you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
There will always be a part of him that loves Denocte, in a way he will never be able to love Delumine. He tries to tell himself that he would still love Denocte with a different queen, a different sovereign who doesn’t carry the sea in her heart. Even now when he looks back at the citadel he can see the mark of a different king, one with silver gypsy coins that laughed with the same wild abandon as his moonlit eyes. In a way, the city streets they crowded now were the same streets they had crowded the day they woke up to find their king had abandoned them. The people still held the same breathless anticipation in their lungs, the same rosemary-scented smoke still curled the air between street vendors’ stalls, the same kiss of ocean mist still washed his face like some holy communion.
And yet -
And yet it was not the same, because the faces of the people were more open now. They lived for more than the night now, when the darkness could hide their sins and their shame and their secrets. These people had had to fight for their freedom, and not only once; and it showed, in their eyes, in their way they stood, in the way they looked at their queen (for Isra would always be a queen, their queen, even when she was not their sovereign) as she walked that path to the sea.
He could only wonder if the Denocte he gazed upon tonight would be the same Denocte he woke up to in the morning.
Ipomoea presses in against the others, and as he feels their shoulders touching his he feels less like a king, and more like a worshipper at an altar. There’s a small part of him that whispers that he should not be here, the same voice he heard every time he abandoned his court for their’s, but it is not the first time he ignores it. And each time he pushes it away that voice grows smaller, and fainter, and he hates that Delumine’s pull is, for the moment, weaker than Denocte’s on him. But tonight isn’t a night for regrets, and he doesn’t want to think of all the things he could have done, or should be doing; not when tonight is her’s.
“May the stars watch over you,” he whispers the words against her shoulder as she passes. And for just a few paces he falls into step alongside her, just long enough to pluck a moonflower from the twining stem that had been wrapping its way up his leg, and to twine it instead through her mane. The vine curls itself against her skin like it never wanted to live apart from her, and he steps back with a smile as soft as the flower’s bleached petals.
“And may you bring a new story back to us one day.”
Then he fades away into the crowd once more. And he tries to not let the allure of that waiting ship and the worlds it promises to explore be stronger than Delumine’s hold on him.
@isra “speech”
