"Fireflies. Fire flies. Fire, fly”
There is an echo of magic in the air, the same dark delight that hangs in the jasmine smoke of Denocte every time the moon rises. It covers my skin like satin. It welcomes me home as much as it begs me to fall deeper, and deeper, and deeper in the blackness.
And I want to listen, I want to cut open my skin and answer the magic with magic and the darkness with sea.
But it is not the magic that brings me to the river, nor is it the roar of a distant waterfall (where the river plummets into the meadow) that echoes not-quite-right in my ears. I am looking for a trail of poppies, or posies, or lilies weaving along the rock shore. I am looking for thorns and willow-trees spring ing out of boulders. I am looking for Ipomoea who had once learned to be brave with me as the sun rose dew-gold over the tips of our weapons.
I am looking for the man with desert in his heart and flowers on his crown.
I follow the soft purr of the music, and the steady glow that flickers just ahead like a fresh-placed horizon. The stones stay just stones as I walk (although mica rises in their cracks like water) and the grass remains just grass when I walk further from the water. Tonight my magic is silent, awed perhaps by the weight in the air in the itch under my skin that is chanting hurry, hurry, hurry like a black-sea song.
When I see them, the fireflies lighting holy lines across the mortals singing and dancing by the shore, I am glad I listened to my eager blood and my hungry magic. I do not remember deciding to join them, but between one blink and the next, I am standing knee deep in the water beside the singers. The water whispers against my skin, begging me to lay my head beneath it and let it carry me back, back, back to the sea.
The current is still whispering to me when I deny it and lift my nose into the air thick with magic and flickering fireflies. And when I exhale I turn the molecules of the breeze into glitter before the fireflies lay themselves around my horn like it's a garden instead of a weapon.
@Ipomoea
