may the flowers remind us
why the rain was so necessary
why the rain was so necessary
Spring had arrived haltingly, hesitatingly, so tenuous it was almost lost amid all the other noise.
Ipomoea almost missed the first few buds of green sprouting along the branches, and the way the canopies gradually filled in overhead. It seemed strange to him, when he lifted his head to the sky and saw a thousand shades of green in its stead. Wrong, almost; like the world was no longer the same without skeleton branches caging him in.
He used to think the arrival of spring made everything new again; like the blood could be washed away with the snow, like he could pretend it had never existed. There was still a part of him that clung to that, a part of him that smiled a soft hello to the new leaves and the birds that flit back and forth between them. That part of him can almost imagine it’s only another walk in the woods, and pretends to not hear warnings in the birdsong and premonitions in the way a distant deer turned and fled at the sight of them.
You should have stayed home, that voice still whispers to him - or is it the trees? If you hadn’t left us, all those months ago- His smile is fleeting, fading even before he turns back to the path he follows through the woods.
The undergrowth of the forest is trampled, crushed under the weight of someone running. The tracks are fresher now - whatever it is had slowed, but the blood flowing from their wounds hadn’t. It’s thick and red and still warm, as if to proudly say that winter would never truly leave the forest, not anymore.
His heart is beating like a war drum and it, too, drowns out the quiet arrival of spring.
And he moves along at its pace, half-running now through the forest as he chases something dying (distantly he knows that it must be dying, even without knowing what it feels like to bleed the way it does.) He can hear Thana tracking beside him, can see the point of her horn breaking the sunlight that falls across their backs. And the blade still strapped to his leg begins to loosen, the point of it tapering, spiraling, reforming itself anew.
By the time he breaks through the trees and into the meadow it looks more like a unicorn’s horn than a sword, aimed at the bleeding thing that lies in the grass, ribcage heaving with every breath.
He forgets, then, that he’s supposed to be looking for the killer, and not the killed; and he forgets to worry about his own safety when he wades through the sea of grass like he’s treading water. Ipomoea only falls to his knees beside the creature, and stares at the bits of crystal half-torn from its head that should have been beautiful, that should have glowed in the sunlight, that are smeared now with blood and mud and sweat. And as the whites of the deer’s eyes roll towards him, and its legs thrash against the ground like it thinks it still is running, he only wonders how the world turned so green overnight,
and why it hadn’t turned red instead.
@thana
“here am i”
