all our searching [yanhua]

[Benjamen]

I shine only with the light you give me

“The sunrise,” someone told him one time, Septimus, probably, or Torix, “always brings a lesson with it.” James, ever curious tried to ask what lesson, but was silenced with a simple look (it must have been Rhone, he thinks now.) “No talking, just look,” the old man said and sent both their gaze out and over the kingdom. What lesson, what lesson would this teach him? Were there long forgotten secrets hidden in lights beams that burrowed themselves into the ground? Was there a story lurking in the place between where the sun rises and where the mountains spring up from the earth? Or were there memories to be held in the colors that sprang forth from cloud to cloud? (The gold of his mother, when she wakes him every morning, the purple of Elliana’s lilac painting, the orange of the flames at Denocte’s lantern festival as they sent the lights over the great lake and his mother sobbed.

All the world’s moonlight can fit inside the belly of firefly. This was the thought that sent him drifting off to sleep that night. But it was the dream of an owl that awoke him.

James would spend the next hours playing the image of the owl in his head over and over again. James grew up with an owl guardian, but this was not Noctura. It was not Noctura, the feathered creature that had once placed a feather within his obsidian locks. He thinks the image over once more, the gaunt eyes, the cold beak, the crooked angle of its wings, was it—

A daisy, blooms in his pathway, ruined dirt sits beside it. James stops to admire it, he was a child born amongst the flowers, with pollen in his veins, tulips blooming in his chest. He admires each petal that sits there, as if it had been waiting for him. He lowers his head and plants a kiss in the center of it, before blue eyes move up to find the man he had been looking for. (“The one whose hair glows and reminds you of Terrastella’s countrysides.”)

“Are you Yanhua?” He asks with a smile that blooms secrets like—

daisies.



Benjamen; my feet knew the path, we walked in the dark, in the dark
never gave a single thought to where it might lead

image by Gary Bendig

@[Yanhua]