[P] overture

[Seraphina]

☼ I'M READY FOR THE FIGHT & FATE ☼

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She was settling.

It wasn’t easy, but she’d learned that such massive upheavals never were; at least, she thought, the trade-off had come with considerably less bloodshed than the one before. Of course, a change in power always brought snakes out of the sand, and the recovering nobility posed more of a threat to the Court’s relative stability than she wanted to admit, but Seraphina had grown up with one foot in the swirling, violent world of Solterran politics and the other in war-torn foreign lands. She was cautious, but she was not fearful – her eyes were trained on the horizon, on what small leaps of progress she might be able to make with this newfound power. Her entire life had been a matter of mindlessly following orders. She had never been able to wish for more, and now…now she had a chance to change things, to undo what horrors had been done to her and to so many others – or to move past them, perhaps, because what damage was done could never be undone. She had never taken herself for an idealist, and it was likely too kind to call it genuine idealism. Everywhere she looked, she was reminded of problems that had permeated her court for so long, for too long, and she knew that they had to be fixed. Because it was right. Because it was necessary.

She’d heard whispers of something strange occurring far out in the Mors today, so she had sent scouts to investigate; the timing was far from ideal, considering that they were to welcome the Queen of Terrastella and her Emissary into Solterra in a matter of hours. The scouts hadn’t returned, and, with each passing moment, she felt her unease grow. They should have returned by now.

With nothing to do but wait and mull, she paced the throne room, white tail lashing behind her. This was her first real diplomatic venture since her ascension, and, with the threat of Denocte and the image of Bexley Briar engraved in the back of her mind like some dark cloud, she desperately needed it to go smoothly – rumor told her that Terrastella had been similarly burned by the kingdom of night, and, in that, she wondered if she could find the basis for a strong alliance. They needed resources, healers, anything; the desert buckled beneath the weight of an entire kingdom, and they could not support themselves on dry grasses and an already-strained oasis forever. Eik, she knew, was buried in work last she checked, and Avdotya had disappeared before she’d been given the chance to ask her to attend the meeting. (She’d been absent more often than usual, lately; when she thought of her right hand, she felt a prickle of suspicion. Something was wrong.) Of course, she doubted that much work would be done on the first day of their visit, so she was comfortable enough to approach the foreign sovereign and her emissary on her own, even if she did feel somewhat poorly equipped to handle Terrastella’s honey-kissed flower queen and her emissary, who was, by all accounts, as whimsical and sensitive as the queen herself.

The massive iron doors at the far side of the great hall creaked open, and a young courtier scrambled inside, clearly nervous. “My lady,” He greeted, with a swift bow. “Queen Florentine and Lady Cyrene have arrived.” She nodded her acknowledgement.

“Please, bring them in.”

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tags || @Florentine @Cyrene
notes || me, writing this post. I'm...rapidly forgetting how to write pre-davke sera.

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