IPOMOEA
there's no place i'd rather be
T
he longer they stand there within each other’s embrace, the more the magic flows from him. Each shuddering breath brings forth new life, blades of grass springing to existence and clawing forth from the blackened earth, clawing for the sun like newborn warriors. Inch by fragile inch, the meadow grows.The progress is slow, and shaky; sooner rather than later the magic will run itself out, and his energy will expire. He’s never held it for so long before; but he can’t stop it now, nor would he want to.
Even if it took him a week, a month, a year; Ipomoea would be here to regrow the forest the fires took from him.
Her touch is golden and warm, each word she speaks a melody that banishes another cobweb from his heart. There’s a hollow feeling inside of him, one that has persisted since that first meeting on the summit of Veneror, between himself and the other Regimes. It’s carved out some piece of him, so subtly he had not noticed the beast’s progress until he woke up one morning and was not happy to see the sunlight streaming in through his window. It had seemed too late at that point to care.
But as the petals and leaves rain around them, and her voice is sweet as honey, warm as sunlight, he feels refreshed in a way he hasn’t in ages. The guilt is still there, in the back of his mind, but fading; how could it not, when his friend is here to tell him he’s forgiven?
“I still should have come,” he presses, but not with the quite so much heaviness as before. If not during the fires, then after. As an Emissary, he would have; but as a Regent, he had been too fearful to leave.
He knew now that life was a journey of mistakes; next time he would be better. For himself, for Florentine; for both of their Courts. Of course, he desperately hoped there wouldn’t be a next time, or a reason to put his newfound knowledge to the test; that was the naive summer child in him, always hoping for the best.
But Ipomoea had been born in the cold winter, and this coming season promised to be colder still. Optimism alone would not be enough to see him through this time.
”You could not keep me from you if you tried, Po.”
He couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled past his lips from her statement, leaning into the kiss she presses into his dark cheek. “I should have known so,” he quips, trying to contrive the same airiness in his tone that he hears in her’s.
Overhead the eagle tips its wing, spiraling away into the distance, and the spotted boy shakes the idleness from his bones.
“You didn’t come to see a dead forest,” he says, and it isn’t a question. His pink eyes turn to look at her, and his smile turns a little more sweet. “Did you forget the way to the Court?” his tone is teasing as he bumps her with one shoulder.
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