The stag looks how he would imagine perfidy to look, were it made into flesh and then given legs to walk across the earth with.
Ipomoea sits with his back to an aspen and stares, cherry red eyes watching as the creature ambles back and forth between the trees. And as Rhoeas turns to him now with eyes that are more akin to bloody rubles than poppy flowers, it strikes him:
He had betrayed the forest when he let death weave her way through the heart of Delumine. He had betrayed his country when he took for himself a crown that was not meant for him. And now he had betrayed his own bonded when he had replaced him for another. And he had refused to allow him to die — so now, it seemed, his magic was determined to live on in him as a reminder.
Spring had arrived haltingly, cautiously; like a timid bluebird, he thought, watching as the same bird flit nervously around its tree. Once he had thought he heard love songs in their singing; now he hears only their territorial cries. But he tries, oh he tries to see the lightness of them, of their songs and laughter and life. Ipomoea tries to see only the way the light is breaking through the canopy, and the leaves seem to brighten and lean towards its warmth.
He tries to not keep glancing into the shadows. And wondering how much deeper they might go.
But spring is not the time for reminiscing on the darkness.
So he is following Rhoeas through the gentler parts of the forest, where new saplings are stretching tall and thin to fill the gaps between their parents and wildflowers create a blanket of color for them to stand upon. All the trees hang over his head in crowns of budding leaves and new growth. Moss drapes itself like a verdant wreath about his shoulders, a cloak over his bonded’s bones. The earth turns to poppies gilded in gold and grasses braiding themselves into patterns and shapes. A sod ship bumps itself against the shore of his legs. A fox kit chases after it when it turns and sails through the clearing.
Ipomoea watches them go. And in his chest his heart has grown legs and is galloping along beside them. Stride after stride it slips through the saplings of his rib bones and frees itself. Step after step it chases that freedom through the forest, through the gold-and-green dappled light. And he is left there watching, bleeding magic instead of blood, and wonder instead of violence, and love instead of rage.
Wonder crosses his mind in the flicker of a shadow, how long it might be until the river of his love dries up.
But the shadow is gone when he sees the familiar shape moving through the trees, a pale figure among the colors of his spring-forest. And he is moving towards it, towards her, even before he has decided to go.
She watched how it paced, at first bold and brave.
Then she saw how it took flight, frightened of a girl who stank of death.
Or it was not the smell of her… maybe it knew?
Had the trees, the plants, the birds and the insects been whispering? Did tales of her trickle through of how there is a golden kelpie who hunted a friend and turned him? A girl not strong enough to stop her kelpie-nature. A girl too weak to walk the path she wished to.
As she watched the stag flee, she knows how vain she is. Her tragedy belongs only to her and to him, Torix.
Oh. Torix.
Guilt is lead within her. It weighs her limbs her heart and her soul. But it is puckered, broken metal too. The edges of it grate her into pieces. Sereia is crumbling as she walks, she is turning into nothingness.
How can she move on from this? How can she ever find peace with herself?
Death had seemed a sweet escape, but her morals are too high too complex. She will not take her life by blade or by blow. She does not think that is right, or fair. But if she slowly dies because she will not eat, well, she thinks that is fair. Her lips curl without humour at the irony of herself.
She would have spiraled deeper into these morbid, sad thoughts. She was sinking, sinking, until he voice somes like a line for her to cling to. And she does, the kelpie turns to him from where she roams listless and barely awake. She looks to her king as he steps out of the emerald brush. The sea-girl smiles but it is no smile at all and it does not touch her lips…
“Your majesty,” her greeting is soft as she tips her golden eyes up to him in question. When he nears too much, she steps back. She possesses no trust in herself. She keeps from him in case he too becomes like Torix. Though she thinks he could kill her before she gets close. Maybe he is one of the few who could stop her frenzied nature when it comes.
“How can I help you?” A humbled whisper. It may be an eternity before she can bring herself to smile again.
@Ipomoea
She wore her hope like a crown, an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
Rhoeas will always recognize another monster before Ipomoea does.
Perhaps it is because he is something of a monster himself — a creature made in magic, pieced together with plants and bones. A half-life, a half-soul, a half-remembered heart that beats in pollen instead of blood. So when he sees the girl, with her haunted eyes and the deepened hollows above them, he bumps his shoulder in warning to Ipomoea’s.
But Ipomoea has never been good at seeing the monsters around him.
The proof of it was in his heart, in his Regime, in his love; it was in the shape of a unicorn who left trails of rot and ash behind her and still, he had invited her into his forest. It was there in the cells below Delumine where Emersyn wallowed in her own transformation. It was there in his daughter’s eyes, perfect though they might seem to him.
If he sees the guilt in Sereia’s eyes as another warning it is lost somewhere in the guilt building up in waves in his own heart. So even when his bonded rakes one antler along the trees he is stepping forward to meet another monster in the meadows.
“I thought maybe I would ask if you have forgotten yet what you wanted to —“ his voice cuts off when she steps back from him. A frown flashes like a shadow across his face.
He could count the spaces between Sereia’s inhales and exhales.
Ipomoea steps forward again, hoping with bated breath that she does not retreat in kind. “Are you well, Sereia?” He thinks he does not need to hear her say it to know the truth of it. But still, he asks. And still, he hopes —
She hears antlers against bark. It sounds so much like tooth across bone that she shudders, a rattling leaf in a wind. Her jaws still recall resistance of ribs between them. They dream in memories and warm, sweet blood.
Her eyes turn to where her king’s bonded lurks, a shadow looming. She holds it in the dark bruise of her gaze. There is a sorrow that lays upon the deep seabed of her wide, dark eyes.
As she moves back, shying away, recoiling like a flower from the shock of rain, he frowns. Sereia catches it. The sight paints itself across her memory and lays seeds in which her guilt blooms as sorrowful as the bluebells at her feet which bend and toll sad songs in the wind.
He asks if she is well. There is laughter bubbling up in her throat. She wants to let it out but holds it in for she knows there is no joy in that laugh. There is only sadness and loathing. Her lashes lower upon her cheek and she turns from his bonded with its tines that pry wood apart like a springtime melody. She settles her gaze upon Ipomoea, tips up her chin until her hair comes to rest across her nose and over her lips. It obscures her smile.
Sereia sighs.
“I am well in my body.” She says and wonders what wellness truly is. Has she ever been well? When she is dying from not eating, her mind switching off, her body struggling with the mountainous task of living, how can she ever be well in body? Yet she says it, and believes it. For she is full up on meat and blood. She is well for she is the furthest she has been from starving in months. And she hates herself for it.
Sereia says nothing of the rest of her. The kelpie does not tell him how her soul and heart ails. How sadness and regret for her actions grips her tight and has despair building within her like a frantic, churning river. “What I wanted to... what?” The gilded kelpie asks, in pursuit of his second question, as the bluebells of sadness sway and chime like waves at her ankles.
@Ipomoea
She wore her hope like a crown, an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
When did he begin seeking out the monsters in other people like he was trying to justify the existence of his own?
Ipomoea can see it haunting her; can see the way it lays teeth around her heart and makes her shudder. He can feel it like it is his own heart being gnawed away at (and perhaps it is; perhaps Ipomoea has at last become everyone’s monster, carving away bits of himself so that he might fit more demons inside of him.) He wants to reach for her —
it should be wrong, to reach for a monster with love instead of hate. It should be wrong, to forgive the wrongs for the sake of the soul. It should make him feel wrong, wrong, wrong to look past the sin in her that he might have condemned in another.
But Ipomoea is alive in his contradictions now. Soft and sharp, peace and war, life and death. She says she is well in her body and he might have laughed for the understanding of it, if his heart was not breaking in sorrow. He might have told her I am, too if he was not always still looking east and wondering when the call of the sands would at last prove too much for him.
“Have you forgotten what you are yet?” his voice is no more than a whisper of the leaves overhead, shaking in the wind. And he hopes — desperately, fervently — that she has not. He can still see the way she danced beneath the glow of Denocte’s arches, can still hear her voice whispering to him above the bonfire drums — I dance to forget what I am.
Ipomoea knows it will not help.
He knows it the way he knows she is still becoming, even if she misses the meaning of it. He can see her struggling the way the first spring flowers sometimes struggle, as if they will never survive the first frost. But they do (always, they do), and he has always thought they bloomed all the brighter for it.
He thinks (he hopes) the same will ring true for her. Ipomoea has seen enough death and destruction in the world to look at a struggling flower and wish only for it to persevere.
So he lifts his head, and steps closer despite the way she had shied away, despite the way Rhoeas presses an antler of warning into his side. “I wanted to ask something of you. Dawn Court is in need of Champions, and I—“ can feel time running out “—can think of no one better to lead the scholars, than you.” Ipomoea knows it is always those whose hearts feel wrapped in darkness who find ways to let the light shine brighter. Perhaps it is precisely because Sereia thinks herself a monster that he believes in her more. Perhaps it is why he sees her not as what she is, but who she could be; who they all could be.
It is perhaps the optimist in him, that boy who wanted nothing more than to grow a garden (only now his garden is not of flowers, but of people.)
“I know it is a lot to ask. But still I hope you will consider it.” The wind whispers between them, and even now he can feel the cold bite to it, even here in summer. He can feel it calling to the monster in his own heart.
When he tilts his head to look into the darkness between the trees where Rhoeas steps, he thinks he can see fate curling its lips into a smile. And perhaps it is then that he knows what is coming for him, for them all.
