Ipomoea
I hope you are blessed
with a heart like a wildflower.
with a heart like a wildflower.
He used to dream of the sea. They all did, all those slack-ribbed orphans haunting the alleyways ot a city that did not love them. They dreamed of worlds beyond this one, worlds where they were the kings and queens and there was water enough to forget what it was ever like to live in a place where they were allowed a single fountain to both bathe and drink from.
Their dreams were all they had. So together they made up stories about adventures and love, anything to make them forget, if only for a while that they had neither. They turned their dusty, red stone streets into gardens and rivers in their minds, and promised each other that one day, one day, they would never need to remember the lash of whips at their backs or the sound of teryrs crying out their hunger at night.
He used to dream of the sea. But that was before he learned the sea had just as much hunger, and just as many monsters, as did the desert.
Now when he dreams it's dark and he is a blade of grass in that darkness — reaching, and reaching, and reaching for a light that does not exist. His bones ache from stretching and growing and each time he wakes it is because of a branch knocking on his window, like the night is begging to be let in.
Or maybe it is only commanding him to let the monsters out. And each night he moves closer and closer to that window, and the latch, and the promise that it is not too late to go home.
And now as the Dusk Court Emissary rises elegant and feral from the waves, he finds himself taking one step closer. He does not smile back at her. Ipomoea has spent all his smiles — all the softness — on people starving in the desert. He wonders if she has ever stopped to wonder there was ever a hunger more important than her’s.
His magic begs him to find out but he swallows it down like all the seawater he dreamed of as a boy. It mixes there in his belly with the ash of burned trees and blood-soaked sand, running like war in his veins.
There is a moment that he wants to ask her if she knows why he chose poppies and dahlias today, why every day the roses grow darker and darker (and how he’s afraid that one day he might wake up and find them black.) He wonders if she would understand the warning in them, the way each petal whispers a promise to the wind that tries to pull them free. Part of him wants to tell her he could give her these flowers, that he could sow a field for her that is as honest and vengeful as the weeping sea.
Would she like them then?
"An honest one, Emissary. But," and here he turns to her, his voice quiet against the roar of the ocean, "I do not think you could tell one from the other." What he does not say is that she looks too much like the ocean, waves shifting in her eyes and sun glinting off of her skin, for him to trust anything she has to say. Not here, so close to the deeps — not today.
Ipomoea inhales and it tastes like saltwater and perfume, death incarnate and all its drowned prizes. "One day, come and tell me the story of the ocean and I’ll tell you that of the trees." At their feet as he turns away another garden is growing, weeds and grass reaching through the crags of the cliff to lay themselves down like sinners bowing before their god. They gleam a thousand colors in the sunlight, brighter than reflections of the sea glittering like a sapphire jewel before them. And when he steps out of their embrace and turns his back to the sea, they shiver and press all the closer to the Dusk Emissary.
And he wonders as he leaves her standing there in his ring of flowers, if she sees the thorns lining every stalk like teeth, waiting to consume.
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“speech”
