I P O M O E A
—
T
hey all look like ghosts, dancing through the meadows tonight.Ghosts made of starlight and mist and half-bodies, legs aglow with light-flower pollen and eyes shining bright enough to be a thousand moons fallen from the sky. He watches as they leave streaks across the earth, like the flowers are at once lamenting their passing and embellishing it in light as if to remember them long after the night ends. Tonight the flowers and the people speak the same language, that of lost and overlooked things and lives already lived.
He wonders if thinking of his citizens as ghosts makes him more or less of one.
He wonders if it makes him the king of the ghosts, forever reliving memories instead of making them.
In a way, it feels fitting: Delumine has always been quiet, its scholars have always haunted the library, the citadel, the forest, always watching, rarely acting. Their only duty to record history, never to make it. He had wanted to change that, once. Now he only looks at his people drifting through the meadow and thinks to himself, at last the appearance matches the soul.
So he joins them, all those dancing ghosts, and he paints himself with the same light that blooms in patterns across their legs, their bellies, their faces. Tonight the flowers crowning him as one of their own are not the usual roses and baby’s breath and solomio; tonight they are silver poppies, and wild vervain, and silk-soft chicory, and all of them are draped in a silver so fragile he wonders how it doesn’t break when he plucks them from the grass. Their light falling across his brow feels almost-holy, the weight of them bows his head into an almost-prayer.
Ipomoea does not know why he is celebrating (is there anything left to celebrate for, when the war is won, when the hunt is over, when the only question left to ask is “was it worth it”?). He does not know why or when his steps begin to feel more like dancing than walking, or if the strange shapes cut through the grass look more like a flower or a noose to the owl passing overhead. But he follows them all the same, collecting pollen from the light-flowers on his legs and belly until he is glowing almost as brightly as the meadow. And with every step he takes he wonders if there’s a greater meaning to the paths, if they exist to lead him somewhere—
Then he sees her.
And he knows the shapes cut into the earth had been made for them.
"Thana." Her name is a sigh pressed into her cheek, and all the flowers in the meadow shiver. His lips are silver and gold when he pulls away.
He wants to trace the swirls across her sides but she is pressing her shoulder to his, her neck to his, her heartbeat next to his. And he can feel himself slipping away from the meadow, can feel the flowers inviting them to dance out of their skins tonight and into another song.
He feels balanced between those two worlds tonight, teetering on a thread spun from silver — and he knows one step in either direction would be all it took to fall into one or the other. A single step and he could become a ghost, or a shadow, or something like a story.
Would they paint his story in gold and silver one day, if he took that step?
"Is that where you’ve come from?" He doesn’t tell her the only world he cares about tonight is the one that he can find her in; he doesn’t ask her to show him that other world, that other story where she is both the hollowed one and the wolf, and he the moon. But oh, he wonders if she can hear it in his voice, in that language of their’s that goes beyond words.
He catches a pearl between his teeth, when they press skin to skin. And he tries not to ruin the story that lives in between them, tries not to slip away into it before giving her a chance to lead the way.
"Do you miss it?"
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
@thana
