 IPOMOEA so lay me down in golden dandelions
At first, it felt a bit like falling. He was sleeping in that great grass sea when the mist first began to fall, dew drops settling like a thousand frozen tears upon his skin. The grass flutters their blades nervously all around him as the island shudders, lacing their fingers together in a veil hiding him from the eye of the moon looking down upon them. As the mist draws closer and Ipomoea slumbers on, the grasses begin to tremble and whisper to one another. They already know what comes next. When the darkness comes it swallows the island whole, consuming the grass forest protecting him. And as the shadows fall hungrily against his body he jerks awake, and for a moment he forgets how he had run for so many yesterdays through an island made of magic, and how that island shed its skin like the snake it wished to be. He struggles to his feet, reaching for the grass and the flowers that had cradled him only moments before - and finds nothing. Nothing to stand upon, nothing to grow roots into, nothing to stop him from floating away into the encroaching darkness. The magic in him snarls; and he thinks he can hear the magic of the island snarling back. But when the first spark of light appears before him, shining like salvation in the nothingness - he can begin to also forget the way he wanted to tear a whole through the magic. His heart slows its frantic beating, and in the spaces it leaves he feels only wonder. The star drifts closer to him, winking and blinking like it’s struggling to contain all the secrets wished upon it while it fell. And Ipomoea steps forward to meet it. A thousand colors shine from the heart of the star, fracturing into a hundred thousand strands of gossamer silk spiraling from its center. The colors flicker; fading and swelling, humming with energy, captivating him. And as the star glides to a stop before him, purring in the same almost-soft tones of a feral cat, he reaches out. The surface of the star is soft and warm, like gold upon flesh, as he lays his muzzle against it. But at its touch it begins to simmer, sparks tearing free from it and spiraling away into the nothingness surrounding them, heat pouring off of it in waves. His eyes begin to water. And then the colors begin to flare, like a miniature sun exploding. The air around him burns, drops of color sloughing off and falling like tears to where the grass had been. Each one sizzles when it hits the almost-smooth glass beneath his hooves, and there it runs like the most brilliant blood he had ever seen. As the rest of the nothingness begins to burn with a thousand more stars, fashioning themselves into constellations of flowers and leaves and lightning arcing over his head, Ipomoea begins to walk. And when another star explodes into tears, he wonders if the island is crying all the tears he’s forgotten how to shed. His magic begins to weep with it. @lyr ”here am I!” |
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Walking into the island is like walking into death. First, through the fog, a fog that stings just as nettles do. It burns but does not burn too terribly, just enough to irritate, just enough to cause doubt. Just enough to remind the passerby that yes, they are mortal, and the due of mortality is pain. Lyr is familiar with such strange oddities. He ventures to the island—the island, now full of stars—because he believes he has brought something back from his travels, something he may never escape. The magic of the far North. Could the ends of the world reach Novus, too? Perhaps the end merely necessitates the falling away of many, individual pieces and—perhaps his realm, his country, is the next fragment to fall into the desolate after that is not death in a true sense, but instead the land of fallen gods. Lyr knows, one day, this will be Novus’s fate. Perhaps it is today. He pierces through the fog with one hollow step after the next. They ring out in the darkness, and Lyr feels blind; he knows he isn’t. He knows he isn’t, because he has played in these god’s worlds before, in realms not made for men. He stares out into the vast emptiness until, at long last, stars appear. There is a chance Lyr would have not found Ipomoea at all, if not for the star that explodes at the other stallion’s touch. The stars leap out by the thousands, forming strange and—to Lyr—incomprehensible constellations. He does not see the death of a star as a thing to fear and so, instead, walks doggedly toward it. His mind is full of half-myths. Lyr remembers what it was like to sail a ship with crimson sails across an abyss not so different from this, across an ocean still as paned glass. The constellations—and cosmos—had danced in the water, there too, but the water teamed with the unimaginable. We are getting close now, boys, Frasier had said. Lyr remembers what the skeleton of Atlas looked like, half-mountain and half-equine, with pitted and ridged vertebrae larger than life. His shoulders had rutted, monstrous, against the inky expanse of sky until it seemed the blades would tear it open and let the promised land spill out. This, compared to that, does not seem so terrible. It is quite some time before Lyr reaches the dead star and the man who stands besides it. Lyr cannot tell if he marvels or simply questions. "Do you think there's a way out?" Lyr skips polite formalities to ask the question; pragmatic; detached. He cranes his neck and looks at the stars above, and then drops it to look at the stars below. The strange, astral space around them seems limitless. And, of course, Lyr recognises the Sovereign of the Court that ruined his life. But now scarcely seems the time to mention such starved moments of history. "Speech." || @Ipomoea so you say you want a deathbed scene the knowledge that comes before knowledge
There’s always a way out. Perhaps it is the star-shine that makes the words seem disembodied, belonging to any time, any happenstance. There is a pleasure in Ipomoea’s voice; as if he is simultaneously commenting on the scenery, saying, it is beautiful here. Why leave? And meanwhile, Lyr can only think: sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the darkness is absolute. Sometimes, you cannot break the surface of frozen water or escape the inescapable silence of the end. Lyr’s mind is full of glacier’s and cracked ice. There are wolves howling in his soul; there is an astral plane not so different from this one, cut through with a boat's sharp prow. The stars reflected in the sea had not been so different from the stars above, in a clear and moonless sky. Lyr reaches his nose to touch a speck of brilliant, luminous dust. It spirals, an orbit out of control, that sends it colliding with other minute formations. There's always a way out. He wants desperately to take stock of that optimism; to ground himself in it. But he already feels dead. Yet, even he can admit this would be a beautiful place to spend eternity. Would you like to stay a while? “Yes. I would.” Where Ipomoea smiles, Lyr’s eyes only soften. It is his nature. He has not smiled since—well, it seems, nearly since his sister died. And that is the way of things. What joy was left to be found? And here, in this magic island, Lyr feels entrapped by strange gods. Is it Tempus, transforming the air into galaxy around them? Is it Caligo, who has seeped the bright light from every orifice but the stars? They are ghostly in the illumination of the false nebulas; pale and crimson; pink and blue. In the silence that follows, the stallion introduces himself: “I am Lyr.” And then, more quietly, in a voice lost to stars and stardust: “Do you love your Court?” "Speech." || @Ipomoea so you say you want a deathbed scene the knowledge that comes before knowledge
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