trapped in an endless garden
Sometimes he feels more a ghost than a man. When he looks at another ghost haunting the desert with a look that tells him he does not belong, and all the memories of the sand come flooding back in to choke him beneath the weight of it all. Sometimes Ipomoea wants to peel back his skin and ask the world if it can see that he is more sand than blood now, if it can understand the way he has never left the desert and how it has never left him. He thinks maybe he has always had more sand in him than he thought — that he is only now learning how deep the feral earth runs in him.
Sometimes, it makes him angry.
He wants to ask her it she remembersrare embers how they fought a war together, if she knows that he was born here in these very sands. He wants to tell her that he can finally hear the dunes singing for him now in a way he never knew he needed to hear but oh, he did.
But Ipomoea cannot, will not, be so cruel.
The war is still in his veins, in his bones, in his skin, lingering like a disease he is not sure how to be rid of. And the desert is still singing him a song, welcoming him home, home, home. He can hear each note of it in his souls in the rush of his blood that is sounding more and more each day like an earth quake when it echoes against his bones (and they feel so very hollow in the wake of it.) The marrow of him is aching with the melody and it feels - 'a little like day and sweat has dried on his skin, as if he is nothing more than the bitter earth seeding his sorrows into the sand in place of flowers.
Somewhere, deep down, he knows his soul is singing back to it. It should make him feel happy. Somewhere the slat-ribled ribbed orphan of him that grew up in the desert is smiling and kissing the sandsaid and whispering over and over again like 0a prayer: thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Ipomoea is not sure when he started feeling less like a man trying to find his way home and more like a god of this bitter earth. But he feels it now, in the way the sand rises at his sides and sighs (and sings, and sings, and sings.) He can feel it in the way it trembles beneath his hooves and leads him ever deeper into the desert. Sometimes he thinks that between him and his magic he's the real teryr who belongs to the all of this violence.
It seems strange now to have ever been so sure the desert had not wanted him all those years ago, that he had been made ever been weak enough to have been left for dead. When he pauses and lifts his head to look in the direction of the capitol, hidden by the sands but which he knows to be towering above it, the thing that blossoms below his magic feels primordial. It feels like the earth is inside of him, a world of blooming and rotting plants growing from the unforgiving sand of his bones.
But Ipomoea does not tell her any of this. Ipomoea does not tell her that he’s going to save this desert (and her, and all of them), or that he can already feel the rust of all the blood he has and will swallowed coating his throat. Instead he steps closer, and a gazelle fawn raises itself from the sands and brushes against her shoulder. It walks between them for a moment, nose lifted to the wind like a thing coming home, before it slips back into the golden dust beneath their hooves.
And when he asks her, “why then, does it feel like I am home?”, that too feels as right between them as all the sand turned silver in the moonlight.
Ipomoea looks up at the golden claw marks cleaving the darkness of Seraphina’s face (and those two have been turned silver in the night, like wishes instead of scars, starlight instead of the sun.) And in his eyes there is a little bit of gratefulness, a little bit of the softness he thinks he has all but carved away, a little bit of a thank you for the company whispered not in words, but in their blood.
He knows better to ask her if she has been well — have any of them been well? — it’s there in her eyes. That haunted look that mirrors his own. The memories, the hurts, the aches and hungers they do not know how to let go even knowing they cannot move forward until they do. So instead he lets the silence between them drag out, broken up only by the whispering of the sand beneath their hooves and the song of it that only he can hear. And he tries to keep the earthquake out of his gaze when he turns back to Seraphina with her haunted eyes.
“It’s a little late for a stroll out in the desert.” The space between his teeth feels hungry when he says it like he knows this thing between them is a hunt only pretending to be a walk, and it makes his magic coil in his chest, and more sand-creatures shiver to life.
Sometimes, it makes him angry.
He wants to ask her it she remembersrare embers how they fought a war together, if she knows that he was born here in these very sands. He wants to tell her that he can finally hear the dunes singing for him now in a way he never knew he needed to hear but oh, he did.
But Ipomoea cannot, will not, be so cruel.
The war is still in his veins, in his bones, in his skin, lingering like a disease he is not sure how to be rid of. And the desert is still singing him a song, welcoming him home, home, home. He can hear each note of it in his souls in the rush of his blood that is sounding more and more each day like an earth quake when it echoes against his bones (and they feel so very hollow in the wake of it.) The marrow of him is aching with the melody and it feels - 'a little like day and sweat has dried on his skin, as if he is nothing more than the bitter earth seeding his sorrows into the sand in place of flowers.
Somewhere, deep down, he knows his soul is singing back to it. It should make him feel happy. Somewhere the slat-ribled ribbed orphan of him that grew up in the desert is smiling and kissing the sandsaid and whispering over and over again like 0a prayer: thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Ipomoea is not sure when he started feeling less like a man trying to find his way home and more like a god of this bitter earth. But he feels it now, in the way the sand rises at his sides and sighs (and sings, and sings, and sings.) He can feel it in the way it trembles beneath his hooves and leads him ever deeper into the desert. Sometimes he thinks that between him and his magic he's the real teryr who belongs to the all of this violence.
It seems strange now to have ever been so sure the desert had not wanted him all those years ago, that he had been made ever been weak enough to have been left for dead. When he pauses and lifts his head to look in the direction of the capitol, hidden by the sands but which he knows to be towering above it, the thing that blossoms below his magic feels primordial. It feels like the earth is inside of him, a world of blooming and rotting plants growing from the unforgiving sand of his bones.
But Ipomoea does not tell her any of this. Ipomoea does not tell her that he’s going to save this desert (and her, and all of them), or that he can already feel the rust of all the blood he has and will swallowed coating his throat. Instead he steps closer, and a gazelle fawn raises itself from the sands and brushes against her shoulder. It walks between them for a moment, nose lifted to the wind like a thing coming home, before it slips back into the golden dust beneath their hooves.
And when he asks her, “why then, does it feel like I am home?”, that too feels as right between them as all the sand turned silver in the moonlight.
Ipomoea looks up at the golden claw marks cleaving the darkness of Seraphina’s face (and those two have been turned silver in the night, like wishes instead of scars, starlight instead of the sun.) And in his eyes there is a little bit of gratefulness, a little bit of the softness he thinks he has all but carved away, a little bit of a thank you for the company whispered not in words, but in their blood.
He knows better to ask her if she has been well — have any of them been well? — it’s there in her eyes. That haunted look that mirrors his own. The memories, the hurts, the aches and hungers they do not know how to let go even knowing they cannot move forward until they do. So instead he lets the silence between them drag out, broken up only by the whispering of the sand beneath their hooves and the song of it that only he can hear. And he tries to keep the earthquake out of his gaze when he turns back to Seraphina with her haunted eyes.
“It’s a little late for a stroll out in the desert.” The space between his teeth feels hungry when he says it like he knows this thing between them is a hunt only pretending to be a walk, and it makes his magic coil in his chest, and more sand-creatures shiver to life.
