you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
There are a thousand fractures of color dancing on the ground, as the light of the bonfires breaks over the stained glass windows. They bounce along the trail ahead of Ipomoea, and they seem to him then like a guide meant to lead the wayward home. He wonders if they would know where to lead him, if he followed them into the depths of the mountains. But he doesn’t follow them. And he doesn’t walk through the arches that hold back the sky, not yet.
There was something about Denocte that always made him feel as though he were both losing and finding himself. He could feel the mountain air filling his lungs, and the smoke of the fire wrapping around his skin like a cloak, and the firelight crowning him in orange flames. It was changing him. And he was welcoming it.
He remembers when it had been a gate standing here, a checkpoint instead of an invitation. Ipomoea had been only a boy it seemed when a dragon had set fire to this mountain pass - staring now at the arch replacing it had him feeling half a boy again. To him the swirling smoke and the silver mists look like the ghosts of Denocte, like Gilgamesh tearing apart the mountains once again. In the darkness beyond the bonfires he can see the monsters of a dark and terrible history rising again, and beneath his hooves he can feel the bones of the earth groaning and turning over in their unmarked graves, He can feel them dragging him down, can feel the roots of this place claiming him.
But Rhoeas is there beside him, pressing flower-draped antlers against his shoulder, pushing him out of the shadows of the arch and into the light of the bonfires. In the distance he can hear music and laughter and singing, the celebrations of a new Regime, a new era, a new dream to be made into reality. A part of him wants to celebrate with the. The part of him that is still half a boy with eyes filled with joy and a thousand wishes in his heart waiting for a falling star to attach to. The boy who dance his demons and fears away wants to join them, to turn yet another blind eye to the skeletons hiding in the closet.
But he knows now of the monsters that lurk in the dark, the beasts waiting for a chance such as this. Sometimes he feels like that beast himself.
So he stands in the fractured light between the pillars, eyes turned towards the darkness even as bodies stream past him towards the light. And until the dawn breaks over the mountains with a rose-red sun to herald the banishing of the dark, he waits.
And he watches.
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