with criminal mentality
For a while he walks alone, and if it weren’t for the stillness of the forest it may have been like any other walk in the woods. If it weren’t for the clouds turning his own mood gray, he might have been able to pretend that the silence was easy, companionable. That there wasn’t another kind of storm brewing, both between the trees and somewhere between his heartbeats.
The roar of thunder in the distance is getting louder, and closer; every time Ipomoea lifts his head towards the sky he expects to see it weeping, expects to feel the raindrops falling like ice against his face and back. He used to wish for rain to water the earth, to make the forget-me-nots and the primroses unfurl their petals with a sigh. Now it seems more like an omen, every cloud, every flash of lightning a premonition; it sends a tremble down the back of his spine, one that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with anticipation. Somewhere a part of him is still telling him to be brave each time his wings flutter; and it only makes his heart beat faster as if to say I already am.
He’s following a set of hoof prints leading through the forest when he hears the pegasus. He glances up only when the shadow falls across his path, a darkness deeper than anything he might find in the woods.
”Find anything?”
He watches the electricity rumble across Andras’ skin, feels the flash of heat through the space that separates them. Andras hangs like judgement in the sky, and not for the first time Ipomoea wonders if anyone had ever looked at himself and seen something like reckoning written across his skin.
He doesn’t say anything.
Ipomoea only steps to the side, so that Andras, too, might see the hoof prints he has been walking beside. And he doesn’t have to explain what the bright red shining from the middle of every few means.
The sight of it, bared to what little light makes its way through the canopy, oil-slick against the forest soil, makes his own stomach begin to churn. So he watches Andras instead, wondering what sort of rage he might see there.
“It’s not old,” he says. His voice is far too quiet, far too hollow to belong to the Ipomoea of old; but there are only gods and monsters in Viride today, and even he isn’t sure which one he would rather be.
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"Speaking."
