we’re trapped in a garden of endless flowers
His dreams feel more like remembering than becoming now.
In his dreams he is running through the same deserts as her, miles and miles of dunes opening up like the mouths of monsters to nip at his heels. He can feel the shadow of the hawk falling across his back, blending with his own until running through the sand feels as much like flying over it. Even when he wakes — alone, in an empty bed in an empty castle — it still feels like flying.
And he knows the dream was not entirely a dream.
So it does not surprise him to find their trails leading out into the night, marked with lichen blossoming in poppy patterns and the song of the bitter earth whispering in between each petal. In their footprints he finds the sound of old death, of fallen seeds that could not root and grains of sand that whisper stories of bones and catacombs and hunger. He would still know the sound of it even if it was not his unicorns carving the notes of it, because it sounds something like home.
He is still listening to that song, their song, when he follows after it. He follows the song of unicorns and all things wild, and as the snow turns to sand he leaves wildflowers blooming in the crescent moon of each of their steps.
And when the lanterns and light break the night wide open, he almost —
he almost starts to sing the words to it.
He does say anything when he arrives beside her, following her violent and violet gaze to where their daughters are limned in golden light (like a sapling, he thinks, dying and growing in a thicket.)
The music settles like bits of the desert tangled in knots around his soul, all sand and spines and tumbleweeds. And it does nothing to settle his heart, seeing the twins standing together like wolves among lions. The restlessness only grows like rot in the marrow of him, seeing their hunger hung like nooses from their horns and filling the spaces between their teeth.
“They’ve grown like weeds,” he says softly. Sometimes he wishes they were more like the forest — he wishes he could tell them that it was okay to grow slowly, to be tender, to take their time sending out roots and branches and leaves. Sometimes he is afraid they are blooming too brightly, too quickly, like the poppies that never last the whole spring.
But their souls are wild, and feral, and already filled with enough color to make all the world seem gray beside them.
And watching them now, changing the meaning of the music draped around them like a crown, he thinks that is the only thing that matters.
@thana
