Worship - thumb down and starting to weep

☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼

if I can't have love, if I can't find peace
then grant me a bitter glory

Seraphina remembers the day that she was collared.

She was still struggling, but she does not think that it took long to break her; she was young, and malleable even when she wasn’t under duress. She remembers Viceroy forcing her to the ground and snapping the simple silver collar around her throat.

She threw it off, and he responded as he always did to disobedience. She does not like to consider the details.

When he put it back onto the girl – onto her, onto Seraphina -, who lay in a heap of limbs, whimpering out desperate pleas, begging, begging, begging - she did not try to take it off again.

Now, that hangman’s noose is the only thing that keeps her steady, the simple silver linchpin that contains all the things inside of her that are so desperate to come spilling out; she is erratic and far out of line, but some part of her is still contained, and she struggles to grasp onto it, because nothing else in the world is solid. Viceroy’s worst crime was in what he left behind. Even now, she doesn’t know how to stand on her own without some semblance of his influence hanging over her head. Perhaps that was why she’d never suited the crown on her head – she isn’t herself. She isn’t sure that she’s anyone at all. She is Seraphina, but who is Seraphina? (Burning one. A mockery to her cold temper, a jab at what his conditioning would craft her into, a name that was not chosen or gifted with love.) She should know who she is, but, stripped of every other influence, every other word she used to define herself, she can only see what she has always feared, what her incessant paranoia insists that everyone who looks at her and knows what that dull silver death sentence winding around her throat means sees when she passes them by – a patchwork doll tugged along by strings, the uncomfortable and ugly residue of Viceroy’s influence, another dead-eyed child soldier, something that presented all the qualities of a person on the exterior, but, under closer examination, was little more than a shadow.

(When asked, on rare occasion, she had always insisted that she still wore the collar as a symbol, in the place of a crown. The only one who’d ever managed to drive the truth from her was Acton, and she was still loathe to admit it. She couldn’t take it off. The impulse made her nauseas. And – and terrified.)

But now she has a decision to make.

There are many Seraphinas inside of her. There is a Seraphina with a name she does not remember. There is a Seraphina that Viceroy collared, snapping back at his machinations; there is a Seraphina that Viceroy finally broke, a Seraphina that no longer remembered any Seraphina she had been before, a Seraphina shattered like broken glass. There is a Seraphina driving a sword through an older warrior’s gut, a Seraphina strewn like loose debris on the battlefield, stained red with her own blood. There is a Seraphina caught in the ashes of her burning city, staring at the crumpled body of her tormentor, wide-eyed and frozen. There is a Seraphina patrolling the sands, even with no master to guide her, because she is so desperate to maintain some semblance of order. There is a Seraphina who rises to a meeting called by a newcomer; there is a Seraphina flung aside by a teryr, nearly broken, vaguely aware that, for once in her life, when she found herself lying in a pool of her own blood, someone was calling her name. (Someone was coming for her.) There is a Seraphina declared Emissary, then a Seraphina menaced by the threat of a war, then a Seraphina with a crown on her head. There is a Seraphina with Eik in the library, and a Seraphina who found Bexley in a collapsed cave, and a Seraphina with Rhoswen in the oasis; there is a Seraphina who watched her kingdom burn again, who burnt her own library to ashes herself, who, still bloodstained and howling, cried out to the god who allowed this to happen. There is a Seraphina with a swollen cheek, dripping wet, staring empty-eyed and haunted at a Regent who thought to strike her while her citizens lay dead in the streets. There is a Seraphina with lilies curled into her hair, a Seraphina drifting among partygoers. There is a Seraphina on Veneror again, summoned by the gods, and a Seraphina sobbing white-hot tears of grief and rage as her own gods imprisoned her, as she realized that she was wrong wrong wrong, a Seraphina betrayed again, lost again. There is a Seraphina trailing like smoke in the wake of the sun god, a Seraphina who just wants to know why. There is a Seraphina who sees the desert consumed by blizzards, a Seraphina who follows Solis’s call to arms, a Seraphina who watches the world dull, for a moment, to a lull.

There is a Seraphina approaching the Bellum Steppe, striding mechanical, eyes narrowed to slits, business as usual - and then there is a Seraphina bleeding out on the ground, barely twitching, struggling to stand but condemned to the ground, a Seraphina freezing over. She thinks that she might have died out on the Steppe, because whatever is left behind doesn’t feel much like herself.

When Isra speaks, it is with a certain reluctance. Seraphina turns her head and listens. She speaks of blades turned to daisies and orphans, and Seraphina marvels, privately, at the way that she spins her words like poetry, because she has never been able to claim such eloquence to her own tongue. It is only when a few, simple words pass her lips - Acton, my first friend in this place, would still be alive - that she stirs, and the rest of Isra’s words feel hollow in the wake of her sudden horror. She hears them through water, and they barely settle on the surface, their meaning numbed by the cold strike of shock.

“Acton…?” She repeats his name quietly, numbly. She doesn’t know – what he was to her, exactly. A friend? (Certainly closer than most, in some regard or another.) His mouth tastes bitter on her tongue, like blood, and she struggles to piece together the idea of Acton – dead. She is accustomed to death. Seraphina has seen more than her fair share of death. But in the back of her mind, he is still some living thing, and perhaps the last time they’d speak wouldn’t lead to a confrontation. And she thinks of Bexley, and she thinks of their daughter, and she feels sick all over again. Raum was – gone. She had never thought that he was good, but she had thought that there was some semblance of – something – inside of him, but if he would kill Acton, there was nothing, nothing – there couldn’t be anything at all, and she is even more frightened for Rhoswen, for that little girl of theirs, and then Bexley, and then O, and she is left with the cold, empty realization that she still doesn’t know what to say. “I…” She tries to find the right words. “…he deserved far better.” By Solterran standards, he had died a good death – dying for the sake of one’s country was a noble thing. But he didn’t deserve to die. He deserved to live.

But life was not about deserving.

“I’m sorry,” she says, finally, as Isra finishes her tale, or what she can tell of it. Her sympathies, of course, mean nothing. But she is, even as Isra is fire and rage – she is sorry that Acton is dead, and she is sorry that Raum hurt Isra, and she is sorry that he hurt so many others, in hurting them, and she is sorry, and she wishes-

She wishes she could say anything at all. She wishes that there were any words that would soothe, or words that would fix, but they are far past the point where words could change anything. There was no happy resolution to this; any peace that could be found would inevitably be a bitter, redstained one.

Isra tries to smile, but it is an uncomfortable thing, and her hopes do not feel like hopes so much as they do some other kind of promise – it takes her a moment, with the landscape shifting like sand with the unicorn’s rage, with her head still fuzzy and fumbling from blood loss and – everything else, to realize that they have almost reached the summit. Before them, just along the path, stand the statues, or what remains of them now that the gods are – gone.

“I’m not sure it’s a matter of whether or not he can.” Her voice comes out quiet and reluctant. I don’t think that he will, she wants to say. Solis certainly could help her, if he were so inclined – he could burn Solterra to the ground on a whim if he felt like it. She had never been able to gauge his feelings for her. He was never unkind, certainly never cruel; he always regarded her with a sort of knowing patience and snide humor, but, in spite of her persistent coldness, he had never turned her venom – born of disappointment and grief more than genuine resent – back on her. She doesn’t tell Isra that Raum is not the first mad king of Solterra, even in recent memory; she does not tell her of the collar around her throat, and she does not tell her of how their god abandoned them, and then he came back, and then he left again, just when they needed him-

Isra and her dragon seem content to remain, to leave her to her god – so she strides forward alone, the shadows prickling persistently at the corners of her vision and the cold air balling up inside of her chest. She climbs higher and higher, until she stands in the center of the shrines, and she regards them all momentarily. Once, this place seemed sacred, the quietness and the watchful eyes of the gods a rare and precious comfort. Now, they are broken, and anything holy about their likenesses seems to have fled with them. She stares at the statues – dull, dead idols – and feels more than a prickle of disappointment. She was hoping for something, anything - the illusion of a greater purpose. Instead, she feels foolish.

Her gaze lingers absently on what remains of the beautiful golden statue of Solis, run through with spiderweb fractures and missing little pieces here and there. He is still in far better condition than his fellows; Solis is a vain god, for better or worse, and he probably took pains to make sure that the statue remained - somewhat - accurate, though, now that she has seen him, she knows that the empty husk is nothing compared to his force of presence. (He burns, he radiates, he is pure force - and she does not think that he is kind or cruel, but a kind of energy, as distant as the celestial body he calls his own.) She stares up into those eyes and imagines them blinking back. They did, once.

She draws closer to his alter, her attention turning to him alone.

The little part of her that has seen the gods come crawling down from the heavens imagines, for a moment, that maybe he will turn to look at her, maybe she will stare long enough and hear his voice. He is always watching, isn’t that what he told her? But she isn’t his queen anymore, and she doubts that she is anything to him at all, in the void of her title. As a lonely, unloved child, she would comfort herself with the knowledge that he heard her, that he was her patron and protector, that, even if she had nothing and no one else in the world, she still had the sun god, so she was never alone as she felt – and he never came down for anyone, and he never saved anyone, so it wasn’t as though it was just her, and it was wrong to expect anything else from him. But then he did come, and not to save his people from Zolin, and then he did give his blessings, but never to her, and she wondered and wondered and wondered if she’d done something wrong or if she hadn’t asked properly or if she just didn’t want enough. What had he asked her, that first time they’d met? (He’d spoken to her with the patience with which an adult regards a fumbling child, and she wonders, too, if she had ever been a girl or ever stopped being a girl, because she doesn’t felt like she’s grown in years.)

“What is it you desire, Queen of the Day Court?”

The god’s words hang in her head like a knife’s edge, like some vicious taunt. What is it you desire? If she were someone else, if she’d drawn a different lot, she is sure that there would be a long list of things that she wanted, but she isn’t, and she doesn’t know. (She’s learned that there isn’t much of a point in wanting - she always crumbles, always falls short, never really has her way, or, if she does, she watches it snatched from her, time and time again.) She thinks that her wants are modest. She is not ambitious enough for love or happiness; she isn’t ambitious enough for blessings. She wants Solterra safe. She wants Raum dead – no. Not even dead. Wiped away like a skeleton in the sand, so far gone that he might as well never have existed. They aren’t even about her, really, so she doesn’t think that they are selfish wants, she doesn’t think that they’re – too greedy, that she can’t have them.

(And there are other cravings, too, forced down and down and down until they exist as nothing more than a dark undertow at the edge of her thoughts. Certainly, she wishes that there were something that would fill that vast gaping nothingness caught in the center of her. Certainly, she desires love – certainly, she desires happiness. Certainly, she desires kindness, peace, a chance to be something that is not a weapon of war, for once in her life; certainly, she desires something softer, or the chance to be something softer. But there is no time for softness now. There has never been any time for something feather-light and sweet, only the sharp edge of a blade. She lives on a fine line, like a tightrope walker. She lived on a fine line. She-)

But everything is a bargain. She knows that. She should know that; nothing is ever given freely. A gift of any substance demands an even greater price, and she wants to burn, like she is fire, like she is the sun, but she cannot find it within her to peel off that last little bit of her that keeps her contained, because she does not know if she can survive it. That means knowing. She does not know if she can know and live with the knowing afterwards.

So she turns her eyes to his shrine, and she tries to busy herself for a moment, at least until she can find the words she needs to say. It is more overgrown than she has ever seen it; worshippers seemed to have neglected the holy site, now that the gods were elsewhere. She begins the work of peeling great tangles of vine from the marble structure at the foot of the statue, pulling them aside and using them to sweep away the dust and dirt that has collected on the base, like a second skin. Eventually, her efforts reveal a dull old sword in a simple sheath, and she frowns, but cleans around it. Perhaps it was a gift from a worshipper, before the gods returned, though she doesn’t remember it. Either way, she has no intention of interfering with someone else’s offering.

When there are no more vines to pull, she is forced to collect herself, heaving an unhappy sigh. She looks back up at the empty eyes of the statue, and she wills them to blink at her again, but she is met with cold stone. Her words come out stumbling. “I…I know that I’ve failed you. Again.” A bitter, short laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “I don’t ask your forgiveness, I just ask for some way to…to fix this. He can’t…I can’t let him…” She sounds pathetic, even to herself, begging like a dog at the hooves of the sun god, and she knows that he loathes the pitiful, but she doesn’t know what to say. Raum struck her down with his magic. Raum had struck down other magic users. She is only mortal; she doesn’t stand a chance against him, particularly if he grows stronger. She can’t force Solis’s intervention, and she can’t even guarantee that he wouldn’t align himself with Raum, now that he was Solterra’s Sovereign. She can’t be sure that all of her faith, fragmented as it is, would mean anything at all.

She trails off and, abruptly, turns away, her head drooping. She is tired of begging, or perhaps she is just tired; she doesn’t know.“I don’t know what I’m doing here. When have you ever…when we needed you…when I needed you…” Once. Once. Once, just once, so he could, so why didn’t he all those times before? Perhaps she isn’t supposed to know.

But something inside of her snaps.

“You didn’t save me then – I don’t need you to do it now.” If she is never meant to be anything more than a hapless mortal, she will still find some way to fix this, somehow. Solis didn’t come for her, and he has never come for her, so she will find another way. Who she is – what she is – cannot fight Raum. She knows that.

She has to burn.

Her mind trails down the nape of her neck, and it hovers over that simple silver clasp. She opens it.

Her collar falls to the ground with a dull clink. It rolls for a few inches, then settles in front of the altar.

In its absence, she is left with a ring of rash-worn skin and a searing sensation that starts in her throat and burns down every inch of her quaking frame, a wildfire that swallows skin and bone and blood and leaves – what? She is burning, burning, burning, but she wants to burn; she welcomes the too-hot embrace of flame against her skin, because she has been cold for so long, so hollowed-out, but now…

Now she spills out over her own edges. Now she is too much for her own skin.

(But she knows that there will be nothing left when she is done burning; it will be a flame that swallows up ash and smoke, swallows itself. Her grief has a mouth full of snarling teeth – her grief is hungry, and, when she is done, she doesn’t doubt that it will come back to eat her alive. The first thing that she felt with any certainty after she was collared was the vicious lash of grief, reducing her to red-rimmed eyes and banshee howls while her kingdom bled out in her wake. She has not been sure of anything but the malnourished snapping of her grief since. Even now, as she struggles to stand steady on legs that are her own in a way that they haven’t been in years, she doesn’t know if there is anything inside of but the grieving. She doesn’t know what she has done wrong.)

“I won’t let him destroy everything that I have created,” she rasps, her voice shuddering under the weight of her own rage. “He won’t destroy me. I won’t let him destroy me - no one will ever destroy me again.” She doesn’t know if those words are true or not, and perhaps he has already destroyed her, but – but she is still standing.

She does not notice the way that her white tangles of hair, freeing themselves from her already-messy braids, begin to trail after her movements, nor the way that her hooves drift off the ground; she does not notice the way that the small pebbles that line the path around her drift alongside of her. She simply stares into those eyes, pulsing, burning -

And, at the back of her mind, she is abruptly aware of a sizzling hum.

She glances down, her eyes widening, and takes in the sight of the sword again – but, this time, she pays proper attention to its craftsmanship. It is ancient, and Solterran steel, and beautiful, in spite of the layer of grime and dust coating it; she can just make out golden carvings of the sun around the hilt, and a single word.

It does not occur to her, as she lifts it to examine the hilt, that she should not be able to raise such a heavy object with her mind. Her gaze drifts down the carved letters, and, after a moment’s pause, she recognizes the language as ancient Solterran. Hers is crude, picked up mostly during her time as Queen, but she knows enough of it to translate the name of the sword. Alshamtueur. Sun slayer.

There is something to that hum, something that begs to be freed.

“Alshamtueur,” she whispers, and the blade, with a sizzle that is almost like a scream, bursts into flames.

The sudden burst of light and heat leaves her stunned, and she nearly drops the sword; it bobs in the air, then steadies itself abruptly. She drags in a long, deep breath of hot air, gazing past the sword at the statue, the way the light gleams off its brilliant gold – and she finds the eyes of the god, flickering. At the edge of the horizon, the sun is beginning to rise, touching the murky blue of night with the briefest hint of pale peach.

She does not know how to soothe the sword, so, in the absence of any other words, she whispers its name again. The sword flickers, but it is quick to go out, and she returns it to its sheath and places it back on the altar. It is only then that she realizes that she should not have been able to lift it, only then that she realizes the way that her hair spins and swarms around her neck, as though she is in water, only then that she realizes that she does not stand on solid ground-

She locks eyes with the statue, taking a shuddering breath.

Seraphina does not think that it is good form to take something from the altar of a god, but, somehow, she feels like the sword is there for her, and, with an unsteady grasp, loops it around her trembling shoulders. Her mouth feels dry, and, when she tries to find the right words to say, her tongue seems to tie itself into knots.

(But no one is ever given a sword and the tools by which to use it without a reason, and she can only assume that this is his answer; after all, magic is a gift of the gods, though the sword might be something else entirely. Even if this isn’t divine intervention, it must mean something. There is more left for her to do.)

“I understand,” she whispers, finally. She must return to Solterra, to see this through to its bitter end. (And, surely, Isra will come with her when she returns.) And she will – she will linger a moment longer, still watching the statue, and then she will return to the unicorn and her dragon, sword at her side, and ask her to return to the land of sun and sand with her. But, for one more, fragile moment, it is only Seraphina and the statue and the pale blush of light on the horizon.

And, as she turns her head towards the rising sun, though there are fractures in Seraphina, she is whole.

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tags | @Isra
notes | aaaaand, done. ~~I haven't proofread at all and this is a novel please forgive me for my sins.~~ this post is long and tonally all over the place.