IPOMOEA
somedays i am wild child
H
e’s watching the water even as she comes forward, and for the first time he imagines what it might be like to live at the bottom of a lake, or an ocean. He wonders if it was dark, and if that darkness took the place that light would on land. Was it hard to be happy, or at peace, when the source of so much good was removed? Maybe that explained the fickleness of the sea creatures, he thinks to himself, and why they so often took the place of monsters in stories. The thought made his heart ache, like a part of it was breaking. But when he looks at Isra he only smiles, and the only hint as to what he was thinking is when he gestures out over the lake. “Even that one?” he asks quietly, for surely she knows more of those underwater worlds than he. “Is life beneath the waves the same as life on land?” It seems impossible, but then again, he has no other way of knowing.
Not for the first time, he marvels at her magic. It clings to her like a second skin, like it would be foolish to ever assume a version of her could exist without it. Like water turning itself to wine, she reshapes the world until it takes a form she finds more pleasing. That, he can understand - it’s the same reason for why flowers follow in his wake, blooming in his footsteps. So he watches, as arrow turns to blade, and he waits, as willow becomes a vine. And when she drops her creation at his feet, he picks it up with equal parts wonder and apprehension.
The blade is singing, and from it he imagines blood running down its length. And for a moment - but only a moment - he’s amazed that nature can be so violent.
But the dagger seems to laugh at him when he thinks that, and he understands why. Nature did not know violence or peace or how they were different. It only knew what was.
Ipomoea lifts his eyes away from the redwood edge, meeting her eyes. If his heart is hesitant, if his soul shies at all from her words, his blood doesn’t seem to notice. It rages and it rages and it sears his veins and it screams at him to run, although he isn’t sure if it means he should be running to or from something.
But he thinks even a short-lived peace is better than no peace at all, and in every story there was always a hero to fight the violence.
“I will,” he says, and there’s a sense of finality to his tone that surprises even him.
And every time his heart beats, it brings him that much closer to the end that he was becoming more and more sure of. He lifts the blade a little bit higher, and there's something beautiful and terrible in the way the early morning light makes the red look more like blood than wood. He doesn't yet know how to use it - but oh, the wood is alive, and hungry, and it already knows for him. But still-
"Can you make me a target?"
@isra | "speaks" | notes: <3
