today i am wiser
It’s her voice, that he first recognizes. He knows it: from Solterra, from Veneror, from the few times they had spoken. Her voice brings up images of rolling dunes and golden sand castles, of the relief of an oasis and a sky that was impossibly blue, impossibly far away.
Her voice makes him remember what it was like to soak up the sun like a flower, how the warmth felt on his skin as a child. In his mind he can see the sprawling streets of the city again, can hear the clattering of hooves on sandstone as the traveling merchants came once more into the Court. He closes his eyes, briefly, and watches it play out like a scene in his mind. The memories fluttered past like dry parchment, hazy and indistinct, but slowly they gain clarity. He had been only a boy when he had left; all he remembered from those days was the harshness of the desert, the pains of an empty stomach, and the vibrancy of those strangers.
"Neither have I."
The admission is surprising, how readily it falls from his lips, a halfhearted smile vanishing as quickly as it had appear. His wings flutter open and closed, open and closed, as if yearning to reach for the sea yet too afraid to properly do so. Wings never did mix well with water - Ipomoea had spent most of his life longing for the sky, hardly giving the dark depths below a second thought. It was the curse of being a pegasus who would never know what it felt like to be airborne, the instinctual need to ride the wind at odds with the inability to do so.
Still, he had made peace with that fact. One couldn’t miss what they never had to begin with, or so he told himself when he watched Odet glide effortlessly overhead. There would always be that subtle tinge of envy that made him feel sick with guilt, that sense of needing something he could not have. He supposed everyone had something like that, some secret jealousy they harbored when they compared their lot in life to another’s; still, the thought did not bring him peace.
He drops his gaze to the beach, to the white sand that sparkles around his hooves each time the waves pull back.
For a moment they’re both silent - and he wonders if Seraphina is as engrossed in her own thoughts as he is with his. The crash of the ocean is constant, filling the gaps their words had left, stretching endlessly out to sea. Out there, somewhere, was Novus; but he couldn’t help but wonder if there were more islands like this one. How many worlds were out there, waiting, begging to be explored? Florentine had seen some of them, and the traders that docked in Denocte each had a foreign home to speak of.
But Ipomoea’s entire life had been spent on Novus and, until now, he had yet to see any other land with his own eyes. How many others were there in the seas surrounding his home, just out of sight?
Seraphina’s voice brings him back to the present. He tilts one ear towards her, but he doesn’t take his eyes off of the sea, not yet.
"I should be asking you that, I think," he tells her, and only then does he tilt his eyes to look at her. He looks at the fallen queen, her silver hair loosed from her braids, multicolored eyes peering out at him from beneath a golden cowl.
But it’s the golden eye that captures his attention first - and the shimmering, metallic scars the pass just underneath it. He stares into her eyes for one long, tense moment, unable to look away - and he realizes just how much of her he had forgotten. Her face, her features, the color of her eyes, all of it had faded away slowly once he had heard of her death, like the wind blowing ashes across a field. Seeing her now was like putting a torn picture back together, and her scars marked the places she had been torn with gold.
He isn’t surprised, although he knows he should be. Ipomoea just smiles sadly at her, his cherry eyes falling away in time back to the ocean before he speaks again. "I’m as well as I can be, all things considered." He had certainly drawn an easier lot in life than she had, but he wasn’t about to point it out. It was already obvious - a passerby had only to look at the way they stood, the differences in their carriage, to know the privilege he had enjoyed, and the hardships she had endured.
"Have you come for him?" he asks quietly then, and this time when he turns to face her he does not look away. There’s a solemness to his eyes that seems out of place, an emotion he does not have practice using (but one he thinks he’ll have reason to use more often, in the coming months.)
Have you come to kill Raum?
He isn’t sure why the thought makes him feel both relieved and all the more sad.
@Ipomoea | "speaks" | notes: <3
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