you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
In the fading of the light and the quiet of the night, the glowing statues reigned supreme. Looking into the stallion’s eyes seem, to him, as akin to looking into the pits of hell as all the artists described them: bright, fiery, hungry. An inferno waiting to consume. Even now the flames dance greedily along the carved-marble face, their light turning every line every hollow, every chisel to a living, dancing shadow. It is hard to look at anything else. The rest of the world fades away, a background of muffled hoofbeats and whispered words that made the statue seem all the more salient, almost-holy.
For a while, Ipomoea stares back in silence. For a while, Ipomoea stares back and thinks he ought to throw his head back in that same rigid arch, and open his mouth to reveal those same flashing teeth, and scream in a way the statue never can.
He does not. But oh, how he wants to.
And it is in silence that he turns away, and begins the familiar garden path. Each step is already ingrained into his memory, written into his bones (how many nights has he paced this same path, unable to sleep? Too many, Rhoeas would tell him). But tonight, tonight there are countless statues, countless carved faces, countless glowing eyes to watch him. He stares back at each of them in turn, like a dying man finding salvation in their looks of pain, and joy, and wonder. And he tries not to think of the way each one looks and feels a bit like him, like walking through a graveyard of memories he thought he had laid to rest, only to look around and find each rising from the ground as one -
The banquet table stands in the middle of the garden, a thousand glowing lights around it drawing him near. The moonlight falters and stretches around it, and when he tips his head to look at the bits of bone and driftwood scattered about he sees only blank faces not yet carved, bodies not yet given form, eyes not yet opened. The magic in him starts to tremble, but in this garden of silent things there is nothing for it to nourish.
Still, he steps closer all the same, close enough for the lantern-light to embrace him like he belongs there with it. And still he picks up a mass of tangled driftwood, and a carving knife, and holds the two together like he could maybe know how to turn a dead thing beautiful again.
But he only stands there quiet, and still, and unable to bring himself to make the first cut.
It is not until hoofbeats come to rest behind him, and still the driftwood lies untouched, that he sets the virgin knife back upon the table. For a moment, as a girl at another table lifts her finished sculpture into the air, and all those around her cheer for it, he is quiet. But then he clears his throat and without turning around, asks the stranger, “If you could make anything in the world, if in the blink of an eye your hearts desire could be given flesh-“ He sets the driftwood down next, and fingers a scrap of sandpaper instead.
“-What would you make?”
@asterion “speech”
