the war of flowers blooming
In the star-blood river Ipomoea can no longer tell where his magic ends and his daughter’s begins. His water-poppies mix with her dahlias, her vines of ivy tangle around the stems of his lilies, and the tree sprouting down instead of up turns as bright and golden as saplings in a sunlit-forest (but there is no sun here.)
To him, Danaë is already as full of the beauty of this garden they grow as he is. It does not matter that her flowers grow from the bones of this island and the blood of its monster-heart; they are all the stronger for it. Ipomoea has spent his life running from the death of things and pretending the life he grows in other places can make up for it all, but his daughter — she does not need to run from it when she can transform it in a way he never could.
It is the only thing he knows. It is the only means of salvation he has ever been able to offer.
And there is that part of him that knows it is not enough; that she is as much Thana’s daughter as his. But still he sighs when she follows him from the wall, and when flowers that drip silver tears wrap themselves around her horn. Still he swallows down her sorrow like it is his own (and maybe it is his own that he has only forgotten the sound of) and demands his flowers to grow from the waste of it.
So they grow. They grow from sorrow and pain and anger, and when he lifts his cheek from Danaë’s he thinks it makes them all the brighter for it.
His eyes are softer than they have been in weeks, in the way sorrow is always soft. If there is a crack filling with seedlings in the sorrow of Danaë’s soul, he can almost see it in the sunflower sprouting from the wall. The sight of it almost breaks him, almost lets that part of him that is sand and all the hardness of the desert loose on this castle. He wants to destroy the weeping wall and the screaming one and everything in this world that has seeded sorrow into her soul.
Again, he swallows it down.
"Even in death a tree in our forest still gives life. It enriches and refreshes the earth. From a single nurse log dozens of new things might root for the first time.” He does not tell her that that is what she is — Danaë is more than a nurse log in a forest. “Most people give up on things they think to be dead. It is a brave thing to grow life where others run.” He smiles like he is becoming a soft god instead of a feral one, like he is still that boy whose only ambition was growing a garden.
Maybe he still is, somewhere beneath the learned violence and the songs of war in every heartbeat. Maybe he is re-becoming it when he looks at his daughter.
He hopes it is. He would reform himself again and again if only to know his daughters could do the same. So when he looks up at the two upside-down tree and asks her, “who is it you want to be, Danaë?” it is as much for his own hope as her’s.
To him, Danaë is already as full of the beauty of this garden they grow as he is. It does not matter that her flowers grow from the bones of this island and the blood of its monster-heart; they are all the stronger for it. Ipomoea has spent his life running from the death of things and pretending the life he grows in other places can make up for it all, but his daughter — she does not need to run from it when she can transform it in a way he never could.
It is the only thing he knows. It is the only means of salvation he has ever been able to offer.
And there is that part of him that knows it is not enough; that she is as much Thana’s daughter as his. But still he sighs when she follows him from the wall, and when flowers that drip silver tears wrap themselves around her horn. Still he swallows down her sorrow like it is his own (and maybe it is his own that he has only forgotten the sound of) and demands his flowers to grow from the waste of it.
So they grow. They grow from sorrow and pain and anger, and when he lifts his cheek from Danaë’s he thinks it makes them all the brighter for it.
His eyes are softer than they have been in weeks, in the way sorrow is always soft. If there is a crack filling with seedlings in the sorrow of Danaë’s soul, he can almost see it in the sunflower sprouting from the wall. The sight of it almost breaks him, almost lets that part of him that is sand and all the hardness of the desert loose on this castle. He wants to destroy the weeping wall and the screaming one and everything in this world that has seeded sorrow into her soul.
Again, he swallows it down.
"Even in death a tree in our forest still gives life. It enriches and refreshes the earth. From a single nurse log dozens of new things might root for the first time.” He does not tell her that that is what she is — Danaë is more than a nurse log in a forest. “Most people give up on things they think to be dead. It is a brave thing to grow life where others run.” He smiles like he is becoming a soft god instead of a feral one, like he is still that boy whose only ambition was growing a garden.
Maybe he still is, somewhere beneath the learned violence and the songs of war in every heartbeat. Maybe he is re-becoming it when he looks at his daughter.
He hopes it is. He would reform himself again and again if only to know his daughters could do the same. So when he looks up at the two upside-down tree and asks her, “who is it you want to be, Danaë?” it is as much for his own hope as her’s.
