[AW] when our hearts are hungry

[Ipomoea]

we all eat lies

The desert was calling.

He can hear it even here in the forest, where the branches muffle the sounds of the sand shifting in the distance and spring blooms in every shade of green. And between the petals of every wild flower that rises up on trembling stalks, he sees the grains of sand shining golden and bright. When he closes his eyes he can still see it, lying like an ever-tightening noose around his soul.

Even here in his burgeoning garden the desert has followed him. Even here with his magic growing roots like anchors, he cannot escape the desert forever. His heart may be a garden now but the desert was in his blood — it would always be in his blood.

For hours he stands there in a clearing listening to it. His flowers wrap themselves about his ankles in braids of color. Stay, they beg in tomes of pollen and paper-soft touches, do not leave us. But they are not enough, not today, not with every chamber of his heart filling with sand and magic like an hourglass running out of space. Not when the song that moves in blood instead of words only grows, and grows, and grows, it grows a dozen mouths and each of them set to gnawing at the forest of his ribs.

He does not remembering leaving them there, petals folding in upon themselves and crumbling without him beneath the weight of all that golden sand. Ipomoea only remembers looking up, and up, and up at the walls of the canyon opening like jaws reaching for the throat of the sky. And he remembers pressing his nose down to the trail of whispers racing along ahead of him like sacred daturas unfurling for him.

Golden poppies and carmine paintbrushes bloom against his skin when he leans his shoulder into the red sandstone walls. And they tell him the truth of it: the king that disappeared into the night, the golden sovereign who loved the sea too much to forget it. And oh, oh —

oh! How his magic rages because of it!

How it turns into a feral thing and grows thorns, and nettles, and teeth that it rakes through the bloody dust of the canyon. If he stopped then to look back at the desert flowers he would see the way they cowered before him now, the way the spaces between them were being filled with weeds and cactus.

But it is another magic that is echoing in his bones like a war-cry when the dust at his hooves begins to tremble. And every drop of that magic, every terrible mile of it blooming in cactus spines down his neck, all of it echoes that call of the desert. It's all tumbleweeds and chalcedony, the echoes of old death and agony and wounds re-opened. In it he can feel something in his heart breaking, and something deeper, something harder, rising up to fill the cracks of it. The sand filling up his heart makes him want to roar, and snarl, and lay his teeth against all of that death and pain until it submits.

He does not want to recognize this part of himself but oh, he does. It is the part of him that never left the desert, that never had a chance to grow soft.

And he wonders now if Orestes had ever known this anger, this feeling of being so close to death; he wonders it it would have been enough to make him stay and break the cycle of kings and queens who were not enough.

He wonders if this is why the desert has called for him.

« r » | @any!

[Torin]

❖

T

orin found himself wandering through the lands of his new court. These lands of Solterra that he now called home, were so different than any land he had known before. This time instead of rolling hills and singing birds the brute was growing familiar with ever changing dunes and the flowering of cacti. The change was something he had not been expecting, he had been in the understanding that all herds were like the small nomadic village that could be closest resembled to the Viking culture, the idea of developed cities and governments more so than the monarchies that he had thrived under was still quite foreign to him.
Maybe one day he would look back on the lands that raised him and realize that their way of thinking was outdated and strange, but until that day there would be a constant state of discomfort rolling just beneath his coat. Nestled in the silver skin, itching at him like a million little flies until one day...one day he would finally settle into the routine of this strange place, much like rolling in a bed of dust or stepping into a pool of water to escape the biting of those relentless flies. Until then, the plan was to travel and learn as much as he possibly could of this new home. Pools of flame skirted the horizon as he drew nearer to the canyon that lined the lands. Their walls housed many dangerous creatures, the majority of which he had yet to encounter. Much to his pleasure.
During his short time within the walls of Solterra, his head had been filled with horror stories of three hundred pound birds that closely resembled lizards that could dive down close to the sands he currently walked upon, and take out a fully grown horse in one fell swoop. His throat couldn't help but start to close up as he grew anxious thinking of the dinosaurs that still thrived in these parts, but Torin quickly quelled his nerves, recalling that these could potentially be made up stories to keep the children as close to the city walls as possible.
Heavy, black limbs carried him further into the canyon, relishing in the shade that was offered up by the walls. He hadn't gotten far into the canyon before the form of another appeared upon the horizon. A bay and white painted creature, elegant, immaculate except for the red dust of the canyon wall pressed into his shoulder as if he had stopped for a rest upon the great walls. Torin watched carefully as he drew nearer to the painted stranger, the plants around him seemed to grow brighter as he got closer to the tri-colored. Though the world seemed to be growing and flourishing in the presence of the painted stallion, the air around him seemed to crackle with anger.
"Is everything ok?" Torin's voice broke the silence of the desert, maybe this stranger needed help. Maybe he had been in search of the city walls and instead found the earth made walls that towered around us. Or maybe...maybe he was out here alone with a purpose as Torin had been.


"a sample of speaking"

« r » | « i » | @Ipomoea | notes; hope you don't mind me tossing Torin in here <3  | words; 531

[Ipomoea]

we all eat lies

Maybe there was a time, once long ago when he had stood in a forest raining in golden colors and thought only of the warmth of it against his skin, when he did not intimately know the way sand burns in the sunlight. If there was he has forgotten it now, forgotten it as though he had always been a desert-creature raised between these sandstone walls. Now he feels only a grim understanding blossoming in his soul at the whispering of the sand against his skin. He can feel the petals of it tapping against his heart like the wings of a teryr learning how to fly for the first time.

There is something terrible in the feeling of it, in the way it buries down into each of the cracks of his soul.

The sand is still whispering to him when the stranger appears at the end of the canyon (and at first he thinks it only the flowers, only the petals, only the life). And the whispering grows louder, and louder, and louder still instead of fading away into the dust.

The magic is growing teeth like cactus spines and setting them against his throat. When he swallows he can feel them scraping all the way down, can taste the blood and the dust and the rust of it. And he does not smile as the stranger approaches, does not pull away from the sandstone wall that is running now like blood down his shoulder. He only watches the man come closer, and closer, and something in his eyes is begging him to continue walking, to leave him where he stands, to save himself because Ipomoea feels less and less every day like the savior he had once wanted to be —

he doesn’t.

His voices is gentle, and softly wondering, and Ipomoea’s teeth ache because he wants to snarl, and rage, and roar like a lion into the desert (like the lion that had chosen Orestes, Orestes, the man borne of the sea, the man who returned to the sea and left a city broken behind him.) He wants to bare his teeth to the sun and scream at it in a way he has never screamed before — the way he might have, had he stayed in the desert where he was born.

He wants to carve the light from the sun and ask each golden shard of it am I enough now? do you regret it now?

But the sun would not care. And he knows, oh he knows he would not find his retribution in its ichor. He knows in the way that all things born from the desert know that he was owed nothing, deserved nothing, would be given nothing.

He would have to take it, if he wanted it. And he wants it — but he is not sure he wants to want it.

“Your king is missing,” his voice trembles like the last leaf clinging to a birch tree in a storm, “and you wonder if everything is alright?"

Your king, he had said. Not our king. Orestes had never been a king to him, not even when he had pulled the flowers from his mane and pretended to be a citizen wandering the gutted streets of a capitol torn apart by a tyrant and his monster. And he wonders if he will ever start to feel soft again, if he will every smile, really smile, again. He wonders if he will ever look at a stranger of this Court and feel more than distrust rising like an ocean in his chest.

He hopes he will. For the sake of the stranger caught in his wrath.

« r » | @Torin
not at all! <3 I'm sorry you caught him in a less-than-stellar mood