☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
there's something soft in me -
we killed it and it's rotting
She feels like she has an arrow caught in her skin.
Think about it this way. It’s a wriggling, painful sensation. When you move, you feel it sink in deeper. When you breathe, you feel it sink in deeper. Perhaps just thinking about it sinking in deeper is enough to give it a little bit more hold, like barbs stuck into your skin. And maybe it has always been there, a little lingering prickle at the edge of your thoughts, but it isn’t too hard to ignore it, or to grow accustomed to it, or to push it aside entirely and tell yourself that it isn’t important, that pulling the arrow out will only make it worse because then you’ll start bleeding and you don’t want all of that ugly red blood to come spilling out, so it digs in deeper and deeper and deeper until the arrow is practically a part of you, a permanent gouge.
You tell yourself that you’ll pull it out someday.
Someday never comes.
Arrows, and other lies that you tell yourself: when you’re younger, you like to tell yourself that you’re special, or that you will be special eventually. Well, it’s been several years of trying, – and failing and failing and trying and trying over and over again – and you still don’t feel like anything especially special. Stick a crown on a girl’s head, and she likes to think that the world will bend to her will, that finally - finally - become something a bit more significant, and a bit more powerful, and a bit more special. You tell yourself that you can change things. You tell yourself that you will make them better and then – then what? (Sometimes you ask yourself why you want it, really. Is it some misguided sense of duty? Is it out of the goodness of your heart? Some selfish desire to play the hero?) But it’s never so simple, and a crown doesn’t grant you much of anything. But you still have your dignity. You always have your dignity, so you never – never - let yourself crack. You don’t slip. You bear the brunt of all the ugly things that get slung your way with a tight-lipped stare and cold, dead eyes, and you bear the brunt of a slap to the face and bitter accusation after bitter accusation with a cordiality and a cold front of politeness, and it’s oh-so perfectly respectable, and when you let something slip through the cracks the shame and the sense of failure might as well eat you alive from the inside out, and you tell yourself that it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, love or hate or neutrality or anything in between. You want to be vindictive – you want to bite back, to sink your teeth in so deep that you taste blood in your mouth. It feels like your entire life is lying back and taking it, and you don’t want to just take it anymore; you want to be authoritative and decisive and powerful and beloved (or loathed) like so many of the other leaders you have encountered, but you know that runs the risk of hurting the people beneath you-
(but indecision is a decision too.)
You tell yourself to be patient.
You have been devoted to the gods for your entire life. When you were a desperate, frightened little girl, they were the only thing that you had – at the most terrifying, lonely moments, the very concept of them was your only comfort. (The concept. The concept. You know that they’ve been somewhere, now, but you don’t think that it’s ever been with you.) And you don’t know what you’ve wanted from them, or what you’ve been chasing after, or what you even want now. Answers? Justification? Ah yes here is the greater meaning here is why everything had to hurt and everyone had to hurt and you had to hurt- Does it even really matter, now? Explaining fixes nothing – nothing that has happened can be undone. And here you are, still begging for some rationalization or some reasoning, as though it will ever change a thing. What’s done is done. (And the arrow slides in a little bit deeper when you think about it, because, really, you thought that they might have cared about you, in their impassive, distant way – but, for all of your years of worship, the closest thing that you’ve received to acknowledgement or reciprocation was the blink of a pair of white-washed eyes. You aren’t blessed. There are no dragons at your side, and the earth does not shift according to your will, and you are not free from the constraints put upon you by time. You are mortal. You have only ever been mortal. You are mortal, and maybe once that was fine, even preferable, but now you stand on the same ground as gods and those who resemble them, those who are blessed by them, and all you can find it in yourself to do is ask yourself what all of that devotion was for. Faith is its own reward, or something like that, or faith is useless unless it’s tested, but it doesn’t feel very rewarding right now. Instead, it just feels like another little pinprick, or more than a pinprick, another layer of skin peeling right off; you are surrounded by foreign faces that have gained the favor of the gods, regardless of their own belief in the divine, and all you can ask yourself is what have I done wrong? You feel like you ask yourself that a lot, lately.)
You wonder if you feel insulted, or scorned. That doesn’t feel quite right. You were angry, when you were trapped, – nearly crushed - so angry that you were in tears, but they were lost to the ashes. You were angry for your people, and for yourself, and you felt betrayed. As with most things that you feel, it’s faded away to a dull, throbbing pain, now. You can’t keep anything alive for very long, and, the moment that it starts to fade, you feel a little bit less righteous and a little bit more childish. You should have held your tongue. It’s always better for you when you swallow things down; it’s harder to regret the things that are left unsaid. You never really feel like you learned to talk to others – there’s always this little space in front of you, like a wall, or a gorge that’s nauseatingly dark and deep. Sometimes you stare down into it, but you can’t see the bottom. You wish that you were angry, filled with some righteous fury – or you wish that you were devoted, and it didn’t matter to you at all.
Instead, you’re just tired, and suddenly very, very lonely.
(She paces the edge of the outcropping, hooves a sharp clack against smooth stone. Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack. A sharp, frustrated breath hisses out of her pursed lips, and the tight braids that loop down her neck begin to untwine, tearing apart at the force of her telekinesis – some strands are jerked from her scalp, and they flow away in the night wind, little wisps of ghost-white. She’s silver in the moonlight, like the blade of a knife or the sharp crescent of the moon, and isn’t it sometimes just a bit funny that she’s supposed to be the “chosen” of the god of sun and flame and day when she’s as grey as smoke and silver as the world suspended in moonlight? She casts a long glance towards a tiny, glinting golden thing that still rests on Solis’s alter. That damned sun pendant. Her own damned choices. Was it the right thing, stepping aside? Did she need to do it? Trying to think for herself, she thought, was hard – and trying to decide what to do for a nation was a thousand times worse. Perhaps she blamed the gods – perhaps she blamed him - for something that was out of his control. (But she never really blamed him, did she? She just knew that she was not blessed, like her opponent, like the woman who slaughtered her people and burnt her city to ruins (but that was not so different than what had been done to her before), but now Bexley and Eik were – and it was just her that seemed to be standing on her own.) Perhaps it was never really about blame, either. Perhaps it was just another desperate attempt to feel like she was in control of a situation that spiraled right out of her grasp. Perhaps it was just another desperate attempt to feel autonomous, no longer obligated to dead kings or generals or gods that never said a thing. And she was a girl - she is barely more than a girl even now, in spite of the (metaphorical) crown that she wears on her head. She doesn’t really know, and it doesn’t matter anyways – there that little sun is, right where she left it, and it’s beyond taking back now. Click-clack-click-clack. She turns her face away from that glint of gold, and she rests her eyes on the jagged edge of the horizon.)
Here is where you stand: to some of your people, you are a stain on Solterra’s history, and to some of your people, you are just an extension of an ugly, oppressive system, and, to some of your people, you’re a little piece on a chessboard all set up to be used, and, to some of your people, you’re a weak, false silver queen, and, to some of your people, you’re a symbol of hope and change, and to a very few, you’re a friend, but you’ve come to the slow, slow realization – like a frog being boiled alive – that you don’t know anyone that you call a friend very well, and you’ve never really let your friends know you, either. You’ve thought that you were a little bit in love a time or two, but it was a quick sting of something like a splash of scalding oil from a frying pan, a burn that flickers away in a minute or three – but you still see the mark it leaves on your skin. It isn’t really love, you think, if it runs away when you start to think about it and you think and you think and you think and it’s gone when you think about it and you realize that it isn’t worth the risk. It’s never bothered you much, being alone. You like the quiet, and you like to think, and, when people ask you to talk, the words always seem to dangle just a little too far out of reach. But you’re a little bit older and a little bit less detached then you think you were not all too long ago, and the things that didn’t matter at all once upon a time are starting to feel like they matter now.
And there’s still the matter of that hole that feels like it swallows you up from time to time; that comfortable emptiness that is no longer quite so comfortable that you still find yourself falling into whenever something is too difficult for you to process.
Maybe it isn’t your fault that hole is there – maybe you weren’t the one who dug it. But you’re the one that keeps opening it up and digging it deeper, wider, shoveling down and down and down. You’re the one that leaves it gaping. Be patient, you tell yourself, things take time, you tell yourself, give it time, you tell yourself, wait for it, you tell yourself. You’re just waiting for the right moment. (But the right moment will never come unless you’re willing to take a leap, and, so far, you’ve been too terrified of the consequences to act.) You’re waiting for the right moment to fight back against the Davke, or to deal with Denocte’s actions against your people, or to bite back at bitter insult, or to let any part of you slip through the cracks for long enough to open up – but the right moment doesn’t exist, and you feel like you’ve spent your entire life waiting on something that will never come.
You’re trying to find your way – you’re trying to find some way. It’s not as easy as you remember, and you don’t know whose footsteps you’re walking in, anymore, if anyone’s at all. And you think, deep down, that you’re just trying to do the right thing, but you aren’t sure if you know what that is anymore.
You’ll have yourself pulled together when the sun rises and morning comes, because you have to – because you have a people to guide and work to do. Veneror has a way of unwinding you, though. It always has. You just need a moment to catch your breath and pull everything in, pack it up and stuff it somewhere in the back of your mind where it belongs. You just need to wait for the morning. You’ll be a bit closer to yourself in the daylight, won’t you? (But this is you too – just you scratched apart and scraped open.) You just need to wait for the cold to come creeping back in like the first tendrils of winter. When the cold comes back, you’re sure that you’ll return to who you need to be – who they need you to be.
So here you stand, pincushioned with little pinpricks of arrows on the precipice of a mountain that you’ve known your entire life, staring out at a landscape you’ve known your entire life, surrounded by pillars that you’ve known your entire life, but you might as well be a thousand miles away from the gods or anyone else at all, in spite of all of the figures that have been exploring the peak in the past few days. There isn’t anyone here to see you now, not even the gods – or so you assume, now that they’re off walking the ground. At least you can feel just a bit sorry for yourself in peace – at least, for now, it’s quiet. You didn’t realize how much you missed the quiet until you no longer spent your days wandering the empty desert; you didn’t realize how much you missed the quiet until the world felt so loud, too loud.
(In the stories that your mother used to tell you, when the protagonist hurt for long enough, all of that hurt would pay off – in fiction, everything eventually fit together for some greater meaning. In reality… she was reasonably sure that there weren’t knights in shining armor to pull cursed princesses from towers or valiant warriors that fought dragons to save villages, or at least not in Solterra. Hurt didn’t have to have meaning, and it didn’t have to be beautiful, or poetic, and no one would simply show up to pull you out of it, no matter how much time you spent wasting away waiting for someone to come along and help you. But you weren’t really expecting that anyways, were you?)
Well. This isn’t fiction, insofar as Seraphina can tell, and there won’t be any white knights coming to save her from – what? She doesn’t even know anymore, and she isn’t sure that it matters. She doesn’t need saving, and, even if she did, she is certain that she wouldn’t want it – not by god, not by some sterling knight out of a fairy tale, not by anyone but herself. It wouldn’t mean anything any other way.
In the morning, she’ll return to her kingdom, and she’ll keep fumbling forward in her ugly, mortal way; she’ll fail and she’ll fall and it will hurt over and over again, but she’ll keep trying, because there’s nothing else to do but try.
So she stands, encircled by empty shrines and empty pillars, the autumn moon high above her head. Despite the absence of the gods that now walked Novus, the days passed all the same.
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tags | @
notes | does this really count as a worship thread? maybe. anyways, have like...2600 words of sera being sad. uhh, this is... technically not private, but I don't feel like she feels like talking.
there's something soft in me -
we killed it and it's rotting
She feels like she has an arrow caught in her skin.
Think about it this way. It’s a wriggling, painful sensation. When you move, you feel it sink in deeper. When you breathe, you feel it sink in deeper. Perhaps just thinking about it sinking in deeper is enough to give it a little bit more hold, like barbs stuck into your skin. And maybe it has always been there, a little lingering prickle at the edge of your thoughts, but it isn’t too hard to ignore it, or to grow accustomed to it, or to push it aside entirely and tell yourself that it isn’t important, that pulling the arrow out will only make it worse because then you’ll start bleeding and you don’t want all of that ugly red blood to come spilling out, so it digs in deeper and deeper and deeper until the arrow is practically a part of you, a permanent gouge.
You tell yourself that you’ll pull it out someday.
Someday never comes.
Arrows, and other lies that you tell yourself: when you’re younger, you like to tell yourself that you’re special, or that you will be special eventually. Well, it’s been several years of trying, – and failing and failing and trying and trying over and over again – and you still don’t feel like anything especially special. Stick a crown on a girl’s head, and she likes to think that the world will bend to her will, that finally - finally - become something a bit more significant, and a bit more powerful, and a bit more special. You tell yourself that you can change things. You tell yourself that you will make them better and then – then what? (Sometimes you ask yourself why you want it, really. Is it some misguided sense of duty? Is it out of the goodness of your heart? Some selfish desire to play the hero?) But it’s never so simple, and a crown doesn’t grant you much of anything. But you still have your dignity. You always have your dignity, so you never – never - let yourself crack. You don’t slip. You bear the brunt of all the ugly things that get slung your way with a tight-lipped stare and cold, dead eyes, and you bear the brunt of a slap to the face and bitter accusation after bitter accusation with a cordiality and a cold front of politeness, and it’s oh-so perfectly respectable, and when you let something slip through the cracks the shame and the sense of failure might as well eat you alive from the inside out, and you tell yourself that it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, love or hate or neutrality or anything in between. You want to be vindictive – you want to bite back, to sink your teeth in so deep that you taste blood in your mouth. It feels like your entire life is lying back and taking it, and you don’t want to just take it anymore; you want to be authoritative and decisive and powerful and beloved (or loathed) like so many of the other leaders you have encountered, but you know that runs the risk of hurting the people beneath you-
(but indecision is a decision too.)
You tell yourself to be patient.
You have been devoted to the gods for your entire life. When you were a desperate, frightened little girl, they were the only thing that you had – at the most terrifying, lonely moments, the very concept of them was your only comfort. (The concept. The concept. You know that they’ve been somewhere, now, but you don’t think that it’s ever been with you.) And you don’t know what you’ve wanted from them, or what you’ve been chasing after, or what you even want now. Answers? Justification? Ah yes here is the greater meaning here is why everything had to hurt and everyone had to hurt and you had to hurt- Does it even really matter, now? Explaining fixes nothing – nothing that has happened can be undone. And here you are, still begging for some rationalization or some reasoning, as though it will ever change a thing. What’s done is done. (And the arrow slides in a little bit deeper when you think about it, because, really, you thought that they might have cared about you, in their impassive, distant way – but, for all of your years of worship, the closest thing that you’ve received to acknowledgement or reciprocation was the blink of a pair of white-washed eyes. You aren’t blessed. There are no dragons at your side, and the earth does not shift according to your will, and you are not free from the constraints put upon you by time. You are mortal. You have only ever been mortal. You are mortal, and maybe once that was fine, even preferable, but now you stand on the same ground as gods and those who resemble them, those who are blessed by them, and all you can find it in yourself to do is ask yourself what all of that devotion was for. Faith is its own reward, or something like that, or faith is useless unless it’s tested, but it doesn’t feel very rewarding right now. Instead, it just feels like another little pinprick, or more than a pinprick, another layer of skin peeling right off; you are surrounded by foreign faces that have gained the favor of the gods, regardless of their own belief in the divine, and all you can ask yourself is what have I done wrong? You feel like you ask yourself that a lot, lately.)
You wonder if you feel insulted, or scorned. That doesn’t feel quite right. You were angry, when you were trapped, – nearly crushed - so angry that you were in tears, but they were lost to the ashes. You were angry for your people, and for yourself, and you felt betrayed. As with most things that you feel, it’s faded away to a dull, throbbing pain, now. You can’t keep anything alive for very long, and, the moment that it starts to fade, you feel a little bit less righteous and a little bit more childish. You should have held your tongue. It’s always better for you when you swallow things down; it’s harder to regret the things that are left unsaid. You never really feel like you learned to talk to others – there’s always this little space in front of you, like a wall, or a gorge that’s nauseatingly dark and deep. Sometimes you stare down into it, but you can’t see the bottom. You wish that you were angry, filled with some righteous fury – or you wish that you were devoted, and it didn’t matter to you at all.
Instead, you’re just tired, and suddenly very, very lonely.
(She paces the edge of the outcropping, hooves a sharp clack against smooth stone. Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack. A sharp, frustrated breath hisses out of her pursed lips, and the tight braids that loop down her neck begin to untwine, tearing apart at the force of her telekinesis – some strands are jerked from her scalp, and they flow away in the night wind, little wisps of ghost-white. She’s silver in the moonlight, like the blade of a knife or the sharp crescent of the moon, and isn’t it sometimes just a bit funny that she’s supposed to be the “chosen” of the god of sun and flame and day when she’s as grey as smoke and silver as the world suspended in moonlight? She casts a long glance towards a tiny, glinting golden thing that still rests on Solis’s alter. That damned sun pendant. Her own damned choices. Was it the right thing, stepping aside? Did she need to do it? Trying to think for herself, she thought, was hard – and trying to decide what to do for a nation was a thousand times worse. Perhaps she blamed the gods – perhaps she blamed him - for something that was out of his control. (But she never really blamed him, did she? She just knew that she was not blessed, like her opponent, like the woman who slaughtered her people and burnt her city to ruins (but that was not so different than what had been done to her before), but now Bexley and Eik were – and it was just her that seemed to be standing on her own.) Perhaps it was never really about blame, either. Perhaps it was just another desperate attempt to feel like she was in control of a situation that spiraled right out of her grasp. Perhaps it was just another desperate attempt to feel autonomous, no longer obligated to dead kings or generals or gods that never said a thing. And she was a girl - she is barely more than a girl even now, in spite of the (metaphorical) crown that she wears on her head. She doesn’t really know, and it doesn’t matter anyways – there that little sun is, right where she left it, and it’s beyond taking back now. Click-clack-click-clack. She turns her face away from that glint of gold, and she rests her eyes on the jagged edge of the horizon.)
Here is where you stand: to some of your people, you are a stain on Solterra’s history, and to some of your people, you are just an extension of an ugly, oppressive system, and, to some of your people, you’re a little piece on a chessboard all set up to be used, and, to some of your people, you’re a weak, false silver queen, and, to some of your people, you’re a symbol of hope and change, and to a very few, you’re a friend, but you’ve come to the slow, slow realization – like a frog being boiled alive – that you don’t know anyone that you call a friend very well, and you’ve never really let your friends know you, either. You’ve thought that you were a little bit in love a time or two, but it was a quick sting of something like a splash of scalding oil from a frying pan, a burn that flickers away in a minute or three – but you still see the mark it leaves on your skin. It isn’t really love, you think, if it runs away when you start to think about it and you think and you think and you think and it’s gone when you think about it and you realize that it isn’t worth the risk. It’s never bothered you much, being alone. You like the quiet, and you like to think, and, when people ask you to talk, the words always seem to dangle just a little too far out of reach. But you’re a little bit older and a little bit less detached then you think you were not all too long ago, and the things that didn’t matter at all once upon a time are starting to feel like they matter now.
And there’s still the matter of that hole that feels like it swallows you up from time to time; that comfortable emptiness that is no longer quite so comfortable that you still find yourself falling into whenever something is too difficult for you to process.
Maybe it isn’t your fault that hole is there – maybe you weren’t the one who dug it. But you’re the one that keeps opening it up and digging it deeper, wider, shoveling down and down and down. You’re the one that leaves it gaping. Be patient, you tell yourself, things take time, you tell yourself, give it time, you tell yourself, wait for it, you tell yourself. You’re just waiting for the right moment. (But the right moment will never come unless you’re willing to take a leap, and, so far, you’ve been too terrified of the consequences to act.) You’re waiting for the right moment to fight back against the Davke, or to deal with Denocte’s actions against your people, or to bite back at bitter insult, or to let any part of you slip through the cracks for long enough to open up – but the right moment doesn’t exist, and you feel like you’ve spent your entire life waiting on something that will never come.
You’re trying to find your way – you’re trying to find some way. It’s not as easy as you remember, and you don’t know whose footsteps you’re walking in, anymore, if anyone’s at all. And you think, deep down, that you’re just trying to do the right thing, but you aren’t sure if you know what that is anymore.
You’ll have yourself pulled together when the sun rises and morning comes, because you have to – because you have a people to guide and work to do. Veneror has a way of unwinding you, though. It always has. You just need a moment to catch your breath and pull everything in, pack it up and stuff it somewhere in the back of your mind where it belongs. You just need to wait for the morning. You’ll be a bit closer to yourself in the daylight, won’t you? (But this is you too – just you scratched apart and scraped open.) You just need to wait for the cold to come creeping back in like the first tendrils of winter. When the cold comes back, you’re sure that you’ll return to who you need to be – who they need you to be.
So here you stand, pincushioned with little pinpricks of arrows on the precipice of a mountain that you’ve known your entire life, staring out at a landscape you’ve known your entire life, surrounded by pillars that you’ve known your entire life, but you might as well be a thousand miles away from the gods or anyone else at all, in spite of all of the figures that have been exploring the peak in the past few days. There isn’t anyone here to see you now, not even the gods – or so you assume, now that they’re off walking the ground. At least you can feel just a bit sorry for yourself in peace – at least, for now, it’s quiet. You didn’t realize how much you missed the quiet until you no longer spent your days wandering the empty desert; you didn’t realize how much you missed the quiet until the world felt so loud, too loud.
(In the stories that your mother used to tell you, when the protagonist hurt for long enough, all of that hurt would pay off – in fiction, everything eventually fit together for some greater meaning. In reality… she was reasonably sure that there weren’t knights in shining armor to pull cursed princesses from towers or valiant warriors that fought dragons to save villages, or at least not in Solterra. Hurt didn’t have to have meaning, and it didn’t have to be beautiful, or poetic, and no one would simply show up to pull you out of it, no matter how much time you spent wasting away waiting for someone to come along and help you. But you weren’t really expecting that anyways, were you?)
Well. This isn’t fiction, insofar as Seraphina can tell, and there won’t be any white knights coming to save her from – what? She doesn’t even know anymore, and she isn’t sure that it matters. She doesn’t need saving, and, even if she did, she is certain that she wouldn’t want it – not by god, not by some sterling knight out of a fairy tale, not by anyone but herself. It wouldn’t mean anything any other way.
In the morning, she’ll return to her kingdom, and she’ll keep fumbling forward in her ugly, mortal way; she’ll fail and she’ll fall and it will hurt over and over again, but she’ll keep trying, because there’s nothing else to do but try.
So she stands, encircled by empty shrines and empty pillars, the autumn moon high above her head. Despite the absence of the gods that now walked Novus, the days passed all the same.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @
notes | does this really count as a worship thread? maybe. anyways, have like...2600 words of sera being sad. uhh, this is... technically not private, but I don't feel like she feels like talking.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
