when lost -

[Ipomoea]

IPOMOEA so lay me down in golden dandelions  It seems to him that there is a message in the pulsing, flickering lights of the stars - a message wrought without words, without language, with only instinct. His own heart aches alongside it, a steady pang that beats in time with the explosions. He thinks he should know, looking into those flickering colors, that if this were the end, he should look away. But he only presses in closer, and deeper, and cradles the star against his chest as it weeps for the world and sheds every last dream that has ever been wished upon it. He counts them as they flake off, bits of star dust that catch fire and burn themselves to nothingness. He wonders if this is what it looks like for a wish to come true - but he knows it is only dying. The stars, the wishes, the island, all of it is dying, and his heart is aching alongside it. Somewhere his magic is curling in upon itself (there are no roots or seeds for it to cradle here, no flowers to coax open or grass to braid into crowns.) But when he lets the star float away into all the nothingness around them, he is not thinking about forests and meadows. “There’s always a way out,” he says, but his voice suggests he does not wish to leave even if the island were to collapse in around them then and there. Ipomoea has run from the island as it sank once before - and all the while, he had wondered what would have happened had he stayed. He had wondered of a world under the sea, where saltwater filled his lungs instead of air and barnacles grew upon his brow instead of flowers. Ipomoea has wondered at a thousand different lives - but wondering alone has never changed the life he lives. If the the island were to sink again here and now — He thinks he might sink with it. If only to see. If only to know what other lives he could live if not this one. “Would you like to stay a while?” He turns to the other stallion then and smiles (although it feels like a hollow smile, like it is not Ipomoea smiling, but someone else). He doesn’t see that their eyes are the same color, and he doesn’t think that it kindles a sort of kinship in his heart — perhaps he would have, if the darkness of the island did not cast them both in shadows that were only black and grey like the apocalypse. Or perhaps he would have seen the cold, detached look in Lyr’s eyes and known the apocalypse did not live here on the island, but in a person’s soul. @lyr ”here am I!”

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