All Welcome lily white and poppy red [festival]

DREAMS ARE SWEET UNTIL THEY AREN'T
men are kind until they aren’t / flowers bloom until they rot and fall apart

As she watches her daughter from some distance – close enough to see her, but without revealing herself to the dainty, black-and-white creature frolicking in the flowers (like a child should, she decides, with some relief) -, she finds herself thinking of the first festival she attended in Terrastella. She was younger, then, and different; a newly-appointed emissary, not yet burdened with the weight of a crown. At the time, she’d been optimistic in the only way that she knew how, which was with a certain coldness that she regrets, much as she knows that it couldn’t have been helped. Maxence had been unlike any native Solterran, and, though he was brash and impulsive, she’d thought that he could be the harbinger of a new Solterra, unhindered by the class divisions and cruelties that had characterized the kingdom before Zolin’s death. And – when she thought about it - he was the first person to ever show her an ounce of respect. It had meant something, at the time.

She’d been here on a diplomatic affair. She swears that she’d worn a crown of white lilies, and she almost thinks that she’d danced with someone for the first and only time in her life, but that might have been in Delumine instead. (The events are beginning to blend together; she is not sure how that makes her feel.) Now, Seraphina stands knee-deep in a swaying field of flowers, watching her daughter, and she tries to make peace with the whole of that – she just wishes that she’d ever felt like any of it was really over.

(And there are always these quiet thoughts in the back of her mind when she looks at her children. Children will grow, and they will find lives of their own – and someday, they will leave her. She doesn’t know what she’ll do, then, and she tries to tell herself that she can worry about it when it comes; but years mean less and less to her by the day, and there is some part of her that is paralyzingly afraid that the ones she has with her children will pass far more quickly than she expects.)

She raises her head, white hair sweeping out of her eyes, and she looks towards the sea. She can smell salt and fish on the crest of the wind; the tide is creeping up on the rocks, foamy tendrils of white against jagged and shimmering spires of raven-black. All around her, there is the sound of life – wandering partygoers, drunken lovers, children finally let out for the spring. Somehow, above the hum of it all, she can still hear the sound of the tides against the shore, the low rumble of each crashing wave.

She watches her daughter and sighs.

@whoever || <3 ||

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"