The days pass by her like the dunes on the Mors. She knows that they change from day to day, shift in shape with each passing wind; she knows that the dunes that she sees each morning are not the same that she will see the next, but, if you asked her how they differ, she could not answer. If you ask her how the days differ, she could not tell you. She is sure that they do, but they blend together like smeared watercolors. Sometimes they feel horrifyingly real. (Sometimes, when she finds herself staring at the shards of some broken thing, and she knows that she has lost control of her magic again; sometimes, when Alshamtueur is slick with someone’s blood.) Most of the time, they don’t feel real at all. Most of the time, although she knows that it is, nothing does.

She leaves no tracks when she passes across the sands like a shadow cast by the dark overhang of clouds, no disturbance to mark her passage. She moves like a ghost; she moves like something dead. She passes through the world without touching it, white hair unbound and floating behind her just as she floats several centimeters off the ground. Ereshkigal circles up high, high in the sky above her head, a mere speck of black against the clouds. They are rare, in the heart of the Mors, but not so rare where it borders the sea, and she is moving towards the ocean. She cannot say why.

(Sometimes the siren-song of hungry, black waves calls to her at night, when she wakes and sees the moon and cannot believe again that she is alive. She isn’t sure if it is a challenge or a threat. She isn’t sure which she hopes for – she does not know what she wants to find.)

Golden dunes give way to bleached beach-sand. She picks her way across dark, mottled rock, run slick with the tides, and she does not pause in her wandering until she finds the corpse of a ship, run horribly against a crop of jagged rocks. Ereshkigal comes spiraling down, dark wings extended and talons outstretched, and she lands on a jutting, jagged board, craning her neck to peer down into the waterlogged body of the ship.

Seraphina has a feeling that she is searching for corpses. She hopes that she does not find any, but, when she looks at the damage on the ship, she cannot help but feel a cruel certainty that the demon will.

Ereshkigal makes a sound of annoyance, then springs back up into the air; Seraphina is not sure if it is a relief or not. (She has to bury plenty of corpses, in the desert – she has buried plenty of corpses, out in the desert or in the city or in the canyons or by the oasis. Lost travelers. Fools who fought a sandwyrm, or a terror, or a simple rattlesnake, or a pack of jackals. Poor souls caught by slavers or Davke. Solterrans, caught up in the reign of- but that doesn’t matter now.) If there is no body, at least she does not have to bury whoever crashed on the rocks. A watery grave would take them.

That is when she notices the hoofprints, leading away from the wreckage. A survivor – though, perhaps, not for long. The Mors are cruel to strangers and friends alike, and she cannot imagine anyone walking away from that wholly unscathed.

Without further contemplation, she follows the tracks out into the sands. She can feel Ereshkigal rolling her eyes, but she disregards her entirely.

(She would rather she become cruel, or apathetic; she cannot understand her need to help, much like she cannot understand her need to repent.)

It does not take her long to catch up with the stranger. She approaches him silently, still suspended above the sands, her white mane and tail trailing behind her like they are suspended in water; her mismatched eyes run his frame. He is taller than her by some measure, with a sizeable pair of antlers and a leonine tail, and his build is suggestive of a warrior. He is a stark contrast to the sands, all earthy tones and sharp white stripes. She hovers behind him; she cannot see his face.

He isn’t leaking blood onto the sand. That, at least, is to his benefit. (The scent of it is as good as a beacon, in the Mors.)

“Did you wash up with that shipwreck?” Seraphina asks.

(What she means is: are you unharmed? Do you need help?)

---

tags | @Galileo
notes | did you ask for some emo I love him, and I'm excited for this thread! <3

poem | jamaal may, "Yes I know She's Dying"
"speech"

When he notices her, when she speaks – he swings his antlered head in an arc, the motion of a startled warrior. Seraphina does not move an inch. She does not wince from the way that his dark antlers slice through the air between them; she does not even blink. There is no twitch to her charcoal lips. She simply floats, silver form suspended, unkempt white hair bobbing about her like ocean currents.

You’re….floating, he manages. She is. There is very little that she can do about it, though – the part of her that begs to control the roiling toss of her magic weakens by the day.

Seraphina tilts her head, the white cascade of her mane trailing after the motion. “An effect of my magic,” she says, without much emotion. (She does not stop floating, either.)

Nowadays, an outcast – a perpetual wanderer, or a hermit – she can almost remind herself of her days as a guard. They are a cold comfort, at best. When she traces the old routes that she used to follow, long before she was an Emissary or a collared queen, when she was still scarcely more than a slave, Seraphina can almost feel like she has strangled her aimless mass of a life into a routine.

The illusion never lasts for long. She’s not who she used to be. She often longs to be that Seraphina again, but the longing is half-hearted at best. It would rid her of the persistent ache that trails her like the scent of graves and death wherever she goes, like the smell of burning flesh and newborn stone and blood and night-blooming flowers, but it would not free her. She would simply lapse from one misery to another, replace overflow with emptiness.

The cure for a flood is not a drought. She knows this; she knows it well.

He confirms that the wreckage is his, and he asks if this land has a name. He didn’t arrive on Novus’s shores intentionally, she takes it. (With how badly-damaged his ship was, she couldn’t imagine that this was his destination regardless.) She dips her head in confirmation.

“Yes. The island is Novus – and you are in Solterra, the desert kingdom of the Day Court.” The words drip off her tongue, each one thickly accented by her native tongue; it rolls, deep and rhythmic, like the dunes that stretch out in all directions, each shift in cadence like reaching a crest. "We are in the Mors desert. It is not…safe for travelers who are unfamiliar with it. Would you like me to guide you to the capitol?”

To tell the truth, Seraphina has no desire to go back. To tell the truth, Seraphina can barely stomach it to so much as look at the city – her home, she reminds herself, with a violent pang somewhere deep in the recesses of her chest – without feeling sick.

Regardless. She will do it, if he asks, because it is her duty to serve these sands and whoever happens to wander them; because it is her burden to bear, for now and forever, until the sands finally take her back. (She wonders if she will ever be anything but a servant, if she will ever live her life unbowed and deliberate, and then she dismisses herself immediately for the hubris – for the selfishness – and she reminds herself that this is exactly what she deserves, and, even then, that it will never be enough.)

There is only so far and so long that she can run.

---

tags | @Galileo
notes | <3

poem | jamaal may, "Yes I know She's Dying"
"speech"