Worship in the absence of everything, abstain from fear

AND HOW I SING YOU LIKE A SONG I HEARD WHEN I WAS YOUNG
and buried for a night like this

At the foothills of Veneror Peak, the air is warm and sweet, heavy with the scent of newborn flowers and morning dew.

She begins her pilgrimage when dawn has just broken over the fuzzy edges of the horizon, a spill of pale pink washed over murky white fog. Her scar hurts more than usual today: a dull, throbbing phantom pain, a memory of skin. It’s an ugly thing, really, even though it tries to dress itself up as something gleaming, beauty bled forth from horror like some consolation prize. It doesn’t move properly. The metal is too stiff, and it distorts every expression that crosses her features; the skin bunches around it, and, if it can be moved at all, it moves in small, unnatural ways. In the bright sunlight, it sometimes grows hot enough to burn. In the chill of winter, it is sometimes cold enough to freeze her to the bone. Worst of all, it is stark enough to be unforgettable. Worst of all, it is a reminder. If it were just skin, she wonders if she could have looked away from it. Instead, the gold just draws her eyes – and she knows that it doesn’t just draw her eyes. She has seen scars before and forgotten them, but never a scar laced up in gold. Her disgrace is memorialized across her cheekbone, etched into the muscles of her face. Wherever she goes, she will have to carry his legacy with her. Wherever she goes, that scar will speak for her, and she is not sure what it says – if she is victim or survivor.

Seraphina pulls the thick fabric of her hood a bit further over her face and hides herself beneath it. It is still early spring; she tells herself that it is because the trek to the peak will be cold, and she is not well-accustomed to the cold.

She has not ascended the peak since [Raum]. And that was fumbling – dark as starless night and disoriented, muddled with blood loss and an agonizing revelation that hadn’t sunk in yet. And cold. So cold. Not like the faint chill that nips her uncovered skin as she climbs higher up the mountainside. Cold like a grave. Cold like a corpse. Lifeless cold, like marble left out in winter. A cold that made her want to lick at her lips, just to prove to herself that she could still feel them, even though her mouth just tasted like blood – copper-tang and sticky. Comparatively, this is soft and pale. Everything in the world looks different in the daylight. Everything.

In the past, the worn stone pathways would feel like a comfort, balm to an itch she’d never quite been able to scratch, patch to a persistently open wound. (Hunger. She might call it that, now. A softer hunger than the one carving a hole into her stomach now – for love, or at least for recognition, but now for blood.) The world would melt away and quiet. No voices. When she became a queen, no stares. Now, too, deformed by the scar across her cheek – no stares. When Bexley was scarred, she couldn’t understand her devastation. In Solterra, a scar was honorable. A sign of survival, and of war. But Seraphina is tired of war, and she is tired of miraculous survival. She is tired, too, of what she used to think was honor. Now, she just wonders if she will ever be able to look at the ascent to the peak and think of anything but Raum. She wonders if she will ever be able to walk the towering dunes of the Mors and think of anything but Raum. She wonders if she will ever be able to step into the sandstone walls of the court and think of anything but Raum.

She wonders if she will ever be able to look at her own reflection and think of anything but Raum.

The sun is still low in the sky when she reaches the peak, stands before the shrines – the small cathedrals. Spills of ivy. Altars. Shed statues, sad as discarded cicada shells. (The image of a living thing, but lifeless.) She stands amidst them all, white coils of hair snaking out from the cover of her hood. The wind is strong so high on the mountain, and stronger still today.

For a moment, she looks back towards the path, towards the mountainside, and she can see someone she used to know, illuminated by the rosy kiss of dawn’s light. But the image is translucent – and even the trail of flames that dance the subtle curve of her spine are stationary, trapped in the still permanence of memory. If she had known, she would have stopped her. If she had known, could she have saved her?

She knows by now that such thoughts are useless. The world was as it was – nothing more, nothing less. She could not rewrite history. But that does not stop a coiling sense of regret – and grief, always grief - from taking up residence in her chest. They had all been younger, hadn’t they? She can remember when things were – easier. Quieter. That little ebb, after Zolin died, when the world seemed to open wide. She remembers when she learned to believe in something, and that was then, too.

Nowadays, she doesn’t know what she believes in, if she believes in anything at all. It’s all too much a flicker to feel like something solid, unshakable. She used to think that she was. Now, she’s shaken. All tremors. Like something diseased, on its deathbed, quivering through a fever dream. Surely, she’s seen enough by now. Surely, it will be better from here-

But she knows that she has to carve out better and mold it herself, and she wonders more and more as that poisonous, ravenous beast that resides inside of her grows larger and larger, and crueler and crueler, and angrier and angrier, and even more envious – she wonders if she will ever be able to create any lovely thing again, or if everything she creates is destined to end in blood and flame. She wonders what her life will become, at the end of all of this. She wonders if she will still have a purpose.

She has a purpose now. Seraphina climbs up to Solis’s altar, her hooves a resounding clatter against the marble – louder even than the wind. She pulls out a stick of incense, and a candle, and she lights both; sweet-scented fog and flickering light dance in the wind, and she lays them to rest at the hooves of the cracked golden statue. She does not look up to his eyes. She does not think that she can stand how cold and empty they look, now that she has seen him alive. She knows that she won’t find god in those eyes.

Instead, she closes her own eyes, and she clears her throat. Fidgets. She tastes the wind on her lips. Licks them. Reminds herself of the sound of what it means to be Solterran, the way that her people’s tongue will dip and fall, but always rise again – of the way that the words should sound in her mouth, the way that, when she speaks, she should feel her past in her blood, some intangible connection to an ancestry that she has never gotten to know. Tells herself that they – that he - cannot choke the voice from her, that he can take everything, but he cannot take the weight of her heritage from her, that he can take Solterra but he will never be Solterran. Tries to still the frantic beat of her heart, which does not want to let her speak -

But she does not want to speak, anyways. She wants to sing.

She breathes deep of the wind and opens her mouth.

fin. || aaaaand, we're at 300. wanted to do something a little different for it. this post did not at all go as expected.

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"