IPOMOEA
let's be wildflowers
I
pomoea can’t help but wonder if whoever had marked Orestes’ brow with the sun had somehow known what he would become. Sovereign of a beggar city, bathed in the light of the sun. Had they whispered to him that he would soon rule over the day? Or had they cautioned him that the day would soon rule him? Perhaps they had said nothing at all.He wonders what they would think now. What they would say when tales reached them of the man who walked through a fire and did not burn, who knelt like a parishioner at an altar to be crowned not by a priest, but by a lion. Stranger things had happened, Ipomoea had seen so for himself - but how many were in this city who had not?
A part of him thinks that he shouldn’t have come here, not today. The desert is no friend to him, it never had been. He knew already that if he gave it the chance, it would swallow him whole, bury him beneath all that sand and sun. A merchant had told him once that the Mors sang, that its dunes danced - but Ipomoea knows it would only laugh at him, while it buried him out there all alone. Solterra never wept, least of all for him. It did not love him, and he was not so sure he loved it. Not the way he loved the forest.
But he had come to see if the new king was truly a king. He knows he shouldn’t care, knew that the people here didn’t want his opinion of their city. To them he was an outsider, perhaps even more so than Orestes was.
A small part of him is breaking at the thought, because of how different things could have been.
The rest of him pretends to not feel it.
The jam tastes like his childhood, like sand and sun and something empty. But he forces himself to swallow it anyway, while he thinks to himself that even the bakers have found a way to tell him that he has no right to be here. The next bite he takes he is determined to taste the sweetness. He almost fails. A raven croaks as it flies past, and it, too, sounds like it’s laughing at him.
"Orestes," he echoes. Long live the king.
His eyes are shockingly blue, a color seldom seen in Solterra. But his body is gold, and that more than makes up for it. Ipomoea holds the stranger’s gaze, feeling like he ought to know him from somewhere, but he can’t remember where. So when Orestes asks his name, he hesitates. But only for a moment.
"I was born here," he tells him, and something in his voice seems to be saying but you were not, and it isn’t a question.
He continues.
"The desert gave me a name, once," he had always wondered as a boy if his parents had ever bothered to name him. Now he knows. "But I don’t remember it.” "
He listens to the echoing of hooves on the city street, flicking an ear in the lone horse’s direction. The wind turns a tumbleweed, over and over and over again, and Ipomoea wonders if the plant remembers what it had been before it died. Before it became a dead, dry thing tumbling through a ghost town.
"Have you ever been anyone but Orestes?” "
The answer shouldn’t matter.
But it does.
@orestes | "speaks" | notes
