In the gloaming darkness between the fires, one full of frail scepters of death and decay, Thana is not another hound of hell pressing hungrily to the fires and the lamplight warring against the blackness. The night feels like a fractured thing around her, like a bone half-alive and half-buried. And she wonders how they can bare it, this mockery of thin veils and overlapping worlds, even as she walks among them as a thing full of light and life instead of death.
She did not ask the children's names, only watched them with her heavy gaze like a lion might watch sparrows dancing around the edges of it's kill. They received no questions from her, only a bit of coin passed strangely with her teeth as if she's never learned how to exists in the world of mortals things born, and raised, and loved. And she did not answer any of theirs as the painted her in glittering swirls of silver and gold.
“It tells the story of the first hallowed one who braved the cusp.” The youngest of the orphans told her, hardly pausing to speak as she painted billowing clouds upon her blood-red cheek.
“Everyone knows the story.” The oldest of them whispered as she braided pearls and silvered acorns and leaves into Thana's mane. Perhaps she needed to gather the courage to braid them into the hair hiding a blade from the sight, as she started to whisper the story that everyone was supposed to know only to fill the silence...
It's the story that pools in the places between her heartbeats and her hoof-steps. It races in the streaks of whiteness breaking up the darkness each time she blinks slower than a living thing should. And it lives in each chiming echo of pearl and silver-dipped acorn as her braid tangle together as she walks though the too-thick crowds and the wilting grasses holding out against the cooling nights.
She wonders how like the hollowed one she is, a thing full of aching and hunger with teeth too rotten to eat a thing. Or if she the wolf in the story, dragging at any bit of spectral flesh as it tries to carry the hollowed one back to the underneath?
Or is she neither because this world is not her own?
And yet.
Yet.
When she sees him, soft and gilded in fire-light, Thana wants to howl to the moon, and all the things the children said are living in the air tonight. She wants to beg, and bellow, and stitch it into the darkness of her decay, just this one thing. And when she presses her shoulder to his, and drags her silver and gold between their skin only so that the story might live like a stain between them, she whispers only this one to all the aching places living like weeds in the darkness between her heart and her soul.
Thana smiles against his neck, as much as a monster like her can, and she presses the soft curl of her side against his (as if her flesh is saying, just this one, too). Firelight pools in her horn gilding it into a weapon against the darkness instead of one for it. Her teeth drag lines in his neck as she pulls away.
Let this one be mine.
Her lips are too hard against his cheek to be called a kiss as she presses them there before moving so they are only touching side to side (protecting that one secret that belongs to them alone). “Have you discovered the other world they are all whispering about?” Because it has always lived in her like a black-snaked waiting in the core of her.
But tonight, tonight she's drowning it in a sea of howling, and bellowing, and braying.
And she wonders if he can see it too, waiting there like a sickle moon beneath the eclipse of him.
hey all look like ghosts, dancing through the meadows tonight.
Ghosts made of starlight and mist and half-bodies, legs aglow with light-flower pollen and eyes shining bright enough to be a thousand moons fallen from the sky. He watches as they leave streaks across the earth, like the flowers are at once lamenting their passing and embellishing it in light as if to remember them long after the night ends. Tonight the flowers and the people speak the same language, that of lost and overlooked things and lives already lived.
He wonders if thinking of his citizens as ghosts makes him more or less of one.
He wonders if it makes him the king of the ghosts, forever reliving memories instead of making them.
In a way, it feels fitting: Delumine has always been quiet, its scholars have always haunted the library, the citadel, the forest, always watching, rarely acting. Their only duty to record history, never to make it. He had wanted to change that, once. Now he only looks at his people drifting through the meadow and thinks to himself, at last the appearance matches the soul.
So he joins them, all those dancing ghosts, and he paints himself with the same light that blooms in patterns across their legs, their bellies, their faces. Tonight the flowers crowning him as one of their own are not the usual roses and baby’s breath and solomio; tonight they are silver poppies, and wild vervain, and silk-soft chicory, and all of them are draped in a silver so fragile he wonders how it doesn’t break when he plucks them from the grass. Their light falling across his brow feels almost-holy, the weight of them bows his head into an almost-prayer.
Ipomoea does not know why he is celebrating (is there anything left to celebrate for, when the war is won, when the hunt is over, when the only question left to ask is “was it worth it”?). He does not know why or when his steps begin to feel more like dancing than walking, or if the strange shapes cut through the grass look more like a flower or a noose to the owl passing overhead. But he follows them all the same, collecting pollen from the light-flowers on his legs and belly until he is glowing almost as brightly as the meadow. And with every step he takes he wonders if there’s a greater meaning to the paths, if they exist to lead him somewhere—
Then he sees her.
And he knows the shapes cut into the earth had been made for them.
"Thana." Her name is a sigh pressed into her cheek, and all the flowers in the meadow shiver. His lips are silver and gold when he pulls away.
He wants to trace the swirls across her sides but she is pressing her shoulder to his, her neck to his, her heartbeat next to his. And he can feel himself slipping away from the meadow, can feel the flowers inviting them to dance out of their skins tonight and into another song.
He feels balanced between those two worlds tonight, teetering on a thread spun from silver — and he knows one step in either direction would be all it took to fall into one or the other. A single step and he could become a ghost, or a shadow, or something like a story.
Would they paint his story in gold and silver one day, if he took that step?
"Is that where you’ve come from?" He doesn’t tell her the only world he cares about tonight is the one that he can find her in; he doesn’t ask her to show him that other world, that other story where she is both the hollowed one and the wolf, and he the moon. But oh, he wonders if she can hear it in his voice, in that language of their’s that goes beyond words.
He catches a pearl between his teeth, when they press skin to skin. And he tries not to ruin the story that lives in between them, tries not to slip away into it before giving her a chance to lead the way.
"Do you miss it?"
§
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
There is a song in the meadow, notes twisted between the lights and the last-pollen motes of the season. It rings in her ears like the black-white sea, like monsters snarling in gemstone caves and harpies giving out coins for a memory. She can hear the notes of it, hear the softness, the way it's begging for there to be beauty in the shattering on the veil.
But Thana cannot understand. Even as their Regent, as their unicorn prowling the gates like a bear, as a mare who wakes up each morning on silken sheets surrounded by books she cannot read, Thana cannot grasp the meaning, the holiness, the religion of the song.
Still she tries, oh she tries, to learn it by tracing the curls of Ipomoea's form. She tries to catch it in the way his eyes grow both brighter and darker (like a twilight sky rising just for her) each time he looks at her. When she turns to him her mouth feels full of her heart, of his heart, of the blood of a single doe. And she tucks it into his chest so that his words might fill her up and deafen the roaring black-magic of another world.
And if Thana had to choose how to be the dead-thing instead of the reaper, she would cry out for this bloated ache of her soul over and over again until she was nothing more than drops of dark blood in the cosmic waters.
“I do not think the world I came from could ever be this lovely.” Thana knows that it could never be. That world, that chasm of rot and wrong, does not hold in its cells the shape of Ipomoea. Her lungs flutter in her chest like two wolves as she inhales and exhales him, whispering their violent, viscous language to his heart where it hides beneath his skin.
Inhale. Exhale. Again
“No.” She answers him and it feels like her teeth are leaking the blood of their heats when she pulls away to look at him. Or maybe it's only pearls falling from her teeth, pearls enough to choke her. The color of his lips turns more black than silver or gold when she presses her lips to his in the place where he's dusted with the painted story. It is better here, she thinks, than in the mouths of children. “I do not remember it enough to miss it. But what would I be without it?” The veil, and their hearts, and the lights glimmer around them like funeral shrouds pretending to be bridal.
And she wonders if this thing between them would exist if she discovered a world without black-death and aching. Would would they be without the hunger?
Would they love as mortals do? Or would they still love as violently as two monsters in the wood do?
e thinks he can hear it — that song in the meadow, twined somewhere between the star-bright lights and the petals of the flowers. He thinks he can make out its whisper, rising from somewhere beneath the magic, beneath the thread holding this world together. It feels familiar, in the way that dreams always do, cutting through his soul like a knife bleeding out his magic.
But if this were a dream, Ipomoea knows there would be nothing stopping those two worlds from breaking apart into so many petals.
And he knows he would not be dancing through them, but running. He would not be something beautiful (not in his dreams, there was never any room for that in nightmares), he would be the thing that helps tear those worlds apart, pulling weeds up by their roots so that something might grow untwisted in their place.
Once he had thought she was a part of his dreams — that the golden sapling they had made grow and die and tremble with want had been only as tangible as the song that fades away every time he stops to listen. It had felt too much like coming home to have been real, like remembering a life he was supposed to have lived. Sometimes though, oh, sometimes he wonders if all his life has only ever been a dream, and if the dreams where he is the dark thing running through the shadows have been the real world all along.
But the feel of her against him, of the swell of her side and the curl of her horn and the taste of her lips — oh, Ipomoea doesn’t need to wonder which world is the real one, or which one he wants to fall into. It’s her.
“Mortal, maybe,” he whispers with black lips against her skin, even knowing that would never be true in any world she came from. Wild things like her were always more than mortal, even the ones that died. He presses a kiss against her throat, breathes her in like she’s the other world he’s been looking for all this time.
But if she wasn’t the unicorn in the wood — “Who would you want to be,” Ipomoea hopes she can feel the way his heart feels like a blackbird, beating its wings against his chest. "If you could choose the world you came from?" The way it crashes over and over into his ribs, the way all it wants is to be free (never mind the cost of escaping.) How many times had he told it to stay in there, how many times had he drawn the curtains closed and pretended to not hear the thing dying just on the other side.
But with her —
It was always with her that he wanted to let it out and remember what it felt like to run like something wild, like he knew how to fly instead of walk.
And the more he tries to listen to the song that is still whispering through the meadow, the more it starts to sound like the story of a king and his unicorn.
§
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
It seems like it has been an eon trapped in this form shaped from the white-waters of the rift. Thana does not remember a time in which her horn has not felt like a weight instead of a weapon. There is no time she can think of in which she did not walk as a bear, a dragon, a wolf instead of a thing built for grace. Nor can she recall a time in which her blood rushed through her veins (as mortal's do) instead of roared.
There are a million things she knows and a million others she does not. And none, none of them, prepared her for the way her heart turns almost fragile when it stumbles and learns the song of his. She did not know, that she could devour something, become fat with something, without first carving it from its cage of flesh, and bone, and blood.
Thana is not brave enough, not fearless enough, to ask him what it's like to be a mortal and to feel time like the moon feels days. There is no world, no knowing, that she would suffer to hear the tomes of death fall from his lips instead of life. Once she had asked a man for poetry, and gotten only hunger and light in return. And it had made her empty as a hollow monster and eager to spill each bit of poetry and light from his form if only to fill her own with something other than black, and rot, and winter.
From Ipomoea she wants none of it and yet all of it (all of those things that are not poetry but endings and not light but limitless). From him she wants everything. Every drop of his voice. Every beat of his heart. Every echo of his hoof steps.
There are three hearts beating in her form for him, for them, for all the things Thana is not courageous enough to ask. The question, what is it like to be mortal?, dies against the hardness of her teeth. She does not try to get it back, not when his heart sings in notes that her own will never learn how to make.
No one has ever asked her what she would be if not death, or a monster, or a thing violent and made. Or is it made to be violent?
Could be be anything but?
She inhales him because it is not the air that fills her immortal, made lungs to something fuller than wings with the air billowing them onward. “I would want to be anything that is not so endlessly wanting.” Thana whispers the words in a way that sounds like a snarl.
ll the world feels so far away tonight. His memories feel like they belong to another man, a man in another world, another life, another time; one that did not ever need to learn that a unicorn’s horn could be both soft and violent.
And with her, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who he was then, or what it took to learn to be brave, or who he might have been if he hadn’t. All the what if’s dancing like ghosts through his mind turned to smoke the moment she pressed her skin to his and called him her’s. They were together, in that field of ghost-flowers and wraith-horses. And that was all that mattered.
It feels as though he has been waiting for this, for her. Even as close as they are, his heart is still begging him to be closer, begging to slow down and speed up until it can find the beat of her’s and match it. He wants to live in the story painted across her skin tonight, and with each press of his lips to her skin he is writing himself into it.
Even when her teeth are hard against his neck and when her words are a snarl against his ears, he is leaning in. His neck curls into her, and he bares his throat like a promise when he presses a kiss that is as gentle as her’s is sharp against her skin. Even with that primordial song that is more than flesh, and bone, and blood, and love, and hunger tangles in their lungs each time they breathe in, still he speaks in the blooming as much as she in the wilting. There is a world in her eyes he does not know, but still he presses in closer, he falls in deeper, and he begs her to show him all the things he does not know how to ask for.
He doesn’t understand her, in the way grave flowers don’t understand the bones their roots tangle around. But oh, oh —
oh! he would gladly spend the rest of his life learning.
“Would you still want me then?” A beggar’s song flutters in his heart, and all he knows is the way her touch both hurts and heals him. He wants to stay here forever in the light-flowers and trace the meaning of their shapes as much as he wants to run through forests of shadows with her. He knows he’s a contradiction tonight (or has he always been?). He knows it doesn’t matter that she can kill him with a kiss and breathe life back into him at the same time.
Maybe that is what their love is. What it makes of them. Maybe his blood was only made up of so many flowers, the only bouquet he would ever be able to give her. Want me, his heart is begging her’s, please take me.“I like to think I would find you, if you were anyone else. If you were from any other world.”
The flowers are laying themselves against their legs like so many painters, with their pollen a new story is being formed across their skin. He sighs, and the flutter of his lungs feels like becoming. “I would still love you, in all those other lives.”
And still his heart is trembling, and the sound of it is both soft as falling leaves and strong as the winter-flowers laughing at the snow. And Ipomoea does not think it will ever learn to be still again, or anything other than the sharp-soft edge of their hunger.
§
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
I am Thana, her thoughts had told her once, and I am searching..
She remembers looking into the world, with the ocean thundering in her ears and the sun stinging against the newborn violet of her eyes. It had seemed strange then, to walk the world as a lion fat with endless need and hunger and want. Miles had dissolved beneath her stride, trees had withered in the forests as she stalked wolf-feral through the dappled sunlight, rivers had turned to algae sludge as she slaked her hunger in the mountain waters. She remembers the feel of her slat-ribs as hunger gnawed on them like Eilgos to the corpse of the poacher (and as she too had gnawed).
She remembers to the way she looked at a king of twilight and stardust and counted the vertebrae beneath his perfect back. There had been wishes tossed in the sea behind them and light-water caught in the spirals of her horn as she rose from the darkness. Each of their words had been an attack on that thing in her once thoughts.
And each word had been a weapon begging her to rise, and clash, and consume it on a battlefield.
But this, this gentle kiss of his lips and the humming of his heart as it stumbles into the death-knell of her organs, is nothing like a battlefield, or a counting sonnet of vertebrae, or the humming of her thoughts as she opened her eyes upon this universe. This is something else, something her immortal lips feel hanging behind them in pulses of smoke, and acid, and sugar. Thana struggles to find the words as he paints her in softness and she paints him in tomes of violence and a love that is more consuming than it is eternal.
She wants to find those words, that something else, with a need more violent than every poisoned drop of hunger and violence in her form. She wants.
Oh she wants desperately. Each beat of his heart, each lyric of his voice, each follicle of his hair, each flower growing roots watered by his magic-- she wants all of it. And she takes it, in his word and his kisses, with out shame and all the righteousness of a god. “There is no world, no death, in which I would not want you or love you.” She says the words with all the fury of the wolves, and the lions, and the formless hunters that were gathered like pollen to make her.
Somewhere, on the other side of a veil, magic and time are roiling, and waiting, as deep as two seas for her to come home, home, home.
She pulls back her teeth from his throat and her blade from his hip. She tucks her cheek to his and her hip to his hip. Flowers wilt and rise, furl and unfurl, pollinate and die, in rings around them (each living like a snake chasing and eating it's own tail). Thana sees none of it. She forgets the story of the children and is deaf to the sounds of the pearls falling from her name as the pressure of them together pulls them from her hair. She forgets everything but the song of his heart falling into death and the chorus of her heart falling into life.
She forgets everything but him.
I am Thana, her thoughts tell her now, and I will forever need nothing but this.
And when she closes her eyes the night, and the music, and the veils eager for her magic, slip over them like nothing more than a frail spring breeze against the deep rooted forest of them. Until the dawn, their dawn, there is only this and her thoughts again and again on the same repeating melody of her heart falling into life.
f he could measure this moment in flowers, it would be in bouquets of scarlet salvia and myrtle, tulips and poppies. He would press petals against her skin and paint a new story, their story, in all the colors of love, and passion, and the language they speak with looks instead of words. And he wonders if the light-flowers would look more like stars or like Diphylleia filling the hollow curls of her horn, pressed in like promises against a blade.
He does not lie to himself by pretending this moment will last forever.
The flowers will all die come morning (he does not know how he knows but oh, he knows), when the sun bleeds the magic from them like so many drops of water evaporating in the desert. In no time at all there will be snow, and winds, and all the hunger of winter gnawing at them from the inside out. Tomorrow he knows, tomorrow the meadow will be only a memory.
But tonight, oh, tonight there is only the press of Thana’s cheek against his, and the whisper of magic whispering in his veins as much as in the pollen, and all those hearts beating between them. And there are the flower paths cutting shapes through the meadow, like another story written in that language of their’s waiting to be explored.
“This world is our’s,” he tells her when they tuck their hips together and turn as one towards the path laid out before them. Pearls are falling from her mane and each one looks like a falling star for him to make wishes on. “I don’t want to be anywhere else tonight.”
And through it all that word, love, is coursing like a river full of algae and lilies, a tide sweeping them together and down, down, down.
He lets himself fall into it. Into her.
§
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
