Yesterday, he had awoken to silence. He had risen with the dawn (when most of the night court was falling at last into their beds). Without saying a word, he had gone to the ocean, letting the water lap at his hooves while he watched the sun rise and split the world in half, heaven above and seas below. For a moment he had thought about swimming out to meet the sun, of capturing the largest star in Novus and taming it with his touch.
He had wondered if that was actually how Oriens became a god; not by being born into it, but by wrangling the sun itself and carving out a path in the sky for it. Perhaps it had been a wild thing before him, that went where it pleased and wept at the loss of its freedom.
It wasn’t how the story was told; but he thought he liked his version more.
But today he wakes up to a world as black as pitch, where shouts fill the air and the cobblestone streets scream as galloping hooves strike them. Somewhere a dragon roars, shaking the ground with its anger, and a shiver courses down his spine.
He rises with the first shout of fire! stumbling from his bed. The ground is unforgiving when he falls to his knees, his wince swallowed up by the darkness. As he sits there, trembling in the darkness, a warm glow begins to permeate the room. It is small and shy, creeping in through the open window to cast a slanting ray of sunlight across the floor.
When he goes to the window he expects to see a new sun, rising where it shouldn’t.
There is no sun. There is something much, much more fearsome.
The night is dark and fearsome, a cold wind bringing salt and smoke to stain his skin. He chokes on it with his first breath, smoke burning his lungs; he wants to go back, to shut the window and pull the blinds tightly shut. He wants the sun to rise like it had yesterday morning, and the waves to be gentle as they baptize his ankles.
But Ipomoea already knows: there’s no time for wishes and wants, there’s no time to think.
He takes off into the night, and Odet barely has time to follow him.
His heart weeps inside of his chest as the fires loom above him, each flame a mouth that reaches hungrily into the storehouse. Grain, wheat, apples; nothing is safe, everything is aflame. Smoke clogs the air, dampening the air so that the roar of the disaster, the shouts of the helpers, everything sounds strangely muted and far away. Only the heat of the flames remain as proof that it was not a distant tragedy, singing his cheeks. He stares and he stares, unable to look away from the beautiful destruction tearing apart the night.
Until Odet pulls sharply at his mane, his clacking beak loud and angry. He leaps into motion, following a pale palomino into the fray.
Water fights fires, but there is no water here; only fire and kindling.
“There’s no time!” he shouts, but his voice feels strangely quiet, drowned out by the raging inferno. “We have to save what we can!”
Ipomoea does not stop, does not turn back to see who hears him or who cares. He continues on, straight to the source itself, where he begins to drag barrels and sacks, anything he can reach, away from the flames’ greedy reach. A bag he carries crumbles to ash, a dozen apples rolling and bouncing down the cobblestone streets.
He can hear his blood singing louder than the flames when he runs back to the conflagration.
having no one,
forced by my nature to
keep wandering
because wandering
was the only thing
that i believed in
and the only thing that believed in me
@isra @
”here am i!“
