☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
child of neptune, I'm the daughter of the sun
keep showing me new constellations
She notes the way that she tenses, the way that she pulls at those chains at so much as the threat of violence – but, even if her reactionary anger weren’t stamped out as quickly as a stray ember, she notes, bitterly, that she couldn’t defeat her if she tried. Not in this condition, and certainly not without magic. (But, of course, she doesn’t want to fight. In fact, she’d rather do anything but fight, at the moment.)
She draws closer, and Seraphina shies back a step. Normally, she is so rigid, so militant, but now she is trembling, a cornered animal more than anything; she has never realized how much the fear of repercussions that Viceroy instilled within her impacted her mentality, her perpetual hesitance, her perceived toothlessness, but now, without anything to keep her grounded, she feels it run like ice in her bloodstream. As her dragon relaxes, and Seraphina forces herself to acknowledge that there is no threat in the bay’s features now, she manages to steady herself, accepting her presence, though somewhat unwillingly.
“Then we shall find him.” She is not sure what those words sound like – they aren’t exactly kind or soft or whatever she might have expected, if she expected anything at all, but she instinctively recognizes that the mare will help her. She feels a pang of guilt for the trouble; the woman has already saved her life, and now she’ll accompany her on a certainly ill-fated quest out of nothing but concern and…some inner goodness.
She is so unaccustomed to kindness that she doesn’t know what to do with it.
“I doubt that he will answer,” she admits, quietly, her words punctuated with a soft exhalation. Once, Seraphina had excused her god’s absence with the assumption that it was merely the way of the gods to shy away from the affairs of mortals; they might exert some, subtle influence, but they never intervened directly. Now, she had stood at the side of the sun god. Now, she knew better. “He never answers…but I…I need to try.” She needs to try, because she doesn’t know where else to turn. Solis has never come at her call before, and she doubts that her loss will ingratiate herself at all to the sun god, but now that he is back, now that he has come back to them, the foolish little girl inside of her who spent years praying to him to save her wants to hope beyond all reasonable hope that he might try to intervene, to crush this tyrant before he had a chance to destroy Solterra all over again.
She doesn’t want him to forgive her. She merely, tiredly, foolishly, wretchedly wishes for him to fix her mistakes.
The mare catches long strings of chain metal in her teeth and presses towards her. Seraphina wants to move back, but she heeds the warning in those hauntingly blue eyes and remains stock-still. Her magic is something unfathomable; the world around her spins to her will, flying in the face of the rules of its own creation. Seraphina does not try to understand it, struggling to trade her bitterness – and jealousy – for appreciation, because it is a beautiful thing. The bloodied bandages tied tight around her wounded face turn to flowers and drift away on the breeze, and, as she watches them disappear from sight, she is abruptly reminded that she is still bleeding. (Her pain is a distant throb, largely buried beneath her emotional distress; now that she has remembered it, it begins to sear.) She moves closer still, those chains still caught in her lips…
and she fills in her scars with gold.
She does not know what she anticipated, but that was not it – where she once had skin, she soon has pooling metal. It is cold where it should be scalding hot, and the chill provides a soothing balm to her mounting pain. She forces herself to remain steady, even as the mare’s lips dust the scarred skin dangerously close to her silver collar, and, as she finally draws away, her meticulous artwork complete, Seraphina tries to meet her eyes. She is not sure that she knows what to make of this gesture, but, perhaps, the kindness of a gentle creator – to make a grotesque symbol of pain and tragedy into something gleaming and beautiful, something stronger.
“…thank you,” she says, quietly. She feels like her words are escaping her again, just like they always seem to when she has need of them; she never knows how to respond to an outstretched hand when it is offered.
She steadies herself, glancing at the mare; she doesn’t know what she expects to find at the peak, but she knows that she needs to go. She is met with a request.
“Will you tell me what has happened while we walk?”
She supposes that she owes this stranger the truth.
Her stomach turns knots at the prospect, but she offers a reluctant nod, directing her stare at the path in front of them. Her steps are awkward, at first, stilted by her swelling nausea and the distant sense of a pounding headache, but she soon settles into an even, albeit slow, stride. She is still struggling to collect her thoughts, much less to organize them into any reasonable order; it takes her several moments to begin to speak.
“My name is Seraphina, and I am – I was - the Queen of Solterra.” She almost stumbles over the tense of her title, and it brings a renewed rush of bitterness scrambling up her throat. “I was summoned here for a challenge to my title…from that crow, Raum. I fought him, and…” Her head sinks, despair creeping back into her tone. She doesn’t need to say it; she is sure that her phrasing is already implication enough. However, some part of herself needs to be punished, so she forces the admission out of her throat anyways. “…and I lost. I failed. He took my crown and my honor, and he quite nearly took my life…” She trails off, and her next words are barely even a whisper, as though she does not want the mare to hear them at all. (She doesn’t want to say them, and she regrets them as soon as they are out of her mouth, but her words are spilling out of her like blood from an unstitched wound, and she is no longer sure that she has it in her to keep them inside.) “…and I do not know what he has left behind.” She doesn’t let them linger. She considers, for a moment, explaining what he has taken from her – that in Solterra you are your blood or your actions, and her actions mean nothing in the face of such a loss, that she is dishonored and forgotten, that any good she might have done has been blighted by the way that she has fallen, that the nobility that might have been afforded her death has been stripped to humiliation instead.
“…but it does not matter what he has done to me. What matters is…” She doesn’t want to think about it. She doesn’t want to, for once; she is normally a painfully contemplative creature, content to run her thoughts in circles no matter how much they hurt, but these thoughts…these thoughts are ones that she wants to run from. “…what he will do now that he has power. He wants nothing but destruction, and my people…” She chokes, abruptly, her throat constricting around her words like a hangman’s noose, like the tight steel collar around her neck. Rhoswen. What would he do to Rhoswen? She had been broken enough already, and their daughter…and Bexley! Bexley, who’d nearly died by his knife once already. (And her daughter – Apolonia. What would he do to her daughter? Surely he wouldn’t hurt the child of his own brother-in-arms, but, then, she has heard of what he did to the Night Queen, and she once thought that the Crows had no higher loyalty than to their court.) Eik. Perhaps her dearest friend, what would he do to him? Teiran. Teiran, who was so like her…what would he do to Teiran? What of Jahin? Surely the Davke man would be fine – he was a survivor at heart. What of El Toro? Elif? Mathias? She knows little of them, but she knows them – she has spoken to them. Gods, even Torstein – she doubts that Raum has any love for the great, three-eyed beast of a man, and, in spite of the trouble he had caused her in the past, she couldn’t help but call to mind his aid against the elk who’d consumed the kingdom in frost…and his earliest suspicions of Raum. The memory almost makes her cringe.
“…my people will be his instruments of war, his…his first victims. I…have faith in my nation’s resilience. We have weathered worse, but…” She hopes that they have weathered worse. Surely Raum cannot be worse than Zolin, but “better than Zolin” is very little consolation. “…but there will be a…cost to weathering the influence of a madman hellbent on our destruction.” There will be blood. By now, there might have been blood spilt already, and she feels sick, because she could have – should have – prevented it. “I’ve failed them. I should have had him killed years ago, when he nearly murdered one of my citizens…” She is speaking more quickly, now, a note of panic entering her trembling tone; she hears herself through water, and she thinks that she sounds hysterical. “…but, when Denocte’s Emissary came with his dragon, when I saw what Caligo’s Regime was capable of, with their magic and their monsters…” She recounts her reasoning like it means anything at all, now. “…when Reichenbach himself assaulted a member of Florentine’s court, I…” She grasps for a way to make this entire situation her fault, because she knows that if she is the problem, at least she can fix it; she has control over herself, or maybe she doesn’t, maybe it all went seeping out of her body with the copious amounts of blood she’d lost on the Steppe, she doesn’t know anymore, she doesn’t know anymore, she only knows that she needs to control something, because this situation has spiraled so rapidly out of her grasp that she doesn’t know how to fix it, and she has to fix it. “…I recalled how dear his Crows were to his heart, and I did not want to risk inciting a war. We had only just been attacked by the Davke; we would not have survived it.” She wants to keep rambling, but she manages to shut herself up, with a long, shaking breath. “…that matters little now.” There is nothing she can do.
She is quiet, for a moment, struggling to gather her resolve – but, when she speaks again, she sounds frightened and exhausted more than anything, hardly the beast of fire and rage that she needs to be. “I…cannot stand aside and allow him to succeed.” She knows this, logically. Realistically. She has to do something.
She does not know how to stop him.
Not now, with her crown stolen – not now, without power enough to counter his deadly shapeshifting. Parts of Solterra were loyal to her, and others would be happy to hear of her death; still others, perhaps many others, would greet the news with apathy. She had trusted, at least, in her capability as a warrior, as a weapon of war, but he had taken that from her, too. Seraphina had always been something; she had been a soldier, albeit an unwilling one, or an Emissary, or a Queen. She had always had a path to follow and some semblance of an identity that had accompanied it. Her life was in service of something greater, so, although she’d never placed much emphasis on herself as an individual, she had never felt as though she was without purpose, without meaning. She had faith in her own capability, her own resilience.
And now she felt hollowed-out, like empty space, like something entirely disposable. Her years of training had failed her when she needed them the most, and her own resolve felt fleeting in the wake of this revelation. She was not sure if she was Solterran – if she returned to who she had been before, he would try to finish what he had started. She was certainly outcast, or perhaps a ghost. She had no path set before her to follow, no easy conclusions left to draw.
When all those titles were stripped away, when she was lost for her duties and her obligations, she was left with a collared, trembling thing, crushed beneath the weight of her own uncertainty.
(Yet still, there is that little flicker in her ribcage. Without anything to keep it silenced, it burns brighter and louder than she has ever remembered it; she can feel it in the sweat beading on her brow and the nausea curling like a serpent in her stomach, in the way that her legs tremble and threaten to buckle although they feel as heavy as lead weights. She is not sure if the sickness is the blood loss or the burning, or some combination thereof, but either way, she dislikes how it is building, how it hovers at the back of her mind like a storm cloud on the farthest reaches of the horizon, a tendril of grey creeping closer and closer, almost inescapably. She is not sure that she can put out the fire that she has started, and, perhaps worse, she is not sure that she wants to; she is not sure what she wants, but she thinks that she might find it somewhere in the ashes, in what is left behind after the blaze.)
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tags | @Isra
notes |I'll edit this in the morning, RIP <3
child of neptune, I'm the daughter of the sun
keep showing me new constellations
She notes the way that she tenses, the way that she pulls at those chains at so much as the threat of violence – but, even if her reactionary anger weren’t stamped out as quickly as a stray ember, she notes, bitterly, that she couldn’t defeat her if she tried. Not in this condition, and certainly not without magic. (But, of course, she doesn’t want to fight. In fact, she’d rather do anything but fight, at the moment.)
She draws closer, and Seraphina shies back a step. Normally, she is so rigid, so militant, but now she is trembling, a cornered animal more than anything; she has never realized how much the fear of repercussions that Viceroy instilled within her impacted her mentality, her perpetual hesitance, her perceived toothlessness, but now, without anything to keep her grounded, she feels it run like ice in her bloodstream. As her dragon relaxes, and Seraphina forces herself to acknowledge that there is no threat in the bay’s features now, she manages to steady herself, accepting her presence, though somewhat unwillingly.
“Then we shall find him.” She is not sure what those words sound like – they aren’t exactly kind or soft or whatever she might have expected, if she expected anything at all, but she instinctively recognizes that the mare will help her. She feels a pang of guilt for the trouble; the woman has already saved her life, and now she’ll accompany her on a certainly ill-fated quest out of nothing but concern and…some inner goodness.
She is so unaccustomed to kindness that she doesn’t know what to do with it.
“I doubt that he will answer,” she admits, quietly, her words punctuated with a soft exhalation. Once, Seraphina had excused her god’s absence with the assumption that it was merely the way of the gods to shy away from the affairs of mortals; they might exert some, subtle influence, but they never intervened directly. Now, she had stood at the side of the sun god. Now, she knew better. “He never answers…but I…I need to try.” She needs to try, because she doesn’t know where else to turn. Solis has never come at her call before, and she doubts that her loss will ingratiate herself at all to the sun god, but now that he is back, now that he has come back to them, the foolish little girl inside of her who spent years praying to him to save her wants to hope beyond all reasonable hope that he might try to intervene, to crush this tyrant before he had a chance to destroy Solterra all over again.
She doesn’t want him to forgive her. She merely, tiredly, foolishly, wretchedly wishes for him to fix her mistakes.
The mare catches long strings of chain metal in her teeth and presses towards her. Seraphina wants to move back, but she heeds the warning in those hauntingly blue eyes and remains stock-still. Her magic is something unfathomable; the world around her spins to her will, flying in the face of the rules of its own creation. Seraphina does not try to understand it, struggling to trade her bitterness – and jealousy – for appreciation, because it is a beautiful thing. The bloodied bandages tied tight around her wounded face turn to flowers and drift away on the breeze, and, as she watches them disappear from sight, she is abruptly reminded that she is still bleeding. (Her pain is a distant throb, largely buried beneath her emotional distress; now that she has remembered it, it begins to sear.) She moves closer still, those chains still caught in her lips…
and she fills in her scars with gold.
She does not know what she anticipated, but that was not it – where she once had skin, she soon has pooling metal. It is cold where it should be scalding hot, and the chill provides a soothing balm to her mounting pain. She forces herself to remain steady, even as the mare’s lips dust the scarred skin dangerously close to her silver collar, and, as she finally draws away, her meticulous artwork complete, Seraphina tries to meet her eyes. She is not sure that she knows what to make of this gesture, but, perhaps, the kindness of a gentle creator – to make a grotesque symbol of pain and tragedy into something gleaming and beautiful, something stronger.
“…thank you,” she says, quietly. She feels like her words are escaping her again, just like they always seem to when she has need of them; she never knows how to respond to an outstretched hand when it is offered.
She steadies herself, glancing at the mare; she doesn’t know what she expects to find at the peak, but she knows that she needs to go. She is met with a request.
“Will you tell me what has happened while we walk?”
She supposes that she owes this stranger the truth.
Her stomach turns knots at the prospect, but she offers a reluctant nod, directing her stare at the path in front of them. Her steps are awkward, at first, stilted by her swelling nausea and the distant sense of a pounding headache, but she soon settles into an even, albeit slow, stride. She is still struggling to collect her thoughts, much less to organize them into any reasonable order; it takes her several moments to begin to speak.
“My name is Seraphina, and I am – I was - the Queen of Solterra.” She almost stumbles over the tense of her title, and it brings a renewed rush of bitterness scrambling up her throat. “I was summoned here for a challenge to my title…from that crow, Raum. I fought him, and…” Her head sinks, despair creeping back into her tone. She doesn’t need to say it; she is sure that her phrasing is already implication enough. However, some part of herself needs to be punished, so she forces the admission out of her throat anyways. “…and I lost. I failed. He took my crown and my honor, and he quite nearly took my life…” She trails off, and her next words are barely even a whisper, as though she does not want the mare to hear them at all. (She doesn’t want to say them, and she regrets them as soon as they are out of her mouth, but her words are spilling out of her like blood from an unstitched wound, and she is no longer sure that she has it in her to keep them inside.) “…and I do not know what he has left behind.” She doesn’t let them linger. She considers, for a moment, explaining what he has taken from her – that in Solterra you are your blood or your actions, and her actions mean nothing in the face of such a loss, that she is dishonored and forgotten, that any good she might have done has been blighted by the way that she has fallen, that the nobility that might have been afforded her death has been stripped to humiliation instead.
“…but it does not matter what he has done to me. What matters is…” She doesn’t want to think about it. She doesn’t want to, for once; she is normally a painfully contemplative creature, content to run her thoughts in circles no matter how much they hurt, but these thoughts…these thoughts are ones that she wants to run from. “…what he will do now that he has power. He wants nothing but destruction, and my people…” She chokes, abruptly, her throat constricting around her words like a hangman’s noose, like the tight steel collar around her neck. Rhoswen. What would he do to Rhoswen? She had been broken enough already, and their daughter…and Bexley! Bexley, who’d nearly died by his knife once already. (And her daughter – Apolonia. What would he do to her daughter? Surely he wouldn’t hurt the child of his own brother-in-arms, but, then, she has heard of what he did to the Night Queen, and she once thought that the Crows had no higher loyalty than to their court.) Eik. Perhaps her dearest friend, what would he do to him? Teiran. Teiran, who was so like her…what would he do to Teiran? What of Jahin? Surely the Davke man would be fine – he was a survivor at heart. What of El Toro? Elif? Mathias? She knows little of them, but she knows them – she has spoken to them. Gods, even Torstein – she doubts that Raum has any love for the great, three-eyed beast of a man, and, in spite of the trouble he had caused her in the past, she couldn’t help but call to mind his aid against the elk who’d consumed the kingdom in frost…and his earliest suspicions of Raum. The memory almost makes her cringe.
“…my people will be his instruments of war, his…his first victims. I…have faith in my nation’s resilience. We have weathered worse, but…” She hopes that they have weathered worse. Surely Raum cannot be worse than Zolin, but “better than Zolin” is very little consolation. “…but there will be a…cost to weathering the influence of a madman hellbent on our destruction.” There will be blood. By now, there might have been blood spilt already, and she feels sick, because she could have – should have – prevented it. “I’ve failed them. I should have had him killed years ago, when he nearly murdered one of my citizens…” She is speaking more quickly, now, a note of panic entering her trembling tone; she hears herself through water, and she thinks that she sounds hysterical. “…but, when Denocte’s Emissary came with his dragon, when I saw what Caligo’s Regime was capable of, with their magic and their monsters…” She recounts her reasoning like it means anything at all, now. “…when Reichenbach himself assaulted a member of Florentine’s court, I…” She grasps for a way to make this entire situation her fault, because she knows that if she is the problem, at least she can fix it; she has control over herself, or maybe she doesn’t, maybe it all went seeping out of her body with the copious amounts of blood she’d lost on the Steppe, she doesn’t know anymore, she doesn’t know anymore, she only knows that she needs to control something, because this situation has spiraled so rapidly out of her grasp that she doesn’t know how to fix it, and she has to fix it. “…I recalled how dear his Crows were to his heart, and I did not want to risk inciting a war. We had only just been attacked by the Davke; we would not have survived it.” She wants to keep rambling, but she manages to shut herself up, with a long, shaking breath. “…that matters little now.” There is nothing she can do.
She is quiet, for a moment, struggling to gather her resolve – but, when she speaks again, she sounds frightened and exhausted more than anything, hardly the beast of fire and rage that she needs to be. “I…cannot stand aside and allow him to succeed.” She knows this, logically. Realistically. She has to do something.
She does not know how to stop him.
Not now, with her crown stolen – not now, without power enough to counter his deadly shapeshifting. Parts of Solterra were loyal to her, and others would be happy to hear of her death; still others, perhaps many others, would greet the news with apathy. She had trusted, at least, in her capability as a warrior, as a weapon of war, but he had taken that from her, too. Seraphina had always been something; she had been a soldier, albeit an unwilling one, or an Emissary, or a Queen. She had always had a path to follow and some semblance of an identity that had accompanied it. Her life was in service of something greater, so, although she’d never placed much emphasis on herself as an individual, she had never felt as though she was without purpose, without meaning. She had faith in her own capability, her own resilience.
And now she felt hollowed-out, like empty space, like something entirely disposable. Her years of training had failed her when she needed them the most, and her own resolve felt fleeting in the wake of this revelation. She was not sure if she was Solterran – if she returned to who she had been before, he would try to finish what he had started. She was certainly outcast, or perhaps a ghost. She had no path set before her to follow, no easy conclusions left to draw.
When all those titles were stripped away, when she was lost for her duties and her obligations, she was left with a collared, trembling thing, crushed beneath the weight of her own uncertainty.
(Yet still, there is that little flicker in her ribcage. Without anything to keep it silenced, it burns brighter and louder than she has ever remembered it; she can feel it in the sweat beading on her brow and the nausea curling like a serpent in her stomach, in the way that her legs tremble and threaten to buckle although they feel as heavy as lead weights. She is not sure if the sickness is the blood loss or the burning, or some combination thereof, but either way, she dislikes how it is building, how it hovers at the back of her mind like a storm cloud on the farthest reaches of the horizon, a tendril of grey creeping closer and closer, almost inescapably. She is not sure that she can put out the fire that she has started, and, perhaps worse, she is not sure that she wants to; she is not sure what she wants, but she thinks that she might find it somewhere in the ashes, in what is left behind after the blaze.)
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tags | @Isra
notes |
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
