He holds her gaze - perhaps for a moment too long - before he nods and quietly accepts it. He knows of Solterra’s reputation, but it had always seemed so far away, removed from his own world and mind. Eulalie had an airy feel about her that now, in retrospect, feels to him as the desert should. How she still smiled and wove stories to entertain him was beyond him, and it made him envy Somnus if only a little.
Ipomoea lets her voice wash over him like the waves, and for a moment his eyes flutter closed like dark half-moons pressed against his cheeks. His legs are moving seemingly of their own accord, drifting like a wind-blown thing until he’s standing between the three twisted spires. And when he opens his eyes he’s looking up, up through the small ring of stone into where the sky lies waiting.
He does not see the blue of the mid-day sky; his mind is too busy imagining how it would look to gaze up at the stars through that window, and how magic might twist them into something else. And as he looks, and as Eulalie talks, he imagines the moon sliding into view, bathing him in a silvery light that is cold and electric and sets his skin to tingling. And his mind can’t stop turning, echoing the same question over and over like it’s the stars themselves projecting into his thoughts -
What is it that you truly seek?
The stars fall away, one by one by one, until the blue of the sky fills his vision.
Ipomoea lowers his head, glancing back at Eulalie. A smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes hides at the corners of his lips.
“I think that sometimes it sounds like we were born a hundred years too late,” he says, gesturing back at the rock monument. “Like all the magical and wonderful feats have already been accomplished, and all we can do is look back on them and wonder at the power of our ancestors.”
The stories always had the more powerful, the more creative, the more ingenious heroes. Sometimes Ipomoea wondered if he would ever get to witness one of them himself; but the more obelisks he found, the more he thought they were all relics of the past.
“…But it makes for a good story,” he concedes, when he turns back to her.
Sometimes, he hopes that he might make for a good story, too.
“It’s getting late,” he says when the silence had begun to settle in between them. The edge of the horizon had turned golden, as the last remnants of the sun slipped from the edge of the earth. “Should we be heading back?”
And when he turns he offers her his shoulder, before he begins to retrace their hoofprints along the beach - albeit at a much slower, relaxed pace this time.
hearts are breaking
wars are raging on
you’ve got me nervous
i’m at the end of my rope
hey, man, we can’t all be like you
i wish we were all rose-colored too
my rose-colored boy
@eulalie !
”here am i!“
