we're trapped in a garden of endless flowers
T
he garden feels more alive when Solstice joins him. There is a quiet peace in the rhythm of her hooves against the loamy earth. The ivy tangled around the fence posts no longer look like sentries guarding the gates to a secret place. When he looks past her the trees scattered along the path look more and more like secrets of laughter than of fear. Around them the garden seems to sigh, like the earth remembering how to breathe.Ipomoea smiles at her. Sometimes he spends enough time with the flowers and the curling vines and the sand and soil, that he forgets the horses who walked overtop it all. Sometimes he feels more like a tree than a person.
But it is always in companionship that he remembers.
“I’m happy to hear it.” His voice is full of that secret love that exists only for the earth. That part of him that lingers beneath the violence he was born into, that was pressed back into him when he went to war, that his own Emissary had tried to take away. It rises now in the shape of flowers unfurling in the morning sun.
And he is glad, in a way he hasn’t been in recent days. When he looks at Solstice he does not see the shadows that hide in the forest, or feel the ever-present calling of the sands. He does not feel the endless need to be searching for something he cannot name, something that runs as much in his bones as it does on the wind.
He feels only the sunshine, and the brightness of the earth lighting up in him. And he is glad that there is someone else to share in it with, someone to find the same peace as he does here. When she speaks, Ipomoea forgets about all the restless parts of his soul that feel like lies or nightmares caught in a dreamcatcher.
He follows her gaze to the curling morning glories, listening to the nervous tremor that suddenly fills the spaces in her voice. The flower reaches towards her when she pauses to steel herself (as if it, too, is giving her strength.)
When he finally speaks, his voice is reassuring in all the ways he does not know how to put into words. “When I was a boy I used to think there was a greater calling for me that led me to here. I did not know then that a calling was what you made of it, rather than fate alone, but I have seen many since then who felt moved to another purpose. People like yourself,” and here he meets her eyes, watching as the nerves are replaced with a look that is warm, and golden —
and at peace.
“If this is your’s then I will not stop you from going and reaching for it. Go with my blessing,” it was the way of the Dawn, he knew, to go and seek higher things. To see the world, and learn from it. And so too was it their way to bring their knowledge home to the Court when the adventure of it was said and through.
So he meets her smile with one of his own, when he presses his muzzle to her shoulder and says, “and maybe, when you return — you may return to us as our new Champion of Healing.”
