I
f there is a right way to burn, to be fierce, to be the new-god the world demands of him, he has not discovered it yet. No matter how hard he tries, Ipomoea cannot find the end of all this sorrow-disguised-as-fury that devours the softness of him. Always it’s there, an endlessness that runs deeper than the shadows of the Viride, consuming him bit by bit.He wonders if it will ever stop. Or if it will eat and eat and eat of him until there is nothing left.
For every ache he carves from his bones there is always another lying beneath it. For every sense of purpose that takes root in his heart there is a little less soil of him for it to grow in. Again and again and again he tears out the weeds and new ones take their place: he had found a home, only for it to stop feeling like home. He had found peace, and then the war came. He had gone to war, and lost pieces of himself he did not know he needed. He had challenged his friend, and found the sickness of his court ran deeper than he once thought. He had become a sovereign — and now, now when his court is finally dancing, and laughing, and singing, now —
now he wants to abandon them.
He still refuses to admit to himself the truth of it. When he finds himself looking east (always, it is east) he tells himself it is because Solterra has been through enough. When he hears the whispers of the sand moving in his veins he thinks it is only the past and not his future. Ipomoea has become so good at making excuses for himself he can almost believe them.
But sometimes he comes to the water. And like the waves eroding the shore away bit by bit, he feels the ocean stripping the lies away. All that is left is the regrets, the things he could not do well enough, the things he wants to do but knows he should not. The holes his own fire has left in him through which he can feel the rest of himself bleeding out.
And he hopes, oh he hopes Morrighan does not let her fire consume her. Inspire her, fuel her; but never consume. People reduced to the ashes of themselves were hardly people at all.
“I had a vision for Delumine. A vision I believed I could better achieve as their Sovereign,” his words are spoken in nearly a whisper. He does not tell her that he thought he was right when others were not; he does not tell her there is a dark side to righteousness.
He thinks back to Antiope, to their meeting on Veneror — ”I am tired of burning. I have burned for so long, Ipomoea.” Her words haunt him now. And they set every bit of his anger, his regret, his apprehension aflame again, every last bit of his kindling that has been all but burned away is hurtling towards consumption. “I didn’t.” His smile curls, the edges of it self-mocking. “But sometimes it is when we do not feel ready that we have the most potential. Our own expectations, our own pride, can get in the way of growth.”
He shakes his head, and pauses only long enough to listen to the cheers that echo from the meadows behind them. “There’s never one right way. You’ll always question whether you were ready, or right, or if you could have done something differently.” he turns to her then, and wonders if she can see the memories that are playing over and over in his mind.
“But if you don’t, you’ll forever ask yourself why you didn’t take the chance.”
an endless garden
