Ipomoea
I hope you are blessed
with a heart like a wildflower.
with a heart like a wildflower.
He listens to her, quietly, thoughtfully, stirring his tea and watching a falling star arc through the enchanted sky above them. It blazes white-hot and bright, brighter than the other stars that watch on in glittering silence. He wonders briefly if the other stars are silenced by awe, or judgement; but he knows without asking that it doesn’t matter. A shooting star plummets only for its only glory, its own joy, its own sense of adventure. In a sky full of stars that all looked the same, only a few dared to be different.
Isra had been like that - and still was - a shooting star, a thing for dozens of others to cast their hopes and their wishes upon.
“Then you must show them every day that the stars are still worth reaching for,” he tells Antiope, and this time the smile he offers her is not so shy. Ipomoea knows what it feels like to take the place of another sovereign, to rule in their absence; he does not know Antiope, but he has seen her from afar, seen her in the streets filled with smoke and starlight, seen her raising her axe like a promise when Raum threatened to tear the city down. He knows she is not a child of summer, but one who has seen winters and darkness and chosen again and again to push through until the morning.
He supposes she was made for Denocte as much as Isra was; and he hopes he is right.
“What would you like to know?” he asks her, setting his own tea aside. He can see the steam still rising from their cups, twin ribbons curling through the air to find each other. "They may call Delumine the Court of Scholars, but history is not all we record. The libraries are as filled with fiction as they are archives, and wonderful artifacts that others have forgotten the use of. A hundred stories of how the world came to be, and how an orphan boy from another court came to rule."
What he wants to say, but does not, is sometimes, I love your Court more than my own. And it scares me.
Instead he only swallows thickly, and smiles at her when he lifts his cup again.
“But if I had to choose a favorite, it would be their study of the different plants. The gardeners say they hope to grow every plant in the world there someday, and I hope that they achieve that goal."
@Antiope
ahh i am sorry this took so long “speech”
