As she begins to speak, he crosses the cool marble floor of the small temple. His passing stirred a small wind to life between his hooves, so that dry leaves and dirt rustled like something like beneath him. His wings reached out, gingerly, slowly, to brush the smooth floor clean, pressing their feathers into the leaves.
The window faces east, more or less - and when Ipomoea reaches it, he can see the way the horizon has already begun to lighten. The sun is still hiding, somewhere far below the edge of the earth. Directly overhead the sky is dark, and stars still reign supreme in the absence of the half moon that had guided him here. But even as he watches, a line of fiery light graces the peak of a distant mountain, crowning it in gold. It will be a while yet before the sun sets in earnest, but somewhere a jay bird is heralding the morning.
He leans his temple against the window frame, and lets his eyes fall closed as her words wash over him. It’s easy to let himself be carried away in her tale; with his eyes closed he can pretend to see it all playing out before him, like ghostly actors dancing across the stage that is his mind. The story lifts itself to the forefront, the center of his attention, and all else fades slowly away as he listens in the peace and quiet
“And did she?” he asks softly at her conclusion, when the temple seemed to echo with the last musical strains of her voice. “Did you learn forgiveness here?”
Forgiveness. For death, for war, for chaos, for all the things that marked their souls as red as the hills of Cantwell.
Ipomoea was not a warrior.
He had always known that. But looking a murderer and a monster in the eyes had brought the realization crashing down over him like a wave of ice cold water.
Even when he wanted to, he could not bring himself to kill; even when he knew the cost of that one man’s life was suffering for countless others. He had hesitated, and it had nearly cost him his own life in the process. And yet he had stood by while others did what he could not, and now he was not so sure if that had been strong or weak of him.
When he turns back to look at her though, he doesn’t see the red that would have covered her on that day she returned to her father. He doesn’t judge her for having taken the lives of others (although maybe once, before the war, before Raum, before he saw fires burning in the night, perhaps he would have).
He sees only another girl from another land, having lived a vastly different life than him and yet still, ended up in the same place. Who smiled without laughter.
There’s a wan, pale light coming in through the open window now, falling across Orien’s altar in a dusty streak.
“The sun is rising,” he says quietly, and he’s not just talking about the sun.
there’s a bluebird in my heart
that wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I only let him out at night sometimes.
I say, stay in there,I’m not going
to let anybody hurt
you
@
”here am i!“
