[AW] if winter had the courage

[Florentine]

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Florentine has not left the island for days. Her joints ache from where the cold of glass has bitten too deep. Her mind is weary from how it has worried and wondered after her children too much. How can a mother’s mind rest when her children are lost? Her soul twinges and her heart is sick. Yet she stands radiant, gilded by a sun that this sky does not know. The glow of her skin is as bright as her smile could be, if it were not darkened by the loss of motherhood. 


The snow settles along her spine. Each flake lands like a cold winter’s kiss. They melt upon the sea and Florentine watches as they land and disappear. The once-queen might come to be ashamed how she does not notice Ipomoea until a frosted flower taps against her ankle. As a girl she might have once been sure that upon such a reunion she would feel the presence of a friend like him anywhere. He has a place in her heart, of course, as all good friends do. Her heart should know him, should recognise when he is near. But Flora’s heart is too busy twinging at the frosted flower to consider its conjurer. 


The white dust, cold and wet, that makes it rigid… She extends her slender neck and brushes her lips over the flower’s frosted face. A part of her expects it to be hard, rigid as glass, like her father made before her funeral pyre, when she died a child once before. Ah. Her eyes close against the thoughts that wash over her as cold and unwelcome as a tumble into the winter sea. For all her life she had been glad for her gift of traversing time, making herself born and unborn, dead and undead upon a whim. But now, it is that very same magic that pulled her children from her side. How can she be so grateful for it now? Still the strange, cursed magic of this place repels her. Still she comes here, for this is where she birthed her babies when Time stood still and this is where they parted ways. 


When at last she lifts her lips from the flower, Ipomoea is there. His white, his brown, his wings, his flowers. He awakens his place within her aching heart. The flowers were not her father, Gabriel, but Ipomoea. Another she loves, another whose place has grown too vacant. Florentine goes to him, she does not look at every Florentine that gazes out at her from every different world and circumstance. Some she has already lived, some she will come to live, some she is living now. There are others of her, being reborn and unmade in a thousand different worlds. Her every decision splits her into two over and over and over until there are more of her than the stars of the sky, there is a Florentine for every decision, every world. But the only one that matters is this one. The only decision that matters is the one that presses her lips to her friend’s shoulder and has her exclaim his name from a tongue that has not spoken it in too, too long, “Ipomoea!” 


She draws back, enough to gaze at him from beneath her heavy fringe where petals fall to join his myriad flowers. “I have missed you,” Florentine says as she drinks him in, repainting the memories of him with his radiance, his softness. There are tears that gather at the corners of her eyes, the waste no time as they spill and tumble down her cheeks. “How are you?”



@Ipomoea

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world