like a flower in the desert.
S
ometimes it seems to him as if all of Novus is only a lost story he has found in the library, a half-forgotten litany on the lips of a Denoctian storyteller. When the man tosses the first bone into the flames (and oh! how the flames roared to taste it, and the crowd ahh’d to see it, and his own heart thrummed in time with it), he can think only of the people who might one day read it. Each word feels weighted, sinking like stones down his throat when he swallows the story. Smoke lingers on his tongue, moving in a pattern that he wants to learn through his lungs. It tastes like a memory, like remembering, like it always has. And Ipomoea is still looking at each set of eyes leaning in around the fire, is still searching for that shine of blood wetting the story teller's teeth. He's looking for that thing that makes him feel more like a self-righteous god and less like a hateful one, that thing to justify that stain blossoming like a flower m his own heart.
A part of him thinks that his soul will always recognize it no matter which story it hides in. That something deep in him draped in robes of red will always blink awake at whispered violence.
Even now he can feel it begging.
But at the feel of Danaë's check pressed tightly to his shoulder, tightly enough that he can feel her teeth at his bones, he swallows it down. Forget-me-nots start to bloom around them, turned red and gold by the firelight. And Ipomoea who is still swallowing down the endlessness of the story thinks they look better this way.
He smiles, and feels a little more of his rage wither inside of his chest like a fire burning down to its embers. When he turns his head to lay his lips against Danaë’s brow his teeth catch brightly on the firelight. “Yes.” The truth of it is written there in her silhouette, in the shape of a unicorn made both sharp and soft. And Ipomoea does not need to hear the forest echo back the lyrics of their ancient song to her to know that she was made as much for the trees as they were made for her.
“What story would you have them tell the mortal?” He does not turn back to the fire when the Denoctian entertainer tosses the last of their magic like an offering to the flames. And the notes of that story, of the god’s thunder and rage and the sword he tossed into the tide, and the way his heart had sped up like he was that god —
all of it fades away like the ending of a song when he looks at his daughter and wonders which song she will sing in the wake of it (of him.)
