may the flowers remind us
why the rain was so necessary
why the rain was so necessary
The clearing, once-peaceful, lost all of its charm the moment the two of them entered the sunlight of it. Everything is growing thorns, from the dandelions crushed under his hooves to the dogwood trees clustered around the meadow. The sweetgrass covering the deer, covering him, look more like overeager brambles now.
Everything is growing thorns, because Ipomoea is trembling.
His heart leaps into his throat, his sides turning dark with sweat. And for just a moment, as his breath rasps painfully in and out of lungs that are growing heavy with the weight of the rot filling the air, he begins to wonder if it’s her magic, if it has at last reached out and touched him. But there’s another part of him, a deeper part of him, that knows it isn’t his throat her magic is wrapping around like a noose. It’s only the deer, with his shuddering breaths that force more and more blood from his body with every exhale.
“I know,” he answers her.
But the knowing doesn’t stop the way his magic is responding to her’s, the way he can’t help but reach for the dying thing the same as her. The memory of the golden sapling is just out of reach, caution and understanding lost in the way his heart seems to beat twice as fast as it needs to, like it’s making up for the deer’s own stuttering pulse. There’s a part of him buried away that knows he can’t pull the creature out of her grasp any more than he could the sapling - but he tries anyway. And perhaps that is the only difference the forest will ever know between them.
Even as Thana’s magic is making the animal die, Ipomoea’s is begging for him to live.
The valleys between his ribs deepen, and his skin grows as thin as paper; but if he had any more blood to give to the earth, it does not come. As his breath gives out at last and his limbs go still, moss begins to creep along his spine and replace the thorns, pollen and roots filling the gaps in his skin a blade had made. And when his heart finally stops, so does Ipomoea’s - and the silence is almost-peaceful. And he forgets, as the seconds stretch on and he feels his own legs go cold, why he had been trembling, and aching, and why it had seemed so important at the time.
Because in that infinite space that stretches between his heartbeats, he doesn't feel the cold grasp of her magic against the stag's throat, or the prick of his own thorns against his skin. He doesn't see the green of the bright new leaves budding along the trees, or hear the whisper of the river in the distance. In the absence of his own breath he only hears Thana's, and the tapping of her tail against the ground like a lullaby carrying him to sleep.
@thana
“here am i”
