there is fire everywhere
and i am lost in it
and i am lost in it
H
e can still feel the heat from the fires, the brightness of the flames forever imprinted into his mind. It seemed his life was one fire after the next now; Solterra, Delumine, Denocte. No matter where he went he found disaster, in a world torn asunder.Smoke lingers in the air, the sharp, acrid smell of burning buildings filling the street and replacing the scent of spices by which he had always known the market. Snow and ash; he can’t tell the difference between them anymore. Both are white and falling, both are coating the ground in a thin, ever-growing blanket.
There’s a hollowness in his chest, an empty space where his heart should have been beating. He thinks the fire may have burned it away, like the raiders had cut it out and tossed it upon the woodpile to burn it with the rest of Denocte’s chattels. And in its absence, he feels nothing - nothing except for the bile rising slowly in his throat.
And the anger that accompanies it.
It feels as if he’s standing in Viride all over again, staring at the blackened shell of a once mighty forest. The leaves and color had been stripped away, and all the joy and warmth and life along with it. It’s similarly muted and somber here, where the markets are hushed and the stalls closed and everything is covered in white.
But here the trees are replaced by houses, and the flames were no accident. White ash coats his hooves, white snow a blanket across his back, white-hot blood singing the inside of his veins.
Where he had felt sorrow back in Delumine, Ipomoea feels a slow-burning rage now. It’s a foreign feeling, one made all the more intense because of it. It streaks through his mind like a ghost, filling the empty spaces of his chest with a fire not dissimilar to the fire from the raid.
This is why you came, the remnants of the fire tells him.
This is why he left his home.
To fight fire with fire, to act when the rest of Delumine was silent. He wants to bring this picture home with him, he wants to show his family the destruction they had turned away from. Don’t you know it’s only a matter of time? We won’t be immune forever. He wants to grab their shoulders and shake them to awareness, to stir them to action, to make them understand that this ruin was not confined to Denocte, that it would spread like a plague until everything and everyone was as hollowed out as the markets.
He wants to scream. He wants to cry and rage and flee, but he doesn’t. Ipomoea stands in the market, willing his magic to bring the life back, but he thinks he may have cut that part out of himself, too. His magic is quiet, the flowers decorating his brow wilting and dropped dead, browned leaves to the streets. He wants to make it beautiful again - but this time, he can’t.
So he lets the fire within him burn
@open to any!! | "speaks" | set after the day court raid
