like flowers
we can also choose to bloom
we can also choose to bloom
H
e feels like he has been here before, in another life, another time, another place. The smell of the incense clinging still to her skin is familiar; it reminds him of—The memory dances just out of reach, laughing at him as it does.
He sighs.
But she is talking again, her voice brushing away the memories like dust off of a table. He lifts his eyes back to her’s (when had they lowered, to look at the flowers instead? He isn’t sure) and regards her quietly. Her question reminds him of another girl, one that had spoken to him of sunrises and hope in a mountaintop temple. He might have smiled then; but the girl in his memories is dead now, and a monster wore her skin.
“It is a city, south of here. And all these lands - the forest, meadow, the river running through them both - belongs to it.” And to me, the thought helicopters through his mind like maple seeds. But today, being a king of anything does not feel important at all.
He watches the way she shivers, and a tremor runs the length of his own spine in response. “It’s a very beautiful city,” he adds with an almost-smile hiding in his eyes, “perhaps you would like to see it someday; the gardens are its peoples pride and joy.” A part of him suspected they were just his pride and joy — the libraries suited most of his people better — but still, it was hard for him to speak of the Court and not mention them. Perhaps it was the first sign of his vanity, rearing its head at last.
Her eyes betray the fear running like a river below her skin; it makes Ipomoea’s heart clench to see. It makes his magic burn a little hotter inside of him, like with magic alone he could erase the shadows hiding between the trees and the monsters that made their homes there. He knows he can’t help her with the monsters living in her heart (he knows he has his own to conquer, first, he knows it is a battle she must fight herself) but still, he wishes he could. He doesn’t want her to become like Emersyn.
“Stay as long as you’d like,” he tells her, but the words come out more like a beggar’s than a reassurance. He’s painfully aware of the slow thud, thud, thudding of his heart, of the soft and slow shushing of the wind, of the flowers laying themselves against her skin at his behest.
All of it feels so familiar again, like the broken shrines on the mountain.
He wonders if time was determined to repeat itself; he wonders if he could stop it this time (a foolish thing, to think he could change anyone’s fate when he was helplessly chained to his own.) A thousand hopes, and desires, and questions are flooding through his mind, but there are no shooting stars to wish them on, no festival lanterns to tie them to.
Still he asks.
“Where have you come from?” he whispers back to her. His heart beats a little more sharply at the words, at the thousand scenarios he imagines in his mind.
He asks because there are only the flowers here, and the girl smiling down at them like they were her only friends.
@solstice "speaks" <3
