flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
There was moonlight streaming in through the windows when he woke.
For a while he lay there, chest heaving, heart stuttering like a dying thing, watching the way the curtains drifted sideways in the breeze. A shiver went down his spine, cold sweat darkening his coat. He could hear a loon wailing, somewhere in the darkness beyond his rooms; and then only silence. His heart was thud, thud, thudding, achingly long, counting out the long seconds that passed.
There was no partner calling out the second half of its tune, no echoing cry to let them know they were not alone.
He rose on shaky legs, and it seemed to him that it took an eternity to cross the small expanse of his room. Leaning against the cool frame, he lifted his head to the sky where a full moon stared back at him, unblinking, unyielding, its light drowning out that of the stars. Its light seemed weaker here, somehow; and distantly he wondered if Caligo had given preference to Denocte, to light their city streets at night.
Ipomoea was drawing the glass pane closed when the loon cried again. The agony in its voice reverberated throughout him, his heart clenching in time with its rise and fall. It seemed, for a moment, as he leaned out the window and stared at the shadows lingering between the trees - that the call was meant for him.
He brushed the thought off quickly, snapping the window shut with a resolved thud.
And yet…
His bed no longer felt quite so warm, and he lay there endlessly staring towards the window, ears straining to hear the muted call still echoing through the night.
As sleep continued to evade him he rose again and lit a lantern, its flame casting feeble light around the room. Shivering from the cold sweat still beading along his skin, his heart still palpitating wildly, he began to walk.
The rest of the castle was quiet, as if spellbound. As the sovereign strode down the halls there was no one stepping in his path to stop him, no one calling his name from behind him, no one to see, or hear, or care, or bear witness -
Dew wet his hooves when he stepped outside, wishing for a half-second that he had thought to bring a robe with him. The midnight breeze was cool against his skin, whisking away the last of his night sweats as he paced the courtyard, slipping down hidden pathways in the garden. Flowers opened as he passed, lifting their sleepy petals in welcome, before bowing their heads to slumber once more as he continued past.
Perhaps if he had been paying attention to the tangled pathways, or had he perhaps been looking for something tangible, he might have thought it odd then to find himself on a trail he did not recognize, leading from the courtyard. As it was, he only pressed on eagerly as the roots grew more wild and overgrown, weeds sprouting up along the unused path. The trees leaned in around, branches scratching together overhead, casting long shadows across his back. And the loon called again, low and furtive, before-
The path opened up around a small pond, its surface glassy and still, unbroken.
He drew forward slowly, staring down at his and the moon’s reflection in silence. And his heart continued to thud, thud, thud inside of him, each beat loud, and painful, and as melancholic as the night bird’s song, drowning out the quiet of the clearing around him.
his late in the night, it was not unusual that Mesnyi had snuggled into the flank of some lover or another, or perhaps that she was still awake, drinking and laughing and entertaining. Tonight, though, she had slipped from silken sheets away from the silvery man she had fallen in with. The moon shone bright across her face through the tall glass windows, waking her as the morning sun. The lavender mare pressed a kiss to her lover’s cheek, assuring him that yes, she would be back, and whispered through the doorway as a ghost.
Midnight wanderings were a mystical pastime, often full of silence and peace, but the crystalline stillness of the hour also invited reflection. She could dive into her past without prying eyes or ears to hear her crying, some stranger looking in on her private world. They could try to sate her loneliness, but no one was good enough, not after her first. Regret pressed into her heart like a fist. All these years and - for what? What had been gained? She’d gone and lost herself in a place too far from home this time, and now she would never see him or anyone else again. It was just her and ten thousand strangers looking in.
Mesnyi didn’t realize that anyone else had come to the pond. It was a private place, even during the day; few stumbled upon the oasis, its paths left untended and nearly as wild as Viride. The lavender unicorn pressed on through the budding ferns and winter-bare branches, the clearing finally opening up before her as a flower. Before the pond stood her sovereign - Ipomoea. In the distance, a loon cried.
”I don’t believe the fish have awoken yet, luminous one.”
"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
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flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
There are no ripples, no disturbances to mar the moon’s reflection in the pool. It floats across the water like all the garden had been made for it, as if all the plants, all the creatures, as if Ipomoea himself were here only to watch it dance. If his mind wasn’t still thinking of haunted things, and if his heart wasn’t still so heavy beneath the weight of it, maybe then he would have been content to watch the moonlight spin new dreams.
As it is, he only frowns down at his own reflection in the pool and whispers to it, “What do you want from me?”
The whisper of leaves against skin makes him lift his head, turning in time to see the unicorn making her way down the pathway. She, too, seemed spun from silver as she steps towards him, her pale form nearly glowing in the moonlight. And for only a moment, Ipomoea wonders if the overgrown pond and the moonlit unicorn are only a fever dream, or his mind playing tricks on him. But for her voice, he might have pinched himself to try to wake up.
As it is, he only watches quietly as she comes towards him, feeling the thud, thud, thudding of his heart against his ribs now.
“There’s company enough while I wait,” he says quietly. Night blooming flowers are growing around his hooves, pale petals reaching hungrily towards the sky like they, too, long for the moon. If he could, he would let them grow tall enough to reach it. But they, like him, stay anchored to the soft grass of the earth, a bed for all the falling stars that fly too high and too fast.
The night is too quiet. Besides the sound of their voices echoing off the water, and their footsteps along the bank, there is nothing. There are no more loons to raise their voices, no crickets sing a chorus in the background, no fish to break the surface of the water to spy on them.
everything is lost,
everything is crossed with black,
black upon black
and worse than black,
this colourless light.
”There’s company enough while I wait." And there they went, the flowers and the vines, growing up, up, up towards the stars, winding around him, blooming, their sweet scents curling around the pair as if it were a dewy morning. She thought it beautiful - his magic - and longed to know more. She collected gossip, rather than spinning it, but it would never be any better than the knowing of a person. His voice was too sad, though. She couldn’t ask.
”Do I know you?”
Mesnyi dipped her head. ”Not anymore than one may know their own sovereign,” she said, “or that the sovereign may know his own people. So it is.” The lavender mare watched the flowers still climb and curl. She found his face difficult to look at for too long.
In that pause she became aware of the complete silence, and its great, yawning power. She looked up at the moon, and the stars, which kept the sky from seeming such a yawning cavern, with all its silence. “Strange how the quiet can wake us, and make us think we are so alone.” Flowers were not friends. They could almost be confidantes, but they couldn’t listen, not that she knew. Maybe his did. She thought it must have felt the same anyway; no flower she had spoken to had ever moved for her.
"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
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flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
He is not sure when he became a man of memories, staring down into a silver pool like he was watching his life play out before him.
There, in the corner: he can see the dunes rolling, shifting. And that leaf drifting across the surface is him in another life, another form, another aimless trek. All the ripples, all the reflections are nothing more than the garden’s way of reminding him that it will continue on long after he is gone. Even now, with the path overgrown and the reeds tangling together with the water lilies, forgotten by all but the two of them — how long had it sat here, unnoticed, unloved? How long since the first gardener had carved the pond into existence? How long since they had died? And still it was here, tangled and wild and very much alive nonetheless.
His smile is sad when she speaks. He should feel sorry for that — for the truth of her words, for not knowing her and so many others who called him their king. There are so many things Ipomoea is sorry for, and he adds this to the end of the list. One day, he was sure, retribution would come knocking at his door.
But today — tonight — there are only secrets in the garden.
“Aren’t we?" Alone?
The wind whispers across the water, sends a new course of ripples shivering across its surface. He watches her, with his eyes turned to silver and melancholy in the moonlight, and wonders again who she is to know whether the loneliness was real or imaginary. Someone wiser than him, it would seem.
So when he sighs, he adds his voice like he has never been anything more than another whisper of a flower’s petals. “Did the quiet wake you, too? Or have you come looking” for me “for the garden’s secrets?”
She says nothing when he asks, “Aren’t we?” She cannot. She does not know the answer. She is not even sure if she is glad when he speaks again, as if he and the flowers will take their roots and sap whatever contentment remains from her mind. There’s hardly any there, she thinks. That’s why I woke up, isn’t it?
Or was it the quiet?
Mesnyi thinks about his questions for a while, but she does not move, as if she had not heard him at all. And when she does speak, she only looks at his reflection in the water, which is, marginally, easier to look at than his sad, sad eyes. “I believe I was awoken by your coming to the garden,” she says, and she is not certain if this is performance or some dredging up of the heart’s truth. “So that we may each be reminded that we do not traverse these in-between times in solitude.” She isn’t quite sure what it means, not really, but she allows the words to fall from her lips as dewdrops without ceasing. “We are much crueler to ourselves than we need to be. But I have never known anyone who could stop the self-mutilation of the soul.” She licks her lips, and allows her eyes to glance over to him and See. She looks away as quickly, back to his reflection, and her reflection, and the reflection of the moon. Which is most truthful? None of them, she thinks. None of them.
"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
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flowers grow back
even after they have been stepped on
In the silence, the hidden garden seems to laugh. He can hear it in the way the leaves shiver against one another, in the sound of the water parting when a fish rises to take a breath. Around them the world goes on, and on, and on, and life reigns in all its tangled, wild growth.
This is what the roses become, he thinks to himself when he looks out across the still waters, when there is no one around telling it what to be instead. And there was beauty in it still.
He does not look at her when she finally speaks, not at first. He is still looking out across the water, into the darkness of the overgrowth lying in wait on the other side of the pond. It feels as though it is waiting for him, as if every shadow growing dark and deep were a hand reaching out to him. If Mesnyi were not there, he might have been reaching back to it.
“Maybe so.” There is nothing to fill the space between his words. No wind-song, or crickets, or laughter. There is only the endless reach of the shadows.
He turns to her, the mare turned silver in the moonlight, and regards her quietly. “Will you stay awhile?” he is not sure, for a moment, if he is asking her or her reflection. And when he stops to think about it, the difference between the two seems to grow unfathomably larger. “I don’t even know your name yet, and I think I could use the company.”
And he smiles, for the first time since being woken by the silence.
“Maybe so,” he says, and Mesnyi does nothing but huff a little breath. Nothing is definite, and anyway, who would want it to be? We are useless without our own torments. Her sovereign looks at her, finally, so she forces herself to meet his gaze. “Will you stay awhile?” He asks. “I don’t even know your name yet, and I think I could use the company.”
He smiles, then, and it is not so hard to look at him anymore. “You will know it soon enough,” she says. “Company is all the greater, with a little mystery.” The silver mare lies down beside the pool, if only to watch their expressions in the water.
"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
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![[Image: 26y3cfu.png]](https://i.imgur.com/26y3cfu.png)
