In the fading of the light and the quiet of the night, the glowing statues reigned supreme.
Looking into the stallion’s eyes seem, to him, as akin to looking into the pits of hell as all the artists described them: bright, fiery, hungry. An inferno waiting to consume. Even now the flames dance greedily along the carved-marble face, their light turning every line every hollow, every chisel to a living, dancing shadow. It is hard to look at anything else. The rest of the world fades away, a background of muffled hoofbeats and whispered words that made the statue seem all the more salient, almost-holy.
For a while, Ipomoea stares back in silence. For a while, Ipomoea stares back and thinks he ought to throw his head back in that same rigid arch, and open his mouth to reveal those same flashing teeth, and scream in a way the statue never can.
He does not. But oh, how he wants to.
And it is in silence that he turns away, and begins the familiar garden path. Each step is already ingrained into his memory, written into his bones (how many nights has he paced this same path, unable to sleep? Too many, Rhoeas would tell him). But tonight, tonight there are countless statues, countless carved faces, countless glowing eyes to watch him. He stares back at each of them in turn, like a dying man finding salvation in their looks of pain, and joy, and wonder. And he tries not to think of the way each one looks and feels a bit like him, like walking through a graveyard of memories he thought he had laid to rest, only to look around and find each rising from the ground as one -
The banquet table stands in the middle of the garden, a thousand glowing lights around it drawing him near. The moonlight falters and stretches around it, and when he tips his head to look at the bits of bone and driftwood scattered about he sees only blank faces not yet carved, bodies not yet given form, eyes not yet opened. The magic in him starts to tremble, but in this garden of silent things there is nothing for it to nourish.
Still, he steps closer all the same, close enough for the lantern-light to embrace him like he belongs there with it. And still he picks up a mass of tangled driftwood, and a carving knife, and holds the two together like he could maybe know how to turn a dead thing beautiful again.
But he only stands there quiet, and still, and unable to bring himself to make the first cut.
It is not until hoofbeats come to rest behind him, and still the driftwood lies untouched, that he sets the virgin knife back upon the table. For a moment, as a girl at another table lifts her finished sculpture into the air, and all those around her cheer for it, he is quiet. But then he clears his throat and without turning around, asks the stranger, “If you could make anything in the world, if in the blink of an eye your hearts desire could be given flesh-“ He sets the driftwood down next, and fingers a scrap of sandpaper instead.
It is peaceful in the garden. The festival-goers who pass between the carvings do so quietly, almost reverently. Asterion, too, feels the holiness of them, these rough statues of driftwood wolves and gleaming bone hares. It’s the soft darkness of the night that hides their roughness, the flickering glow of their eyes that makes them real. A gyrfalcon with wings tilted in an imaginary wind seems to watch him fiercely; he could swear a fox he passes has its ear cocked, listening.
If so he must disappoint them, for Asterion is silent and slow as he winds through the carvings. Dew clings to his legs and colors them silver and he inhales the crisp scent of turning leaves. He tries to keep his thoughts close but they want to wander, back to Denocte, back to a girl with the curtains blowing around her, veiling her face. Maybe it is alright to let them. There are worse places they could go.
In time he finds himself at the center of the garden, another hungry moth to the bright lantern-glow. There is nothing in Asterion that says create; the only shaping he does is of waves and pools, temporary things. There is the pull to add to the story - but oh, he feels separate from it, more of a ghost than the carved figures with their living-light eyes. He might have moved on then, further into the night, but then he spots Ipomoea.
He says nothing by way of greeting, so that the paint is the first to speak. And for a moment more Asterion is silent, considering, thinking how it is only another echo of the question that Marisol and Moira had both pressed him with, a question he has never been able to satisfactorily answer. What do you want, Asterion?
“A second self,” he says softly, “to make all the choices I did not, so that I might live them, too, and see if they were the right ones.” His smile then is what is so often is - small, wry, almost self-deprecating. And then it is smoothed into something genuine when he turns to catch the king’s eye.
He feels as though the statues are watching them, with the flames flickering in their empty eyes. He wonders what they would say, if they could speak - if they would say anything at all. Perhaps they would still only watch him, and let their silence be judgement enough.
It is because they do not speak that he puts the driftwood down. There it sits, perfectly still, perfectly silent, perfectly dead. He considers, for a moment, of setting his magic to it. Of shaping it the way he shapes the flowers, the trees, the grass and all their roots; of whispering to it come alive, and nursing it like a broken sapling. He would not ask it to change for him (it was already beautiful in his mind, with its sun-bleached branches twisted around one another like a knobby embrace, every whorl and knot now exaggerated and spectacular), except to maybe grow leaves, or flowers, or other branches to keep itself company. But Ipomoea is not sure if the driftwood, with all of the salt crusted into it, leeching out all the parts of it that had once been alive, would listen to him.
And he is not sure he wants to know. Not tonight.
So he puts it down, and he listens.
He recognizes Asterion at once, and a smile (hidden, with his back turned) spreads slowly across his lips. “Would a second life be enough?” he asks, just as softly, when he glances back to meet the once-king’s eyes. “I imagine there would be innumerable choices upon choices for this other-you to make.” He does not ask if knowing would make a difference - if it would make things better or worse for a man with stars written across his skin and sorrow stitched into his heart.
People like them often asked the questions whose answers caused the most pain.
His voice is a trembling leaf caught in a winter storm when he whispers, “I would turn the whole world into a garden.” The confession feels heavier on his lips than it should, if only for the root of it that lingers just below the surface.
“And I would never stop to wonder if it wanted to be a desert, or an ocean, or a mountain instead.”
And that was the catch, the dangerous what if that kept him lying awake at night - that his dream was not shared. That his choices, while right in his own mind, might bring more harm than joy to anyone but himself. He supposes a sculptor never paused to wonder at the worth of the stone he turned into a fox, but Ipomoea’s statue was not something so inanimate as that.
He turns to Asterion then, and is quick to put his almost-smile back into place like it would be a shame to forget it.
“I’ve never seen you in Delumine before,” he says, but he is not so crass (so bold) to ask him why he has not come before. He only thinks that it suits him, as he stands there in the lantern-light; that his skin looks like the night sky above the forest, earthy and celestial at once, heaven touching the trees. He wants to know if that is what it feels like, to see the trees and the gardens and the fields full of lights for the first time, as someone who is not so biased as he.
So when he steps away from the table and asks, “how is it treating you?” everything in his soul seems to quiet at once like a meadow waiting for the storm to begin.
“I suppose I’ll never know.” He ought to ask Florentine, sometime - she had done more traveling in her youth, world to world and time to time, and he wonders now how many lives she’s lived, how many she’s discarded. Maybe she was wise enough to not pull herself in too many directions. What kind of tapestry would a life like that make - richer, or pulled thin?
Asterion knows the sound of a confession, and he doesn’t miss the tremble of the Dawn King’s voice as he whispers his. A garden, the bay thinks, what could be so bad about that - but then Po continues, and he thinks he understands. “Perhaps it’s best we can only make driftwood statues,” he says with the curve of a smile in his voice, and touches his muzzle briefly to the paint’s shoulder, like a steadying hand.
He withdraws as the king turns toward him; he was always a little shy about touch. But their conversation reminds him of Eik, another man (another friend) who knows the hairpin balance between power and responsibility, and just like that Asterion is glad he’s come to Delumine. It isn’t a magical forest, chasing a mystical hind, but it is good to see Ipomoea again.
Especially here, in his own country, with branches and starlight sprawling above in a meadow with more than a whisper of its own magic. The bay tilts his head at the remark, remembering. “I danced here once, at another festival, but it seems like a lifetime ago and I never had the time to explore. I feel lucky to see it in the fall.” He does not add that he may stay to see it in winter, as well.
He’s glad to follow Ipomoea away from the table, away from the few pairs of eyes that truly are watching them. Neither would he be sorry to continue walking, to melt further into the shadows and then into the trees - but he wouldn’t want to draw the king away from his country’s own party. “Like a friend,” he answers, smiling more broadly now, so that it reaches his eyes. But there is still something searching in them as he regards Po, like he’s looking for evidence of a wound. “And how is it treating you?”
Later — after the light-flowers lose their magic, after the ghosts of the world tire of their dances and return to that other-world everyone is whispering about — later he might wonder that tonight was made for secrets. And he might wonder if it was something in the air, or the magic, or the ghosts that made them all feel so close to the surface of him, burning up his skin like so many flames trying to get out.
Later, later, later —
But for now it’s all hidden in the shadows cast by the lantern-light. He doesn’t have time for dishonesty, or regret. He has only his memories spread out before him like the glass shards of a shattered mirror.
“Perhaps it is,” he muses. Asterion brushes against him, muzzle to skin, and he leans into the touch for a moment. It grounds him — a reminder that he is more alive than dead, not yet one of the ghosts that seem ready to steal his place. The bay is both earth and stars and Ipomoea has always felt at home in them both.
He looks back to the other horses lingering near them and wishes he could say the same for them. Most days Ipomoea would give himself up to keep them from slipping into that other-world. But today —
“I’m happy to hear it,” he says, the firelight flickering along his jaw when he smiles. His hoofbeats are soft against the dirt path as he leads the once-king away from the table of un-carved statues. There was a garden full of secrets to discover tonight, a hundred winding paths with a hundred hopes and dreams standing guard over it all.
He looks at them now as they pass, from the smallest carving of a single leaf to the rearing, roaring horse marking the entrance. All of them are limned in light in a way that he knows he will never be. When he speaks at last, his voice is softer than a king’s should be.
“Did you ever wonder, when Florentine first made you king — did you ever think she was wrong?”
He is grateful for friends like this, he thinks (even the ones he doesn’t know well) - those for whom quiet speaks as well as a voice. The spaces of silence are easy between them. Maybe it is only a mark of Asterion’s growing up - once, surely, he’d be clambering to fill the air in his nervousness, especially before a king - but he thinks it has rather more to do with Po himself. Maybe neither of them were always this way - maybe what really grows between them is the shadow of a crown.
Well, he is glad enough not to have his head bowed by it now. The bay is glad, too, to follow the paint the way he had on the island, the soft sound of their hooves like a drum beating him back in time; the light here is darker, softer, and the magic quieter. Almost you could forget it was there at all.
Asterion’s eyes, too, touch each of the carved things, each of them given life with careful cuts, given motion with flickering firelight. When Po speaks, the bay has to twist a black-tipped ear toward him to catch it. The question touches his heart like a tender bruise, but a smile curves his lips. “Every day.” He considers adding, I think that’s part of it, or should be. Now he studies the back of the other stallion, the dark wave of hair, the way the firelight finds him. “But I don’t know who would have been right.”
He does not see the smile that curls like a budding flower against Asterion’s lips — he is not looking. His eyes are turned to the statues, to the darting hare and the sly fox stalking after it, both their eyes ablaze with lantern light, each line of their face carved so delicately, so expressively. He does not see the look written like poetry in Asterion’s eyes when he is looking into the eyes of all those statues, staring back at him —
but he hears it all in his voice.
He closes his eyes against it with a sigh, feeling his heart tremble beneath his ribs. His wings flutter in kind, wrapping themselves around his fetlocks in an embrace that does little to keep the chill of the night at bay — and even less to keep out the chill of his own thoughts.
Sometimes he wonders if it would have been different, had he not left for Denocte and for Solterra. Had he not come back with a dagger he was ready to point at his own king’s — his own friend’s — throat. Sometimes Ipomoea lies awake at night (surrounded by walls that do not feel like a home, but like a thief keeping a bed that was not his own warm), and he wonders how things had become so crooked. It was the war, he told himself once, the war had made him into someone else.
But he knows that is not true. It was only the war that had showed him who he truly was.
And somedays, he was not sure he liked who that was.
He is quiet for a moment, letting the flickering lantern-light fill the spaces between them. And then — “Will you walk with me a while?” Ipomoea is not so sure he would like to be alone tonight, not with the thoughts that press in like wolves around his heart.
But there is a hint of that childlike youth still in his voice when he turns to the bay and nudges a smile into his side. “They say it’s easy to wander into the spirits’ world tonight by mistake, if you don’t have a friend to pull you back from it. And,” this part he adds quietly, with sincerity, “I would like to hear about the things you’ve seen while you were gone — if you would like to share them with me.”
Around them the night grows colder, and the shadows longer, and the flames burn lower on their wicks. But the firelight finds them still, and the warm and golden glow is enough to make him almost forget that he feels half a ghost already.
