we're trapped in a garden of endless flowers
H
e likes to wander the gardens when he has too many things on his mind to think.Today he can feel them all pressing in against him like coyotes, teeth pressed to his thoughts and snarls echoing in his veins. He keeps turning into them, turning east — turning to the desert, where most of his thoughts keeping turning in a manner he can only attribute to inevitability.
Ipomoea can feel the desert consuming him. Even from here, even in his court of flowers and old-growth forests; he can feel it growing closer day by day. At times he stops and turns to it, imagines the haze of the horizon to be the shimmer of the desert. And again and again he wonders —
He wonders if he will ever be soft again. If he will ever be content again.
And he wonders if he can ever walk among the people of the Dawn court and look them in the eyes again, knowing his heart is split between this court and another. Between this world and another, for Solterra is as much a world away as those that lay beyond the sea.
But in the garden he can feel it slipping away again. The desert is reduced to a grain of sand that lingers in the back of his mind, overwhelmed by the petals and the roots and the leaves he fills it with now. The roses brighten and smile as he walks by them. The sunflowers turn their heads to face him as though he were the sun they were waiting for. Wisteria and ivy reach out to pat his sides when he walks within their reach. And all of them are whispering as they touch him, welcome back. Welcome home. We have missed you.
A piece of his soul that he had not realized had been torn free is again settled as he walks the garden paths. It feels, as it always feels, like he is an orphan boy again seeing a garden — a real garden, not the cactus-and-ocotillo gardens in the desert — for the first time. He bids the gardeners the day off, and sets to work.
It is in a wilder part of the garden, where roots crisscross the dirt paths and ivy chokes itself along the walls, where she finds him. A leaf presses itself along his spine to warn him, and Ipomoea looks up in time to see the girl from the meadows smiling before him.
“Solstice,” his voice is soft, the orphan-boy who has not yet found his voice. But he smiles at her, and stands. “I’m glad you found me. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
