IPOMOEA
let's be wildflowers
F
or a moment, it feels like time may have stopped, and they are wading far too slowly through air that is as thick as sap pouring out from the wounds of the trees. The forest is golden, so golden he thinks they have been trapped in that sap, suspended while it turns to amber all around them. It’s not meaningless to me.
She wouldn’t know how alive those words make him suddenly feel, like a part of him that he’s hidden away is waking up at last. He takes a breath, and the forest air feels right when he inhales it and wrong when he exhales, painful and wonderful and crisp.
Maybe if he had listened to the forest when she first set hoof into it, he might have known what to expect. Maybe the trees would have told him that death had stepped into their midst, and then he might have feared her, too, and he would have anticipated rot instead of hoping for growth. But he does not know, and as she turns back to that slender sapling that burns with sunlight and life, he leans forward with hungry eyes that betray his expectation.
For a moment, nothing happens.
And then his heart sinks, as ice creeps over the fragile stalk and turns the edges of those bright leaves black.
Later, when he looks back on this moment, Ipomoea will not remember what he said or what he thought. He remembers only how he rushed forward, breaking the sunlight across his back and falling to his knees beside her. He remembers how close he had been to the unicorn who brought death with a caress, and how the plant had shuddered to feel both of them touching it at once.
The leaf still turned black, curling in upon itself until its petiole snaps, and it falls with a final sigh to the ground, taking his heart with it. For a moment his heart stops, and he can’t bear to breathe.
But then another leaf takes the place of the first, small and green and alive, and as more leaves fall, more take their place. Ipomoea’s heart shudders back to life alongside them, as the tree can’t help but accept life and death as one, and experiences both at once (but was there ever any other way? Maybe that is how life has always been.)
He looks up at her, and he’s near enough to see the way her horn is spindled, peeled back like tree bark in the spring. And although he knows the forest is chanting at her to leave, even while the canopies seem to be shifting overhead in sudden turmoil, his eyes are begging her to stay.
“Thana,” he whispers to her from across the sapling. “Will you come to Delumine with me?” It feels almost wrong to ask, but this time he does not care to think about what might be right.
He only thinks that a unicorn and a pegasus might both learn to speak a new language, the other's language, the language of life and the language of death.
@Thana | "speaks" | notes: <3
