The magic in the air was intoxicating, like it contained a special strain of energy that lit every nerve alight. Everything felt clearer here: the colors were more vibrant and lovely, the sounds seem especially loud and crisp, the scents more potent.
Ipomoea’s magic was awakening inside of him like a great beast, yawning after a long sleep and stretching its legs, testing its claws. Even without meaning to he left a trail of grass and flowers everywhere he walked; the vines overhead swung down to greet him, the leaves if each bush stretching their spindly fingers out to touch him as he passed. He shivers as they do, and they tell him stories of the other equines who have walked the same unsteady path as he, of the unicorn queen and the ocean king, of the girl with dawn light upon her shoulders and the boy barely weaned. He is not the first to search this path for the relic; nor will he be the last.
But the animals - all the strange and fearsome and wonderful and magical creatures seemed to come out of the shadows in his presence, watching him silently with eyes of topaz and emerald, ruby and sapphire. They did not seem afraid of him - nor was he afraid of them. Ipomoea nodded his head as he passed, and a few even dared follow. A fox with a split tail and bear feet padded alongside aside him for quite some time, before turning and disappearing silently into the night. Their presence comforted the appaloosa, for he knew they would not hurt him.
A few, mere months ago he may not have dared to search for the relic at night. But Ipomoea has watched fires burn at midnight since then, and he has walked a silvery forest in pursuit of a murderer. The dark, he knows, is nothing to be feared.
An owl hoots somewhere in the distance, yet something tells him that if he went to investigate it would not be an owl he found.
Overhead it was a moonless night, so the stars seemed all the more bright. But as he passed beneath the canopy of the forest, Ipomoea looked up in wonder to see a galaxy emblazoned on the underside of the broad, flat leaves, a mirror to the heavens.
They dance and they spin, entwining themselves together into endless constellations and stories. Even as he looks, he can pick out similarities and differences between they and the real thing outside the forest. His eyes drift back and forth, and the names of the ones come naturally to him; yet it is the unfamiliar ones that hold his attention. A galloping pegasus, a flaming sword, waves that bend and break gently. His imagination is running wild tonight, as he envisions a flock of butterflies swimming through the canopy overhead, immortalized in fake starlight.
And as he stops to admire the wonder of magic, footsteps crunch across the forest floor behind him.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” he whispers softly to the stranger. “I’ve never seen anything like this place before.” It was magic he knew; terrible, beautiful, wondrous magic.
And he loved it.
He turned towards the sound at last, pulling his eyes reluctantly from the star show above to focus instead on the stranger padding through the dark. They’re still clad in darkness, but the starlight draws sharp lines upon the planes of their face, bathing their shoulders in silver.
“Hello,” he says simply, as flowers begin twining their way up his legs.
@anyone! another relic hunting thread <3
”here am i!“
She is following a trail of flowers and vines, thick and blooming and scenting the air although it is night and the air is cool and there is only starlight to coax out the petals and leaves. The scent of another horse - of Novus - is faint below all these new smells, so different - almost overwhelming - from simple sand and wind and sweat and stone. Earlier, as she wandered alone, she had begun trying to count all the things utterly new to her, but she lost count around one hundred. It is difficult not to feel overwhelmed, cowed by awe.
Elif only finds it a little easier, in the night. The forest is dense and close, though lit will all manner of unnatural things; fungus and leaves that glow unearthly blue, and the shine of eyes that prickle like burrs along her skin and make her tuck her wings closer to her sides, and the calls out of the darkness of things hungry, or lonely, or glad.
The mare is not sure how to feel. She can’t quite manage fear, not after the last long weeks in Solterra, where the threat of violence hung thicker than smells of tumeric and paprika in the marketplace. But she is lonely, and entirely out of her depth, and when she whispers to the wind only the smallest streams of breezes comes to find her, to sing through her feathers, to cool her skin where such foreign humidity makes her sweat. Gladly she leans into its touch, and lets her eyes drift closed, and lifts her chin to the canopy -
where she finds the stars, and gasps. It almost makes her dizzy to look at, those maps of constellations printed on the leaves. Now she wanders more slowly, gaze up as though she walks below a mural in a chapel, stumbling over every other step. There is no hope for her to be secretive here, and so transfixed is she that she doesn’t realize there’s another figure ahead until it speaks.
Her first instinct is to freeze, to think of the whip coiled like a vine against her hip; but as her gaze falls to him it softens.
“It’s amazing,” she answers, and her voice, too, is hushed with childish wonder. “If a little disorienting. I -” she cuts off abruptly, as something dark twines around the man’s pale legs; it takes her a moment, particularly with the brief distraction of finding wings there, to see that they are flowers. Unaware of his magic, she takes a step back, falling again into shadow, feeling flighty and nervous as a fledgling bird.
“I think the island has a hold of you,” she says, and casts her green gaze pointedly to his legs.
The stranger is framed in silver moonlight, wearing it like a gown as they step forward. A star explodes in the canopy overhead, silently, brightly, and its reflection is illuminated in her eyes, eyes that stare at him from a dark face.
Then the light vanishes, and only the glow from the canopy bathes them in soft, indistinct tones. Her voice is hushed and feminine, a mixture of awe and youth that brings a small, subdued smile to his lips.
”I think the island has a hold of you.”
“Oh, yes,” he says distractedly, returning his gaze to the canopy overhead. “It tends to do that.” The vines are thickening, winding their way about his fetlocks like ropes tightening into a noose. But they do not strangle him, nor drag him down to the earth; flowers bloom along their length instead. Blue and yellow, white and pink; each one is different, as if it doesn’t belong with the rest of the plant. We don’t, the creeping vines tell him, as they press into his skin. A steady trail of emotions and memories, memories that begin as suddenly as the island appeared, flow from the plants to Ipomoea. We are not ordinary.
More and more flowers appear, until his legs disappear beneath a blanket of petals. But when he looks down, and lifts his leg slowly, gently, so as not to tear the delicate flora, the vines release their hold on him. They fall back to the earth in slow motion, and he pulls his other leg from their grasp with the same exaggerated carefulness.
“That’s better.” The vines coil themselves into a pile across the ground, a few flowers bending towards him on long stalks still. “The plants and I have an understanding, of sorts.” He had never considered before how it might look to others, when the plants reached for him and followed him around like pigeons begging for food. Whenever a flower leaned over to brush his side as he passed, or when birds came down from the trees just to be near to him - it had all become second nature to him.
Only now did he pause to think how strange it might have looked to a stranger.
“I'm Po," he says now instead, and the smile spreading across his face feels like a flower blooming.
She might have doubted it (or feared it, with her people’s superstitions) had she not met Mateo, and listened to him sing, and watched the way it turned the ordinary world to brief and brilliant streams of color.
So it is not as strange as it would have been, to watch those vines curl and open flowers along the slender tendons of his ankles and the curve of his knee. Though Solterra is not known for its plant life, and she is not known for her botanical knowledge, she notes the way the flowers bloom along the vine, different colors, different numbers of petals. They perfume the air with scents sweet, and sharp, and drowsy.
And then she steps away, and she shuts her slack-jawed mouth so that her teeth click softly together. “I never thought of them as having much of an understanding at all,” she says baldly, then, realizing it sounds like an insult, adds “there aren’t many but cacti where I’m from.” And now, she thinks, she will always wonder what they’re doing, if they have thoughts like she does, and wants, or fears -
Elif shakes her head, takes another tentative step forward, so that they are both standing fully in starlight. When she breathes in she wonders at how heavily-laden the air is, with thick-growing plants and salt-smelling sea and the trace of creatures she can’t put a name to. Whatever his scent is is mostly lost, below the cover of the island.
“Elif,” she says, smiling back. “Are you - searching - too?”
She shuts her mouth quickly, with the sharp clack of teeth meeting teeth, and only then does he stop and consider how strange it might seem. The flowers leaning in around him, the vines wrapping his limbs in a hug, the shrubs that parted to make a safe path for his hooves to tread. Nature was at peace around him, and he around it.
He can’t even remember when it first started, for he thinks there was never a beginning to it, just that it simply is. He had always loved plants, even as a child; and the plants seemed to love him back, thriving in his presence. Many a gardener had written it off as his devotion to studying the many botanical books he was saddled with, but he supposes that even then, even as a child, he had known it to be something more. Something magic.
There were books in the library mentioning this, but none in great detail. Only that sometimes a figure would look out from between the trees in the forest, with antlers of living wood adorning their brow and tails strung with leaves that seemed to grow directly from their hair. Ipomoea himself had none of such blessings, but still the words - the stories, as many dismissed them - drew him in, those few times he had stumbled across them.
He smiles when she speaks, and tries to make it appear reassuring. "Solterra?" he asks her, and something akin to sadness - or is it longing? - colors his voice with strains or blue and melancholy. But then he shakes himself. "Oh, but the cactus, too," he tells her, almost eagerly, voice still hushed. "They yearn for the water and the wind and the sun the same way you or I. Although," he conceded, "I suppose they do not think quite like us." There’s was more of a slow, content manner, one that meditated only on what they were and what surrounded them, never wanting to be more, never knowing what more could be.
She steps forward, until they’re both in the starlight, and he tilts his head back to look at the sky mirrored in the leaves. And before she speaks again he wonders if, maybe, he could bring a sapling home to Dawn, and if they would show the same galaxies there as they did here.
He takes a moment to answer. "Yes," he says at last, breaking the silence that had fallen, not uncomfortably, between them. "I think I am." Weren’t they all? But then he smiles, and his teeth glint at her in the darkness as he looks shyly back at her.
"Although, I’m not sure if the island has all the answers I’m looking for." And then he closes his own mouth quite quickly, as if it was blasphemy to say such things.
@elif thank you for being so patient!!
”here am i!“
She should have been less surprised, less wary - gifts of magic from the gods seemed to be growing less rare, after all. She herself had been born with an affinity for the wind, and could raise it (not much, just a breeze, enough to tug at her hair and stir up the sand in patterns at her feet) with a whisper or a thought. Why should this man and the way he walks like a gardener through the forest be any stranger? Perhaps only because he is unknown.
“Solterra,” she answers, uncharacteristically soft, and the same sadness colors her voice, turning its tone foreign even to her. She feels old, then, older than she should, older than she is.
It passes, when he begins to speak of cacti, and the eagerness of his voice (reminding her of Mateo, in all its earnestness and sincerity, and that alone is almost enough to coax her forward another couple steps) draws a smile from her lips. “I should hope they don’t,” she says, and flicks her ears back and wrinkles her nose, imaging all the plant life (what there was) of her home as hot-headed and fierce as the horses there.
No; it would be a worse world if the plants had the same ambition as the people.
He looks up to the stars and she steals the moment to study him further, the dark glint of his eyes, the red of his skin like rubies in the dark, the slender curve of his throat. And then down, where the vines still reach out as though comforting him (or themselves) with touch, where she at last noticed the wings on his feet. Then Elif is colored again by surprise, for those are the most curious things of all -
But Po is speaking again, and she glances up to catch his eye, not wanting to be rude. (Yet she still wants to ask What are they for? Doesn’t it make you sadder, to have them and still not fly? Or can you fly?) Now it is her turn to look up at the stars, thoughtful, though it isn’t long at all before she’s shrugging a shoulder and looking back at him. “I’m not sure if anywhere does. I used to think answers were easier to come by.”
She wants to ask him what he is looking for, and wants to tell him the same - but something about it feels like wishing on a shooting star, or blowing out a candle at the death of one year and the birth of another. The kind of thing where sharing it might ruin it, or weaken it, or keep it from coming true.
Elif knows it is superstitious nonsense, and shifts her wings against her sides like a self-reprimand. Still, she says nothing of what she hopes to find. It is unlikely, anyway, that Solterra’s salvation could be found on an island that shouldn’t exist.
Instead she steps forward again, light as a cat, until they are nearly face to face and she can make out each petal and vein of leaf in the blue light of the stars. “But there must be some things worth finding,” she says, then nods in the direction Po came from. “Is there anything that way? I haven’t found much in my direction.” The pegasus thinks of what he has said, and of the way even the night-birds and insects seem to be gathering closer to him, now, faintly through the branches and the leaves, as though he is the moon they all orbit. “But maybe I wasn’t looking for the right things,” she adds, and grins at him.
He shifts his weight from one leg to the other as a shooting star darts across the sky-mirror. Ipomoea watches as it fades, and he says a silent wish to himself. A wish for Solterra, a wish for her people; a wish for himself, and the unresolved sadness he feels when he thinks of Raum and all that’s happened.
Then he catches himself, and smiles a small, thin smile. It was a Denoctean custom, wishing upon stars. Delumine was far too practical to believe in most superstitions. But thinking so didn’t stop him.
Her wings rustle when she shifts them, and he finds himself flexing his own subconsciously, breaking the grasp of the vines around them as they lift and stretch and mimic flight. Like they’re dreaming of flying alongside the Solterran girl, through forests filled with stars and skies that know no bounds. He lets them wonder what flying would be like - because he’s shut those dreams of his own away long ago.
“If they were, they wouldn’t be worth searching for I suppose,” he tells her. The island has reminded him of that - of how sometimes, the answer isn’t always the most important part. Sometimes it’s the excitement at finding something new.
Here it’s easy to forget that he’s looking for monsters and gods, that he has an anger building inside him that demands retribution. It’s easy to lose himself in the wonder of a vibrant new flower, or the peculiarity of a ray of blue-colored light.
He glances at her, and the sudden spark in her voice and in her eyes has him grinning. “Oh, I’m sure we can find something over there,” he says, nodding at a break between the trees.
“The trick is to not look for any one thing-” And he’s moving towards the game trail, where strange creatures had formed a path that twists through the trees and follows the flow of the land. “-we need to let it find us.”
There were tales about this island, tales of strange, floating lights and plants that shone different colors in the night and animals that danced when no one was watching. And he was determined to see at least one more marvel tonight, even if it isn’t the one he expects.
It is (of course it is) her first instinct to disagree with him - why, oh why, couldn’t any answers be easy? It had all seemed simple enough in her foalhood - but instead she only smiles, a fleeting little crescent moon. It is much like his, from moments ago, and like it, hers vanishes unnoticed.
Maybe the real trick was to stop asking those questions. Again she thinks of being a child, and the word Why always tripping off her tongue, and how her parents finally grew impatient with it. The answers went from truths to guesses to chastisements to nothing at all, until she finally stopped asking, and now she wonders - why shouldn’t it be the same way with the universe, with her own god?
Why does this island exist?
Why does it feel like danger and beauty both?
Why was Raum allowed to take over, to starve the people of the desert, to slaughter their queen?
Why was he allowed to win?
Why, why, why?
No answer, unless you could find one in starlight and frogsong. Maybe Ipomoea could. Elif can’t. And sometimes she feels so tired of trying.
But they are here, and there is magic, and it’s enough for now to just be. Her newfound companion says over there and she turns her sharp-angled head to look, peering through the almost-darkness, making nothing out but a thicker black beyond the blue-lined leaves.
“Patience has never been my strong suit,” she says, already following after him, eager and apprehensive at once. She keeps her wings in tight, asks the wind around them to hush so they might hear and see and know whatever stirs the leaves is not the breeze.
There is something almost reverent in the appaloosa and she tries to echo it, keeping quiet, careful of each placement of hoof, green eyes wide and roving.
And she swallows her questions, all those that start with what and why and how, even when a rasping, raking, rumbling sound rises up out of the darkness ahead of them.
He can see the darkness moving, shadows slinking and morphing before his very eyes. But he is not afraid (or at least, he tells himself not to be) - the stars are lighting his way, and a girl borne of the harshest place in the world is by his side. Ipomoea hopes that in another life, one where he had stayed in Solterra, that there’s a version of him that is more like her. He would have liked that.
His magic makes the trees and the vines and all that wild, tangled undergrowth part before them like water, laying out a predetermined path for him to follow. And follow it he does, without knowing where he was going, or where the path may end.
He’s in it only for the adventure.
And as that terrible, rasping, raking sound rises up all around them, like the forest is gasping for breath, he lifts his chin all the higher. His eyes grow brighter. And instead of slowing down, he speeds up.
