you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
He feels as though the statues are watching them, with the flames flickering in their empty eyes. He wonders what they would say, if they could speak - if they would say anything at all. Perhaps they would still only watch him, and let their silence be judgement enough.It is because they do not speak that he puts the driftwood down. There it sits, perfectly still, perfectly silent, perfectly dead. He considers, for a moment, of setting his magic to it. Of shaping it the way he shapes the flowers, the trees, the grass and all their roots; of whispering to it come alive, and nursing it like a broken sapling. He would not ask it to change for him (it was already beautiful in his mind, with its sun-bleached branches twisted around one another like a knobby embrace, every whorl and knot now exaggerated and spectacular), except to maybe grow leaves, or flowers, or other branches to keep itself company. But Ipomoea is not sure if the driftwood, with all of the salt crusted into it, leeching out all the parts of it that had once been alive, would listen to him.
And he is not sure he wants to know. Not tonight.
So he puts it down, and he listens.
He recognizes Asterion at once, and a smile (hidden, with his back turned) spreads slowly across his lips. “Would a second life be enough?” he asks, just as softly, when he glances back to meet the once-king’s eyes. “I imagine there would be innumerable choices upon choices for this other-you to make.” He does not ask if knowing would make a difference - if it would make things better or worse for a man with stars written across his skin and sorrow stitched into his heart.
People like them often asked the questions whose answers caused the most pain.
His voice is a trembling leaf caught in a winter storm when he whispers, “I would turn the whole world into a garden.” The confession feels heavier on his lips than it should, if only for the root of it that lingers just below the surface.
“And I would never stop to wonder if it wanted to be a desert, or an ocean, or a mountain instead.”
And that was the catch, the dangerous what if that kept him lying awake at night - that his dream was not shared. That his choices, while right in his own mind, might bring more harm than joy to anyone but himself. He supposes a sculptor never paused to wonder at the worth of the stone he turned into a fox, but Ipomoea’s statue was not something so inanimate as that.
He turns to Asterion then, and is quick to put his almost-smile back into place like it would be a shame to forget it.
“I’ve never seen you in Delumine before,” he says, but he is not so crass (so bold) to ask him why he has not come before. He only thinks that it suits him, as he stands there in the lantern-light; that his skin looks like the night sky above the forest, earthy and celestial at once, heaven touching the trees. He wants to know if that is what it feels like, to see the trees and the gardens and the fields full of lights for the first time, as someone who is not so biased as he.
So when he steps away from the table and asks, “how is it treating you?” everything in his soul seems to quiet at once like a meadow waiting for the storm to begin.
@asterion “speech”
