneath them all, beneath the magic and the music and the fireflies, she is only—
"You look like a shooting star," he whispers against her skin, when he goes to her. The water churns around his legs, pulling, always pulling, like it’s his turn for the baptism and it doesn’t know how to turn a sinner away. He closes his eyes, and lays his cheek against her shoulder.
"If I were to make a wish, do you think it would come true?"
Isra with the blood-tear halo
"Why must we be born into a world where we must spend our lives struggling to become unbreakable?”
From the corner of my gaze I had watched him dance. I do not know how to look away from bits of my memories that sit in my soul like golden stones. He is ringed with light, with grass reaching for him like a million ghosts, and I can see how he is not the same man that came to me to learn how to be brave.
This man, this king, is not who I remember.
Shadows rise around him like storms now. I know the look of them as well as I know the way dawn-light turns Eik into something holy.
But I do not go to him, not yet. I only watch him dance like a ghost remembering how heavy a heart feels and how swiftly blood can rush. Oh, I hope he rediscovers it, the innocence that felt so holy from every movement I watched him make once. But I also know how victory tastes. I know how to feels to be steel, and wrath, and monstrous so that none have to feel the burden of it.
Perhaps we are more similar now.
I have passed the point of innocence and softness. I am shattered as much as I am whole in the remaking.
There is that darkness in my eyes, the shadow of killing and mercy living in the blue like a bit of demon risen from the underneath, when I turn to look at him. It does not fade when he presses himself into my skin (brushing gently against my tremulous soul) like a wolf coming home. I smile, for the first time since I've come home I really smile. My teeth flash like weapons ringed in firefly light. “Ipomoea.” I sigh between my flashing weapon teeth and my soft-kiss smile. I do not realize I am the same sort of contradiction as him-- tragic and sharp, sorrow and wrath.
The line I trace down his cheek is a jagged and gentle thing, one as lost as the two of us. “If I am a shooting star there is no wish I would not grant you.” I do not mention that if I am star I am a dead thing blazing out the last of my glory in the atmosphere. I do not mention that I will explode into dust and nothing else. All I can do it trace a circle across his brow and hope it's a seed that might grow, and blossom, and turn us into something else but wolves, and lions, and ghosts on the outskirts of the world.
More fireflies gather in the crease of my spine and in all the hollows where our bodies to not fit together so closely. Nature anoints us in the light we have both forgotten the taste of (and the feel of it against us like cool salt-water and summer sun showers). I did not know I should have been missing this when I reveled in the sound of shattering chains. I did not know.
But I almost--
I almost remember.
“Wish Ipomoea.” I blink. All the shore turns to silver stone that glows in the night, and the fireflies seem nothing more than children of this world (found and safe where the two us are lost, lost, lost). “Wish.” I kiss his brow like a lion welcoming home a god of war. And--
he does not need to tell him that she is a dying star (aren’t all shooting stars dying? don’t all stars flare the brightest, in the end?) he can see it in her already. It’s there in the way she moves, like she’s drowning in the ocean of her own memories, like each step is a fight for survival, a fight for freedom.
He knows what the weight of all those memories feels like. To see all those pieces of yourself following after you like a fractured mirror, feeling all those shards of glass shattering under your feet as you walk across them, trying not to let them cut too deep (but they do, they always do.) But sometimes he still wonders what it will do to them, living in their memories instead of dreams; he wonders what it says about a person, to have more nightmares than hopes.
He is not the same Ipomoea who braided a moonflower into her mane as she stepped onto a ship all those months ago. He is harder now, and sharper, like a rose left to grow wild without a gardener to trim away its thorns.
And so, he thinks, is she.
But to feel her kiss against his brow, telling him to make a wish the same way she once told him to be brave —
And to see her shrouded in a thousand fireflies pretending to be miniature stars —
And to feel the ground beneath his hooves turn to glowing stone, like they stood on the moon instead of the shoreline —
He thinks there might still be a part of the Ipomoea who learned how to be brave with her, surviving in one of the deep trenches of his heart. A part of him that remembers what if feels like to dream, and hope, and believe that wishes come true. So he closes his eyes with a sigh, and feels his heart settle into an almost-quiet rhythm that feels as familiar as it does strange. I wish — but there are too many things Ipomoea wants — all of them scarred into his heart with sharp-edged and brightly-colored emotions.
“I was wondering why the night felt so different, like it was celebrating more than the season. Now I understand,” he tells her, and although he doesn’t smile his voice holds a touch of it anyway. “I’m glad you found your way back to us, Isra.”
The fireflies settle around them (as if they’ve forgotten the horses who are still dancing, forgotten how the game works, forgotten that Isra and Ipomoea were not a thing called home). And for a moment when he opens his eyes again, the Rapax looks like a ribbon cut from Vitreus, its surface still and shimmering and as sharp as their memories.
“How many people discovered the sound of freedom, while you were away?” He knows it doesn’t matter if the number was one or one thousand — he knows either would still have been worth it. But still, he asks, and he —
Isra and blood-gold threads
"hold me down, down, down until I remember how to fly.”
There are too many pieces of me to count left on the shoreline of my homeland. Each of those pieces is woven together with threads of bloody gold, moonlight, and glass shards sharp enough to kill as they splinter. Now I am only the pieces left behind-- the scars, the nightmares, the blood blots that feather out across the back of my eyes like clouds across the bright blue sky. I am regret, and hope, and immortality tangled into the misshapen form of a unicorn.
And I will never relearn all the other shapes that I could have been. I will never get them back.
Now I am a killer, a savior, a new-god with her teeth resting against the jugulars of the old ones who came to us with their tidal waves, endless winters, floods and fires. I am a unicorn who looks at a king with the fireflies hanging in his hair like pearls hang in mine and with hope in his bone where mine is filled with oil and salt. I can feel the sting of jealousy in my heart. The ache of it makes me wonder if I can pull from him all the ways in which to make myself feel like a savior instead of a destroyer again (even though I know that I would become the beast a million times over to save him from becoming one).
Sometimes, in moments like this when I am with someone else who says a million other things and cries a hundred tears in a word as I do, if in the end that everything I have done (everything I have suffered through) was in vain.
“I am glad to be home.” I pray that saying the words will make them true. I pray that I learn to love peace, that I learn how to become something other than dangerous and terrible. I pray, I pray, I pray and I think I am the only one left to listen to the words.
I wonder if the world will ever change. No matter how many times I blink back the thought, and cover my horn in fireflies and moonlight, it comes back again like a sickness.
And like the sick thing I am, the broken thing, I lean my firefly brightness to his. With my cheek to his, my rib to his, my hip to his, I try to relearn the why and ways of being a queen instead of a warrior. A story tickles at my lips like a hummingbird with the hunger of wasp. I think of a girl with hair the color of an oil-slick. I think of the fire in her belly and the way her anger was made of swords and teeth. I think of how she felt, how her mother felt, how the ignorance in her city felt.
I think of how she burned part of the world to the ground to save the other half of it.
“Not all of them. I could not free them all.” I whisper against the dip above his lips. And I think that my hair is oil-slick black and my heart is full of fire, and bitterness, and just enough love to let me push the fire out instead of in.
And I think that I am a terrible monster because it takes me until now, as I draw a line up his chest and remind myself that I am here, here, here and I should be lovely instead of hard, to ask him anything. “How is your home Ipomoea?” I blink so that he will not have to see the salt in the corner of my eyes where tears used to gather, or the brine exhaling from like nose like air should.
I hope that he does not see the monster that I see when he looks at me with the fireflies clinging to me in all the same ways they would cling to a stone.
oth of them are rendered down to their individual pieces now. Bits of bone and blood and muscle held together by their magic, their immortality barely holding together a thing that wants only to fall apart.
He wonders how many pieces of themselves they’ve lost — how many parts they’ve lost along the way, all those chips and tears and fragmented parts of their soul they were too busy to notice slipping away. How many had they given away when they were learning to be brave, and fierce, and wild, without knowing they were only so many threads away from unraveling entirely? He had not realized at the time that they were changing the shape of him, changing the sound of his name, of his heart, of his soul. He had not stopped to ask what the cost would be —
he hadn’t thought it mattered, at the time.
But oh, now he wonders if there had been another way. More fireflies are gathering along his cracks and oh, it makes him wonder what it would feel like to be made whole again. If he could have chosen which pieces to give away, if he could have fit the rest of them back together into a different shape.
The thought is what makes him smile, and beg those wilted flowers waiting in their bones to rise, rise, rise and bloom, because there is still a part of him that remembers how to be fragile.
And a part of him wonders, when he’s pressed cheek to cheek, rib to rib, hip to hip with Isra, and fireflies fill the hollow spaces in their hearts, if he could teach her how to be soft again. Or maybe it would be her teaching him, or the fireflies and moonlight that gild her horn in gold and silver. Maybe they could find those pieces of themselves or forge new ones from the stars that did not grant their wishes. Maybe it was better that way — to make their own dreams come true instead of relying on already-dead things burning up thousands of miles away.
She could not save them all but oh, she saved more than their gods ever did.
“But there are thousands whose hearts are learning how to beat for themselves, and you taught them the song to,” he whispers back. When he closes his eyes he can almost see it, that distant shore with its city burning (don’t all burning cities look the same?) But he knows the look in her eyes — the look that shatters him, that chips away more pieces of himself that fall away into the river, and he wonders why the fireflies aren’t chasing them down.
Again he begs the flowers.
Again he tries to catch the pieces of himself before they drown.
Again he presses a kiss to her cheek and feels his soul whispering to her’s, feels his heart trembling, and hopes to see her smile reach her eyes this time.
He breathes out against her skin, and there are a thousand things he wants to tell her. There are a thousand things that have changed since she left their shores, a thousand ways in which he has wilted, and withered, and rooted, and bloomed again. And yet he says none of it — he doesn’t tell her about the blood, and the winter that felt as though it would last forever, or how he’s afraid this winter may be even longer than the last. It’s there in the scars of the trees for her to read; and yet —
And yet it’s not the violence that feels important. It’s what they carved with it.
“Come and see.”
He sees the monster lying just beneath her skin — it looks like his. But his smile still feels almost-soft again, when he presses into her skin and turns back to the festival, where his home is learning again how to breathe and sing.
e forgets at times that there are worlds outside of his own. And he forgets that in those worlds there are other people living out their lives, with worries, and dreams, and loves, and fears, pasts and futures —
He had forgotten that was why Isra had gone. But he sees it now written in the new scars spread across her hips like constellation maps, in the shadows that have gathered beneath her eyes like she holds the night skies of those other worlds close to her cheek. Never does he stop to ask her was it worth it, or would you do it differently if you had the chance.
He knows. He did not understand before but now, when he looks out across a city and a world that has forgotten what it means to look for the future, oh now he does.
Around them the night and the fireflies are pressing in, and that song he thinks he recognizes is dancing in between them all. So when Ipomoea presses his skin to her’s he is thinking how much like flotsam they are now, stuck in a tide. He wonders how long it will be before the waves pull them apart again (because it will, he knows it will). And when he whispers against her, ”it’s okay,” he is trying to feel the fire, and the bitterness, and the love drowning in the chambers of her heart.
So when he pulls her away into the festival and counts fireflies instead of memories, and deaths, and fallen dreams — it is as much for him as it is for her.
