take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
She could be a legend, if the story came from the right mouth, was told the right way. Her story has grief in it, has great and terrible love, has vicious villains, and promises and other such things. But what her story also has is her own darkness – yes, she has wept over the broken bodies of her parents buried six feet under, once begged them to come back, begged while life went on around her and she kept getting older and older until she out aged her own parents. Yes, she did all this, but she also once broke a boy’s heart (“Can I see you again?” “No.”) And another because she thought it was all his fault for making her do it.
Yes, she once stood by helpless as he maimed her father, wailed and gnashed her teeth at the loss of him. Yes, she did all this, but she also reached for another man’s heart with one already in her hand because he made a fool’s mistake of looking her in the eyes and asking for her name.
She is not a myth that deserves telling.
There is a wandering soul that blows in on a Delumine summer breeze.
The meadow is just as lovely as she remembers it that day she had met Lie. The grass is deep and green and smooth in the bright sunlight of summer, interspersed with wisps of pale yellow, the grass that never made it back from winter in time for spring. It tickles against her knees and parts the way for her to move. At once she is content, finding comfort in the caress of the grass against her golden, sunshine skin.
It easy to think, here, that no monster has ever touched her, that no monster would ever touch her again. That she was stronger now. Elena knows this isn't true, that the monsters will always be stronger than she is. But, it is nice to pretend.
Elena is a pretender. She has taken the mask that sits on her beside and placed it over her face to match perfectly in the way it smiles and laughs. It was almost terrifying how Elena has learned to hide beneath the emotions to look to the face of another and wear their smiles.
The delicate angles of her face are soft with sunlight. Dawn has always enchanted the girl, with its meadows and its forests, if her heart did not sing with Dusk perhaps she would have chosen Delumine. She finds herself here all the same in the meadow, collecting the flowers that grow there to take back to Terrastella and to the hospital. Blue eyes rove over the different flowers, remembering her training back when she had been an apprentice in Paraiso.
Elena collects all of the flowers and herbs she can find, knowing they would prove beneficial to the Dusk Hospital. It is when she spots a group of particularity beautiful flowers up ahead in a small grove up ahead. They did not look useful for healing, but Elena finds them beautiful all the same and reminiscent of the flowers she and her mother would find when she had been young. It is only when she bends down to invite their fragrances in that she comes across a surprise, pulling her head back with an “Oh!”
Dawn, it would seem, was always offering her chances for all sorts of adventures.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
@Ipomoea
let's light this house on fire
we'll dance in the warmth of its blaze
pixel made by the amazing star
04-21-2020, 03:48 PM - This post was last modified: 07-21-2020, 05:50 PM by Elena
flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
The sun is shining brightly over the meadow today, the only shadows those that are cast by the flowers. They reach hungrily for the light, unfurling their petals like open hands that are ready, waiting, eager, straining to outgrow the others and to be the first to reach the skies. It looks as if they’re waving a gentle goodbye to him, dancing on their long and thin stalks, trading in their earthly greens and blues for a cloak of golden sunlight.
Rhoeas watches them sway with interest, and wonders to himself why they don’t just pull themselves up by the roots. Poppies like these had simple roots, easy to pull.
He ambles on through the field, crystal antlers fracturing the light every time he dips his head to smell the flowers. His bones creak and rattle as he walks, the sounds cushioned only partly by the curtains of moss and flowers draped across his spine, the roots hanging from his sides. The way the grass weaves at his sides captivates him, the whisper of the wind sliding between its blades setting his chest to aching.
Everything set his chest to aching, it seemed. Everything alive and beautiful and light. Everything he was not.
He doesn’t understand the yearning budding inside of him, just as he doesn’t understand the instinct that keeps him from wandering too far from the horse sleeping in the grasses. The magic though, the magic he understands; he watches as the grass braids itself around Ipomoea like a cradle, watches as the dandelions press themselves against his own skin. The flowers always seemed brighter, somehow, around his bonded; they stood taller next to him, opening their petals like they held a special sort of beauty in reserve for him alone.
Rhoeas paces a circle around him, and with the tall grass tickling his sides and hiding his body it is almost easy to mistake him, from a distance, as simply another deer that has wandered too far from the forest. But he keeps one eye, one ear, one shoulder turned towards the stallion sleeping in the grass, even as he wanders further and further from his side, never far enough to lose sight of the flowers he wears.
And when the mare comes slowly closer, and closer, and closer, he watches her, too.
But something stops him from waking Ipomoea right away - the delicate angles of her face, soft from sunlight; the bundle of flowers she continuously adds to as she walks - and he simply waits. He sinks lower into the grass, watching her as his heart beats painfully loudly in his ears.
And it is not until she reaches the bed of grass his bonded sleeps in, bending her head near to his, that he rises at last and shouts -
Ipomoea!
~~~
He comes awake with a start, the silent shout rousing him in an instant. Ipomoea’s eyes flutter open, head rising above the dancing grass, just in time to see the golden mare perched overtop of him.
Oh! she says, pulling back in surprise.
“Oh!” he echoes, dragging himself to his feet.
Flowers and grasses pull away from him, petals raining like tears from his skin. He can feel Ro lurking somewhere behind him, somewhere in the sea of grass and wildflowers, watching him. His stare is intense enough to burn. But still the stag does not come forward, not yet - he leaves the stallion to his own devices. Ipomoea knows - by instinct or something deeper - that his bonded would only come to him if he were in danger.
In a way, knowing that, and knowing why he kept his distance still, was reassuring.
So he turns to the mare, as the grass shivers all around them both, and tells his heart to be still, there is no danger here.
And without quite knowing why, as he dips his head and breathes deeply of the sweet summer meadow, he says, “I’m sorry.”
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
There is no denying there is a heaviness to Elena now. She has changed, and she is still deciding if it is for the better. She was still quick to smile, but she was still quicker to grow stoic. Whether or not Novus and Terrastella (and boys with shadows, boys with stars) are to be blamed is difficult to tell. Just a half of a year has Elena been here and she wonders now if she went back and found Kensa, delved back into the world of politics if she would even be recognized, if she could even do it. She holds flowers with her ready to heal, and perhaps it would kill her to know now that all Pangea did now was burn and hurt.
Clouds bounce by with dreams Elena has forgotten on this summer’s day. Dreams flying with the birds above her on feathered wings. And she has had dreams of swimming below the ocean with the dolphins she had seen on the coast of Paraiso. (The place her parents went, the place her parents fell in love.) She had dreams of being a mountain, strong, tall. She had dreams of being a tree, ever changing, apart of the sky and the earth. She had dreams of becoming a lake, rippling, and glistening in the sunlight.
And she has dreamed of the sun.
Of fire.
But they float away with the clouds across the blue sky and Elena is left behind once more.
How stunning, the way the heart blooms and bursts.
She feels like there are wildflowers caught in her throat.
‘Little girls need sunshine and adventure,’ her father had told her. And maybe that is why she stands bright in the sun with a surprised grin on her face peering at the once slumbering man before her. With practiced grace, Elena takes a step or two back from him, silver blue eyes widened slightly, but quickly shining with humor when she realizes there is no danger here.
He rises to his feet and Elena cannot help but be in awe of how beautiful he is. If there was somebody who could embody the feeling, the emotions, she had whenever she stepped into Dawn, it would be the man before her. Little to Elena’s knowledge. that she has just stumbled upon its leader. Blue eyes blink away her surprise and laughter finds her lips. It would seem they had both startled each other.
Flowers shed from him in a way that reminds Elena of the way Paraiso’s great trees would dapple the world every spring time with blossoms. It was those times that you could find Lilli and Elena braising the petals and flowers into the silver mane of Alvaro and Malachi and Marcelo, much to Alvaro’s dismay. She is unaware of the stag that watches close by.
“No, no, please, I should apologize,” she offers to him in lilting lyrics that fall like the flowers from his skin. “You were pleasantly sleeping and here I was collecting flowers,” she gives him a tone of faint silver bell laughter as she places the healing herbs down by her feet. “I’m a medic,” she adds. She turns those blue eyes sweetly to him. “I hope you don't mind, I am from Terrastella. I’m Elena.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
@Ipomoea
let's light this house on fire
we'll dance in the warmth of its blaze
pixel made by the amazing star
06-05-2020, 03:44 PM - This post was last modified: 07-21-2020, 05:51 PM by Elena
flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
Her eyes are the first thing he notices about her (then the warm gold of her skin, like the sun; then the bundles of flowers she carries with her, of every shape and color.) But he notices her eyes first, because hey are blue — blue like the sky, blue like the waters swelling in the Rapax, blue like wood aster and the pennywort decorating his brow. And not only are they blue, but —
But they are smiling.
It feels like a lifetime has passed since Ipomoea has last seen eyes that can smile on their own. And it is only now that he realizes how much he has missed it.
His own smile is shy and slow, bubbling gently like rainwater sliding off of a boulder (and it is nothing compared to the boldness of the river.) But still he smiles, and as he bows his head he plucks from his crown a flower, several flowers — gods knew he had enough to spare — and braids their stems together into a miniature bouquet that he offers to her. The blue flowers seem to dance, lifting their petals towards her.
For your smile, he wants to say, but instead he only says, “Will these do? The aster and hepatica have their own healing properties, according to the medical books I’ve read — but they suit a bouquet just as well.” He doesn’t ask her what she needs them for, or for who, or for what she wants to heal.
Ipomoea has never needed a reason to share flowers with a stranger. The act alone has always been reason enough for him.
His heart has settled into an almost-gentle rhythm again by the time he offers them to her, despite the way Rhoeas lurks nearby in the grasses. The stag watches them both carefully, bones rattling so softly they sound nothing more then branches tapping against their trunks. His mind brushes against Ipomoea’s, primordial and vigilant. He flicks an ear in his bonded’s direction.
“I’m Po,” he says, lifting his eyes back to her’s. But what he doesn’t say is, and I’m the king.
Some days, being a king does not feel like such an important thing to be. Especially when his crown feels more stolen than earned.
“Terrastella, you said?” His heart does a little leap at the mention. “How are things in the Dusk Court? It seems like ages since I last visited.”
But he cannot remember Terrastella without remembering the little blue bird he had nursed back to health once upon a time. And he cannot remember Odet without feeling like he was turning to stone bit by bit, starting with his slowly-beating heart.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Elena had felt love when she had been born, and then almost just as quickly, she had known the confusion that life forces on all its children. (Confusion at why her mother’s body was failing her, confusion at why the soldiers came home battered and broken. Confusion why they had to leave, Daddy and her, but everyone else was staying behind.) It is a confusion that lingers, despite answers. There are too many answers, all thrown at once into a sea of uncertainty. She had been swallowed by that sea, one small, lost soul in the midst of hundreds, thousands of others. And it takes her time to surface. It takes her time to surface, because she cannot swim on her own, not when when the first time she had gone to the lake had been with her mother and father, ready to bring her to the surface, dressed in sparkling water drops.
There is something in her that is attracted to the ones that have something sad in their smile. (If only she could bury her light beside their hearts in the quiet of theirs chests, maybe it would help.) But his smile still comes to her, no matter the slow settling it takes, the last leaf of fall. And she is so quick to have her soft smile curve on her features, like lilies. “They are perfect,” she says excitedly, those blue eyes brighten. Perhaps it is a foolish love, a love for children. “I have always quite enjoyed finding new flowers, old ones too.” She shines like the sun underneath Po’s offering. She has not found much time to converse about flowers since arriving in Novus, not in any way as unburdened as this.
The sky was light, small flicks of clouds drifted peacefully through the atmosphere as birds looked almost like dots soaring overhead. “How did you come about to have such a crown fit for a king?” She asks with quick laughter, unaware of just how fit that crown truly was. Elena thinks of the King of Dawn in castle, roving over books, not sleeping in a meadow. But, she decides, here and now he is a king in his own right. King of the Flowers. A worthy, honorable title in Elena’s blue blue eyes.
“I knew a Po once, an owl, I guess Carpo was his name,” she says, recalling the creature she had helped Jay and Orani care for. “I’m still quite new, I arrived just at the closing of Winter, but I enjoy it,” she says. She wonders how she has lived this long away from the sea, because she can still smell the salt on her skin and it feels like home. “Stop by sometime,” she offers him. “I can always use some flowers,” she says, offers, a reason to come because sometimes just desire is not enough.
A beat.
She cant helps but look carefully at his beautiful face, rosy eyes.
“May I remark something?” She asks him with that politeness that had been so instilled in her from a young age. “There’s something quieting about you, Po.” She says, tilting that pretty head to the side. “I think it must be a blessing to have you as a friend.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
There is a moment — stuttering, fleeting, short-lived — in which the flowers hang in the air between him and he feels his heart beat two steps faster.
He supposes there was always something about offering a gift, particularly one as personal as this (to him, all flowers were personal; particularly the ones he had chosen for himself) that involved a bit of fear. He had always found it childish, as if being afraid of a gift being rejected were more embarrassing than it actually being rejected — and yet it’s a knee-jerk reaction, a trickle of ice down his spine that he had no say in being there. And all he can do is smile his sad, shy smile, and pretend the world will be okay either way (it will be — he reminds himself of the earth’s permanence, of the resilience of the flowers he wanted so much to be like.)
And of course, there was something else entirely about a gift being received, particularly with such a smile and excitement as her’s.
He finds it contagious, her smile.
It makes his own feel a little less sad, a little less forced, a little more like it used to. Like a flower blooming — no, a flower wilted, petals dropping one by one, a bit of yellow creeping up its leaves. And then that first bit of water offered to its dry roots, that first hand of salvation. He thinks that might be him, the wilting flower looking for a bit of care. Funny, he thinks, when he’s so used to being the gardener, the one doing the caring. And yet there was something in her eyes and in her voice that had him relaxing into the new role all the same.
“We have that in common.” He finds himself leaning towards her comfortably, gravitating around her smile like a planet does the sun. “Are there any in particular you still need?” Something in his eyes is saying he will help her look, or that perhaps he already knows. And he decides then that he likes the way she talks about the flowers, because it is so similar to the way he talks about them himself — and oh, oh it feels good to be understood that way. She reminds him of another girl from Terrastella, one with flower petals following her with every step she took and laughter in every word she spoke.
Rhoeas is coming closer still, dragging the tines of his antlers through the grasses. Ipomoea smiles, quick as her laughter. “I suppose I’m just lucky,” his voice is full of the laughter he does not let go, not yet, not when her joke is more of a pun than she realizes. Rhoeas laughs for him, and the sound of it is grating and halting in his mind.
“I’ll be sure to do just that,” he promises, “and I’ll be sure to bring Delumine’s finest with me when I arrive.” It feels like a lifetime since he has visited the southern court and, in a way, it has been — years at least, long enough for him to have blossomed a dozen times over, and to watch all of his petals drop just as many times. All of his friends in Terrastella were dead or gone now, but maybe —
maybe there was always time for making new friends.
There is silence for only a moment, both of them smiling, both of them looking after the other with a spark that says I know you. You’re like me, aren’t you? a familiarity he does not find so easily in strangers. And then —
“Oh,” he says with surprise. But it is not a bad sort of surprise, rather the opposite. “Oh,” he repeats, and this time — oh, this time there is understanding, and joy filling all the spaces between his heartbeats, between his words, between his lungs.
“I would like that,” his voice is as soft as the flowers she tucks away with the others. “I think you would make a very good friend too, Elena.” And oh, if he was a flower, surely he would be one that had not quite bloomed late, but just in time.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
They are children.
The both of them.
They are not in a meadow, but on a playground. Elena, bold, bold Elena is hanging onto the metal chains of a swing, that blonde hair is wild as it swings back and forth with her. Those legs pump higher and higher, with practiced movement. And then she pushes off, lets go of those chains because they never could held her back anyway. And she faces nothing else in this world as she leaps. Nothing but gravity.
She lands on her feet, crouched down, a hand touching the ground for support as laughter races to her lips. Leaping to her feet, she races back to the swing.
She grabs that swing, holds the cold chain in her hand, but she does not sit, she is too busy staring at the boy across the playground, with a sad smile, and wildflowers eyes. Eyes that look like they could belong to the bouquet he holds in his small hands. She goes to him, a bounce in her step because life cannot yet hold her down. There is dirt on her knees, her clothes are worn from hours, days of sunshine and play. She taps him on the shoulder with a gentle hand. “Will you trade me a swing for a flower?” She asks him with that smile that says she wants so much more than a flower. And if he wants a friend he will have one.
“Ah, a rarity,” she says when he offers his own emotions towards the plants. She hadn't known too many who shared her enthusiasm, not since Lilli, not since they played in Paraiso’s flower garden. “I think I have what I need,” she offers him an answer with a smile. “They are so deceiving,” Elena comments. “You don't always imagine something so beautiful being so useful,” she says. And yet here they were—blossoming in every corner.
His comment bring silver bell laughter and another smile, low and easy. “I would give away gold and gemstones for a bouquet of roses,” she says, means. Gold, gems, such cold, solid things. But flowers, oh, now they grew, they moved, they breathed. They were alive, they were full of life. A living crown was far better than a dead one.
Elena settles closer to him, admiring his flowers, the wings upon his feet. Maybe he was a butterfly in another life, just as she always thought herself to be a honey bee.
She knew another who thought themselves a butterfly, and together they flew from flower to flower.
“I will have a place waiting for them.” Cross her heart. She laughs and touches his shoulder as soft as a flower petal. “I am willing to find out if you are,” she says. Friends. She needed them, more of them. She needed more smiles blooming in her life.
“I’ll trade you,” she offers him, like she does in universes away from where they are now. She hands one of her own flowers back to him. “A flower for a friend?” She asks, with forget-me-not blue eyes. She cant explain it, but she knows they both need to be going. “Promise, you will come see me, Po, please?” She asks him, as if that please could make a person climb mountains and swim to the bottom of the ocean. And maybe it can. She turns to leave, her bundle of flowers with her and look back at him with one last smile made from the day’s sunshine. “And I will have you know, I take promises, very seriously.” And like a cloud in the sky, her laughter floats by before she leaves the meadow, wildflowers in her hair.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
The longer he spends in the meadow, the younger he feels. The forest — and all its shadows, its secrets, its blood-red unicorns running with their horns held like spears by which to run through the world — feels so very far away.
There was a time when he would come to the meadow to remember, instead of forget. But standing here exchanging flowers with a girl whose eyes smile more than most peoples lips, the difference doesn’t seem to matter.
So he smiles, and he laughs, and he bids more flowers to grow and press against their skin. Somewhere, closer to the forest, a patch of wild roses blooms bright and lively, offering up its fragrant and fragile beauty to the shadows as if to relieve the darkness somehow. Later he might wonder if it was meant for the darkness within or without — but now, oh, now he only thinks it some sweet moral blossom, that nature could pity and be kind to condemned men like him.
He’s not sure it’s an even trade — a flower for a friend — but he doesn’t tell her that. Today he feels more light than darkness and he holds the feeling as close as he holds the flowers the flowers she gives him. “I couldn’t think of a better trade,” he tells her, and hopes saying the words will make them feel more honest. He could use more friends (too many of his were dead, or gone, or worlds away.)
“As long as you have a place waiting, then I promise,” he says with a laugh that feels lighter than it ought to. “Goodbye, Elena. I’ll see you soon.” He crosses his heart and hopes to die, like he did so many years ago, like he did the last time he gave away flowers to a pretty girl.
Rhoeas comes to him when she turns to leave, and together — wildflowers in Po’s hair, and in Rhoeas’ ribs — they watch her go.
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