may the flowers remind us
why the rain was so necessary
why the rain was so necessary
There is not much sunlight coming down through the mostly-bare branches, that lean in around them like a skeleton cradle. But it is enough for him to see the green-and-black buds decorating their skinny arms. Some of them are withering, drawing back upon themselves until they sever their stalks and fall like dry tears to the ground; but others are brightening, leaves unfurling proudly, joyously, stubbornly. And they turn the sunlight in the small clearing green.
It feels as though there are roots in his belly, burrowing down into the deepest parts of himself. He can feel them clawing, gnawing, dragging his heart down to a place of dirt and moss and magic.
Rhoeas groans beside him, feeling it too.
Ipomoea wonders if this is how a tree feels, watching the orchid growing from its veins begin to bloom. Or how his flowers feel, all the times when he would bid them to grow through deserts and rocks and places where the dirt was hard, and dry, and unforgiving. Had they thought of him as selfish, too? The way he thinks of the rose thorns and the birch trees and the wildflowers begging him to rise as selfish?
You could have died, she tells him. “I didn’t,” he answers, but the words come out like a broken prayer that does nothing to settle the distressed way his magic turns inside of him. Perhaps it is because his magic already knows better than he does, before he does, that a part of him had died, that there was a lost part of him had not come back awake. His magic knows Rhoeas was only taking the place of something else, something vital, something lovely - some part of Ipomoea that had trembled to see a mountain rising from the ocean and a jungle from the desert. The Ipomoea who had thought everyone, and everywhere, deserved the beauty flowers brought; and had never stopped to consider that maybe the flowers did not deserve the hardship he had laid so unfairly upon them. He knows that, now.
In the silence stretching between the trees he hears only the wind, and their breaths, and their heartbeats all echoing madly. It feels for a moment like time has finally stopped, and the four of them alone resist it - but then Thana is stepping backwards, and Rhoeas is tapping his blood-crusted antlers against the brambles, and Eligos is smiling without moving his lips.
Ipomoea alone is still, and silent, and praying he could be more like the leaves sprouting along the branches overhead.
And when Thana turns to run, this time he does not chase after her; this time Ipomoea feels like the golden sapling that does not know if it wants to wilt or bud.
He does not watch the leaves and the dirt settle behind her. He only watches the deer trip on broken legs and tangled brambles in the clearing, and wonders if half his life had been worth half of another.
@thana
“here am i”
