may the flowers remind us
why the rain was so necessary
why the rain was so necessary
He can taste the rot in his dreams.
It reaches up from his lungs, claws its way out into the place where his heart should be beating, and his blood racing, and his magic filling. In the absence of his breath there is only silence, and in the silence there is only death making a home of him, mold spreading in mosaics through his veins. And two hearts turning cold and black.
He thought it would feel like salvation. He thought it would feel something like returning to the earth at last, like curling beneath the roots in peace.
But it only aches.
His bones, his heart, the spaces between them, it all aches. The magic drains from him like the stag’s blood, watering the earth in flowers still. It leaves only wanting in its place, dust and rust and the memory of something that had once filled him with wonder, and hope, and joy, and a reason to run through the meadows and say hello to every flower he passed there. But this - this doesn’t feel like running. This feels like wanting, but never gaining; like a goldfinch chained to a pedestal day after day, until it forgets it had ever longed for the sky. It feels like the forest pulling its roots away from him.
He wants to tell his magic to stop, wants to beg it to understand that this was not what he wanted. He can feel it churning still, a swirling pool of light that is fading, and hunger that is growing in the darkness.
Maybe he had known this would be the answer all along. Maybe that is why he had never asked the question.
But there is another magic stirring the tar-thick blood in his veins. A magic he doesn’t recognize, even when it swells up from the deepest parts of him and breaks like a wave over every nerve. Some part of him that is achingly familiar stutters back to life, and he can feel in it an echo. The stag, pressed cheek to cheek with Ipomoea, begins to stir. And instead of blood falling from between his ribs there is only soil, and flowers, and pollen, and a heart that doesn’t quite remember how to beat. And all he did was circle closer and closer to death.
The staf tilts his head over the horse laying wilted against him, and his antlers only add to the cage of brambles and thorns Thana tries to tear away.
Rise, the stag speaks to him not in words, but in aches and wanting. And rise, the magic begs of him as it falls like rain against his heart.
I can’t, he wants to tell them. It was easier to give into the aching, easier to fold himself against the deer and tell the hunger it could have its fill of them. But he knows as well as any that the roots of a rose bush grow too deep to be killed.
There’s a part of him that is beginning to remember how to be brave.
Rise, the forest tells him, and his heart begins to tremble. The thorns are falling back by the time Thana cuts him free of them, and this time he wishes them only to flower, not to consume. When his heart starts to beat again like a question, and the deer’s follows along like an answer, and Thana begs of him to breathe -
They listen.
And it is not as two things learning how to come awake, but one. Together they open their eyes and see the sunlight breaking itself against the crystals on their brow. The blood in the earth starts to feel like a baptism, like rebirth, like the spring that had arrived so haltingly. And it is together that they fill their aching lungs with air, and start to think the aching in them both could wait one more day. He thinks he can still taste the rot on his tongue, and how it makes the air in his lungs jealous.
”Thana,” he whispers, because he is still suffocating and she is the thing that stops the pain of it, the thing whose magic tangles with his own like two vines climbing over each other to reach the sun. Because there’s still a wanting in him that wasn’t satisfied by a half-death or a half-love or a half-life, something that is desperate and hollow and only beginning to be filled.
”I needed to know.”
@thana
“here am i”
