I'M NOT CRAZY, but when the sun split / him wide, he left me this, look, / my body veined in soot.☼
Across from her, in the mirror, the viceroy is shaving off her hair.
She, a girl – not even a year old, if she had to guess – lies in a crumpled mass on a sandstone floor, slender chest heaving, sides slick with sweat and blood. She is swollen here and there with ugly bruising and veined red. There isn’t enough of it to pool. Sometimes, he insisted that he would not be so wasteful; that he was not so interested in wasting the healer’s time. She imagines that this was him on a good day, when he hadn’t lost his patience with her yet.
(He lost his patience often; and she was his favorite.)
He shaves right at the nape of her neck, and her fine white hair falls to the floor in clumps. Her legs twitch loosely, even limply, in the way that a butterfly twitches when it is caught in the mud. He nicks her more than once, shallowly, probably intentionally. It bleeds horribly. (Shallow cuts often do.) The girl has her back to her, so she cannot see her face, but she can imagine the kind of expression that she was wearing at the time.
Her magic twines around one coil of her forelock and twists it. When Viceroy died, she stopped cutting her hair. He always insisted on shaving it off entirely, down to the skin, and, as soon as it began to grow back, he would shave it again. He told her that it was useless in combat; it would be a burden on the battlefield. He crooned in a sickly-gentle voice that he was doing it because it was in her best interest. She had seen the reason in it, at the time, but now that she is older, she has a feeling that he mostly did it because he was maneless, and, when they met, he couldn’t stand the sight of her long, long hair.
She doesn’t remember their meeting, exactly – but she remembers Viceroy well, as though he’d only died yesterday, so she can imagine the curve of his lips at the edges when he saw something that he disliked.
She does not think of him often, anymore. (She has thought of him more often recently.)
Seraphina drifts by the image in the glass with a shake of her head. She might have been horrified by it, if it had happened to someone else; but it happened to her, so she feels almost nothing at all. At least the cruelties of her childhood were no fault of her own – at least she does not have to feel such the painful clench of guilt whenever she regards them.
She passes through rows and rows of shards; her image ripples alongside her, below her, ahead of her, behind her. No matter where she looks, she can only see her own face, which is condemnation enough; but she cannot see at all what she so desperately wants to find, which are features not unlike her own, but softer, less worn by exhaustion, less angular and thin in the cheeks. She cannot remember her face, anymore, and, though she knows that she was good, she cannot recall enough of her to follow her example.
She cannot even recall the name that she gave her. Perhaps that is what severed them the most; her daughter was not named Seraphina.
She stops, and she turns her head to the mirror at her side. She watches herself in the reflection, newly scarred, a thin line of blood dribbling from the gold on her cheek, cowl pulled over her shameful face. Her eyes are sunken and dark, and her lips make a frown so heavy that it seems perpetual, and, though her magic was still weak and ambling, at the time, she can see it tugging at the white tangles of her mane, threatening to make a medusa of her.
Seraphina continues walking – further and deeper, towards the core of this place.
@Tenebrae|| <3 <3 <3 || rebecca dunham, "elegy for the eleven" ; title "Notname," Lyd Havens Sera||Eresh
There is a gale howling on the mountain. Above, the clouds are a heavy bruised gray, but these and everything else are made invisible by the snow falling thick and furious. The wind moans, gnashes its teeth, seeks to dislodge any living thing from the path. What trees there are this high up rattle their thin bare branches like a warning.
Inside Asterion there is a howling, too.
There must be an empty place within his chest, for such a sound and such a darkness. He has never been empty before, but always too full, full to overflow, of love and want and worry and dreaming. He is finding that it’s easier, to be hollow.
Ice coats his lashes, snow clings to his sides and buries the stars there. Each breath is a wisp of smoke whipped away by the wind and still he climbs. There is a part of him dimly aware that he is calling the storm, that his magic is crying out for the rain and oh, the clouds obey. At one point he rounds a corner and staggers against the wind, leaning for a moment against the slick stone of the mountain, sensing but unable to see the precipice yawning before him; and then he puts his head down, pushes on.
So it goes until the air is so thin and frigid it feels like swallowing icicles, until the only remnant of warmth is the burn of his muscles and lungs, until his eyes ache with cold. And then the path twists again, and rises once more, and he is above the storm.
The change is as sudden as stepping through a doorway and leaving the world behind. Asterion blinks against the sudden midday sun and blows out a shuddering breath. From here the clouds look like the surface of the sea - tumultuous, dense enough to drown in.
Ahead waits the altar of the gods, but the stallion makes no move to continue. For the first time in his life, he feels like a god himself.
The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices
I am looking at myself in the mirror, and I think: I hate this bitch.
I am blurry in this silver surface. I don't know if it's that someone hasn't cleaned the mirror recently or that I can't see properly because I'm crying, but I am crying—I know I am, because I see that she's crying. This other Miriam. The one I hate to pieces.
Her cheeks are streaked with dark tears. Her eyelashes have clumped together. Her hair is a mess, the curls wild and totally broken, half-heartedly braided in some places, matted in others. This is not what a princess looks like, I think to myself. This is a living disaster. And I am not sad. I am angry—bitter—I am infuriated that she has not kept it together.
"Do you know what this makes us look like?" I ask her. My throat burns. When the words come out, they're broken, from a place so deep in my chest it sounds less like a voice and more like a snarl; they snag in every possible place on the way out, like I am trying to throw up pieces of glass.
She looks back at me. Her eyes are tortured and pleading. Her lip trembles as she tries to hold in her tears (and fails; they spill over her cheeks pathetically, and I can hear them hit the floor all the way in the opposite universe). I realize, looking at her, that her face is not marked by any kind of a jewelry, and that she must be my child-self.
Someone else might think this is an excuse. All children cry, they might say. Even royalty.
But I look at her and I see weakness. I see the girl I was all those years ago. I see how good I had it and how terribly sad I still was and I want to kill her, or myself, or both of us, and end it all before I'm forced to wake up and see the sun.
"Say something." I want it to be a snarl, but it comes out a whine, the pathetic yelp of a puppy whose tail was stepped on. She stares back at me in silence. My anger is growing insurmountable. I feel it in my mouth like a sting of acid. I feel it curdling my muscles like venom, sitting in my stomach like a rock; I feel it rising and rising and rising, a wave of heat and bright-white pain, pain, pain, pain from my legs to my chest to my throat, until I can't hold it in anymore, and I hack out a cough.
When I open my mouth, bones come out.
Bones. A few of them get lodged in my mouth sideways as they tumble out, and I have to crack them in half and spit them out so I won't choke.
I cough out bone after bone after bone. They pile up on the floor at my feet. They clatter against each other, making so much noise I think I must be waking up the whole house up. They fall out of me until it's literally impossible, until my throat is raw and broken, until I simply can't cough anymore, and I gasp for breath.
Most of them are small. They are bright-white; they are old, sun-bleached, and have been picked clean.
I cough once more.
Miriam the Younger's hairpin clatters to the floor.
It sits there, in the horde of her bones, as still and dead as she is. Blood dribbles out of my mouth. It drips down onto this little pile of what is left of her, and I am too horrified to even feel sick: I can only feel the numbness of my body, and how the terror crawls over every inch of me with spider legs upon spider legs.
SOMETIMES YOU CAN GET AWAY COMPLETELY but [they] / will tell about the howling / and the loss☼
As a child, Seraphina had conceived of god as something like a watercolor painting. That is to say – the blurred lines of the landscape, and everything in-between.
One thing that she can say about the children is that they have forced her to pay more care to herself than she has in years, now. (When she considers that it has been years - not weeks, or months, or days, but years - it leaves a rotting taste in her mouth. She tries not to think of it too often or too much.) More often than not, when she walks, she has begun to find her hooves on solid ground, though the telekinesis is still apt to buoy her up if she does not pay enough attention. There is a faint, metallic sheen to her coat that nearly reminds of the reason why she was known as the silver queen, once, a lifetime ago – and the white mass of her mane is more often forced into the neat braids she wore in her youth, unallowed the wild freedom that her lack of care had allowed since-
If she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, she can nearly finish the thought without trembling. Since Raum.
She returned to the desert, although she did not want to, because of the cold. She is not accustomed to it, and she doubts that it was good for any of the three of them – so she swallowed down her apprehension, and her quietly-brewing anger, and she returned to the sun god’s domain, although the walk back was miserable and mostly nauseating. It was only when she’d crossed the border and stepped into the Elatus Canyon that she discovered that returning was not as awful as the prickling anticipation that preceded it.
She does not know what she expected. Something awful, certainly; the sands stained red, or statues littered at odd angles throughout the canyon, or the Oasis circled by guards again, determined to kill the citizens by dehydration or starvation or submission. Of course, the sands were plain gold, as usual, and the only stone in the canyons composed the walls, and, when she arrives at the Oasis, slick with midday sweat, there is no one else present on the shoreline at all.
She feels – mercilessly dehydrated. It isn’t an awful sensation, exactly. (If she had to pick a word for it, she might call it familiar, though not quite like this.) Ereshkigal perches on the frond of one of the palm trees, something small and bloody and wholly dead (she hopes) caught in one of her talons; the tree bends, slightly, beneath her weight as she begins to eat.
She has learned to ignore the horrible crunching sound that accompanies her shark-teeth on bones; Ereshkigal claims to like them best.
She finds herself standing at the water’s edge, charcoal hooves half-buried in a fine layer of sand. The water is perfect blue, like a cloudless sky, and as clear as a mirror. If she looks carefully – and she doesn’t – she can see the faint swell of her sides reflected back up at her, and the tired sharpness of her eyes.
She faces her reflection, dips her head to the water, and drinks.
@Bexley|| we're #suffering, ladies! though less than usual, I think.|| june jordan, "you came with shells" // title from "have never been a lonely god," paige ackerson-kiely Sera||Eresh
inspire others, inspire yourself. music of the soul.
While it had not been hard for Brenn to get used to the court life - coming from a similar system himself - he still found himself roaming the gorgeous surroundings instead of doing something useful, like introducing himself to the court. This however needed to wait just a little longer as he walked through the sea of golden grass the plains held, currently having been touched with what seemed like a white blanket covering. While winter was definitely very much in place, his green cloak helped him shield from the worst of it. It also helped that the temperature had climbed to more comfortable temperatures in the mids of day. Solis be blessed, it was really helping his previous bad mood he has had before coming here.
Continueing his journey, Brenn found a fairly sturdy tree that had not been battered down too harshly by the cold nights and decided now would be a good time to rest his slightly tiring legs. Carefully, he leaned his painted body against the trunk, ears pinned forward to catch any sound that might come from it, but other than a slight protest of the wood nothing else came. With a soft sigh of relief, he let his sky blue eyes roam in front of him. The bison pack seemed to still be nearby, but keeping a respectful distance away. He could respect that, it was no use in agitating the wildlife. Especially since he was supposed to rest for a moment.
He could not help feeling jittery, though. It seemed as if an electric current was coursing through him, making him want to move, to run, to dance. He has always had difficulty standing still and taking a breather, now really seemed no different. He was determined to let his body recover, so he eventually closed his eyes, temporarily lowering some of his defences. He might be a little too confident in his ability to hear danger if it came to him, but at the same time he was standing in open ground and during his trek here he had not seen any predators. So he should be safe, right?
You got me in a heading drop, I never wanna come off
You got me with your beat of love, I never wanna come out
andromeda walks the path towards rapax river like an angel lost. she dances like soft silk, between the slim pine trees of delumine. her breath is sensual and ragged, when it falls lightly past her lips, unfurling in the winter chill. hunger, makes an eclipse for the shadows of her heart. her soul feels both dead and hungry, for the salivating way her gaze hooks against cold, shivering flesh. when she spots something moving in the distance, her fiery gaze become hot blades, etched upon the chaste image of an ermine rabbit. andromeda watches the rabbit's eyes widen with blood-shot terror, then scamper off into the woods, tail held high. it is only a white-furred speck, a fleeing creature, disappearing off into the remote distance. there is apart of her that wants to chase the rabbit and run it into the earth, in a sea of red. to dash its visceral entrails, along the pale snow, till they look like strewn petals spread out before the ashes of a funeral pyre.
there is apart of her that begs to sink her fangs into tender flesh and tear. tear it asunder. like a wolf tears into mangled flesh, bone, too hungry to feel mercy, where instinct prevailed. but there is a softness in andromeda, too. a tenderness within her delicate, girlish skeleton. with a jaded sigh, she lets the rabbit disappear without following it into the forest. her hair falls over her face. smooth pin-straight lavender, rippling across her cheekbones like a soft, seductive veil. she does not feel hungry, physically. flesh does not sustain. will never sustain. o, it is her mind and heart, that starves instead. something feels empty within. something feeds her emptiness. she does not know what this emptiness is, and yet she feels it. consuming her worlds, from within. consuming her and possessing her like black magic possesses its victims. dark. cursed. beautiful.
when hot sunlight, pours over her sensuous physique, andromeda looks absolutely heavenly. starved light creeps angelic, against her slender curves. an eternal flame of desire, how she glistens wildly beneath the sun. yet parts of her memory falls like disjointed limbs. blood. soul. fire. she remembers dying in the fire. she remembers the scalding heat of it's violent caress. being consumed alive by flames. being destroyed over and over again. designed by heaven's light, andromeda is the pure manifestation of ethereal beauty. she is soft and graceful like poetry. she is wild and wicked like the songs of wolves, howling for the hunt by midnight. she is soft in ways minks are soft; both silky, slender and deadly. her smile is warm like sunlight. but her heart feels sad and alone, when she looks into the distance, where the rabbit once grazed. this must be loneliness, she thinks. this must be what living feels like.
her heart feels distorted. her thoughts are broken. her mind feels ravaged. none of her feels right, when her delicate form dances along the edge of the woods, and upon finally reaching the river's edge, only then does she drink from the cool well of water to sate her thirsts.
Think of me, I'll never break your heart
Think of me, You're always in the dark
I am your light, your light, your light
☼ ISHAK ☼اسحاق "we're too far gone / nothing I say will mean anything"
Strains of a string band come drifting in, and you turn your face towards an open window. Cool night winds come through, rippling the curtains and silks festooned about the hall. The floor is shine-stained — mica and cosmetics and blood.
The stars glimmer, and for but a moment you are the colt tracing the patterns of your father’s maps. You are the press of cool wind and sand in your mouth and gathering clouds on the horizon. You close your eyes tightly, choosing to focus on reds and purples instead as you wobble slightly.
You are, perhaps, a drink shy of one too many.
You’re relentlessly tired of this party, as it spills into overlong hours. Some fool had gone and stumbled into someone else’s unsheathed blade, and now Ruth is busy patching them both up. (If it’s actually a foolish and botched assassination attempt, you can’t say you care. Unless someone is trying to kill Ruth, it’s your firm opinion that it’s none of your business.)
You grimace as you catch sight of a wine stain, of its accompanying broken wine glass. Even here, tucked away from the whirl of energy that is the body of the party, there is work being made for the servants. You hear a moan of pain, and of complaint, and you’re not in any mood to be Ruth’s surrogate bedside manner.
You check instead that the door is firmly shut.
If you thought the walls would actually silence the music, you’d slip into Ruth’s rooms and pass out on the pile of cushions in the corner. It feels like the further you get from the center the louder the party is, but that might just be your fast developing headache speaking.
Irritated, when you hear the clip of hoofsteps, you are quick to say, “Room’s occupied. I’d recommend against interrupting.”
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☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "I CAME TO KNOW what your absence always means. Cliff. Every day knived sharper and doused in electricity."
I have always felt closer to the ocean than any Solterran should.
If anyone asks – I’ll politely cite the alleged rumors that Mother crafted my siblings and I from things, not bore of us of blood and sinew. If anyone asks – I won’t say a word, but I’ll turn my head towards the rocks that compose the seaside cliffs, and perhaps you will see them, too, in the arc of my neck, in the rugged dark-and-light of my skin. Let them think what they will. I, unfortunately, know the truth, but I have very little interest in telling it to anyone else.
There is a storm over the sea today. I have come looking for kelp – or seaweed, or both. Most of my patients don’t much like the taste of them (claim that it is “fishy,” although most of them are neither carnivores nor omnivores), but they are nutritionally dense, and I sneak bits of them into their food when they aren’t looking. During the winter, when food is scarcer regardless, I always have to find a bit more.
Today, I am alone. I don’t know where Ishak is, exactly – he said something about urgent business before he left this morning, but he didn’t elaborate on what the business was. It makes me assume that it is related to his previous occupation, but I didn’t ask. (He didn’t give me time to; he was out the door nearly as soon as I awoke.) Today, I am alone, with nothing but the screech of gulls and wind for company, and I almost feel strange about it.
Ishak does not like for me to go much of anywhere alone. He is a near-omnipresent figure in my life; I don’t mind, but I won’t let myself be kept in some birdcage, either. (After all, I am no bird – like all the rest of my family, I am a serpent, though unlike most of them, I do not often bare my teeth.) I have work to do, whether he is present or not, so I left some time after he did and made for the coast, picked my way past the docks and the bustle of the capitol until I found a stretch of unoccupied shore. It is easier to find things, further out, and quieter.
(That only means that no one will hear you if you scream, a voice distinctly reminiscent of Ishak insists, in the back of my head. That only means that no one will be here to help you, if something goes wrong.)
It’s paranoia. I worked alone for years, before he tried to kill me, and I was fine.
I lean close to the cliffs on a narrow stretch of shore, my hooves slipping on the thin bank of rock between the cliffs and the sea; the waves plunge up, covering their dark surface with a fine skim of saltwater and foam. I keep walking. If I just make it through this narrow corridor, I can see a stretch of beach ahead.
The rocks and barnacles dig into my skin. They draw shallow cuts; not even deep enough to bleed. I press forward, gritting my teeth, and I don’t think of falling into the water and drowning. Instead, I think of the press of stone at my shoulder and the bone-pale strip of shoreline ahead, just out of reach.
I cascade – finally – from the outcropping of rock and down onto wet shore, shaking my saltwater-slick hair out of my eyes. I am sure, with an ugly mingling of tide and cold sweat caught in my fur, that I do not look much like the daughter of a noble house. That suits me fine.
My hooves dig moons into the shoreline, and I look out towards the waves – long enough to note the way that they are growing larger and hungrier, long enough to catch my breath.
@Leto|| >D || shira erlichman, "ode to lithium #107"
For a while I am amiable, pleasant, uttering a blessing in common tongue for the pious, slipping a glib in Sahvahn for the enamoured—until my breathing grows strained and my smile stretches tight like lambskin left out to tan.
I bow lightly to a brunette with the Hajakhan crest ironed into her sleeve, her ruby eyes faintly serpentine in shape; she is watching me too carefully to be anything but conniving, and her smile fails to convince me otherwise. Vaguely I place her as the new Emissary's maternal cousin, but her name escapes me, and anyway—she is not important enough for me to expend any further effort.
This entire party is an avalanche of barely placeable faces and smiles that leer like a laughing jackal's. And it has only just begun.
A new tide of arrivees pours as fluid as wine through our carven doors, and as I lean precariously against the skeletal, holly-wreathed banister of our staircase—prized for its looks more so than its effectiveness, a taste distinctly Ieshan—I bring a wing to my mouth and absently check if it comes away red.
It doesn't. This comforts me, but only barely.
I am faintly annoyed that besides Miriam, my sisters and Corradh seem to have conveniently forgotten about my existence. Pilate is the only one I know the whereabouts of, and this only serves to annoy me further.
I grit my teeth; I am too proud to search for the rest of them through the swell of aristocratic faces, so I turn away to pick unhappily at a fig tart I had plucked when I'd passed the kitchens. It tastes bland and paste-like. I resolve to hovering the china plate in the air, and seeing how high I can lift it.
I am the eldest, and as such have never looked for my siblings, because they have always been the ones to look for me. To boast, to whine, to wheedle. I had listened to it all without complaint. Was sibling devotion inherently limited to childhood and spritely adolescence, then? Was a never-healing sickness and months of bedrest enough to undo all I have done in their welfare?
I am fairly unsurprised and too impassive to take particular offense. It is simply the way of the nobility. Our mother had barely raised us, our father her sulking shadow; that her children have grown up feral yet clothed in the finest of silks, fed on a diet of ambrosia, should surprise no one, least of all me. It is quite possibly the worst combination you could have—we are quite possibly the worst you could have—yet something still holds us all together, and for now—
For now, it is not my duty to ask what exactly that thing is.
There is a teasing flutter of lavender in the crowd. Immediately I am aware who she is—I have been waiting for her—yet I hesitate, the plate shivering in the air, for a surer sign. Until the scent of night-blooming jasmine perfumes the air, and my lips drag up into a grin.
I am pleased that she has come. I am honored that she has traveled such a distance at my request. I hunger for such physical reminders of my existence.
When I step into her path, the sapphires draped like tears over my cheeks and breastbone ripple and whisper like a voiceless chorus. "Lady Mesnyi?" I say, my voice raising in inquiry, though it is more a display of manners than a real question. I have never seen the performer in the flesh yet she is infamous: skin kissed by lavender, ears dabbed with jasmine, a swan's grace and a nightingale's croon in clear, warbling soprano.
I sweep into a bow, the tasteless tart providing me with the energy to make it low and grand. "I am honored. Your presence has been eagerly awaited."
§
In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim
« r » | @Mesnyi
he's not wingless yet as depicted but I just couldn't wait anymore to use this table c""":
