I STAY EMPTY, I FEEL THE HUNGER so simple when I was younger--
Seraphina followed the footsteps of the ink-coated stranger in a silence that seemed to extend into her thoughts. She felt that she should have thought something as she followed him, but her mind was left empty as she stumbled in her mechanical pursuit; she was surrounded by gaping, uncomfortable quiet, save the soft whisper of growing wind. The throbbing in her leg had soon become so anticipated that she didn’t feel it at all, and the blood from the gashes on her chest had slowed to a gooey trickle – it was caked on her skin in a layer of dark, gelatinous pus, but she barely noticed it. Her mouth still tasted like copper, and, whenever she breathed, she sucked in the tangy, sticky scent of blood. It didn’t bother the warrior woman, though. She had dragged herself back to Solterra in far worse condition than this in the past, and she could certainly do it again.
Homecoming was not her present objective, however.
It might have seemed strange to be following behind the stallion that had caused her those wounds to begin with, but Seraphina had seen enough of him to gauge his skill, and Solterra was always on the hunt for capable warriors. During their battle, she hadn’t noticed the scent of any of the other courts on him, so she thought that he might be a loner. If he was, she had every intention of offering him a home in Solterra. Although there seemed to be a darkness gnawing at him, a cold rage that put her own indistinct apathy to shame, it was secondary to his skills, and Solis only knew that most of the Solterrans were damaged goods.
(And he’d spared her. He could have easily left her maimed, and, for a fraction of a second, she’d thought he might, but he hadn’t.)
The tall grasses of the Eleutheria Plains had risen to brush against her legs before she caught up with him again. The brilliant sunlight that had beat down upon her shoulders during their battle had fallen prey to a swarm of murky grey clouds, and she could smell the promise of rain – a foreign, earthy freshness to the desert mare – on the wind. Now it existed only in subdued beams of light that found their way through little cracks in the cloud cover; they left patches of the desaturated tawny sea illuminated in pure, pale gold. Autumn chill had crept in with the breeze, and Seraphina wasn’t sure if she minded it or not; there was a near-imperceptible tremble to her silver skin, but it could just have easily been the result of her injuries as the cold. Her mane, long tugged free of its braids, trailed behind her in ghostly tangles.
She trailed her eyes along the antlered stallion thoughtfully, though she kept her distance from him – she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed her, or if he had realized that he was being followed. (Somehow, she imagined that he had. He seemed clever.) Raising her voice to be audible over the wind, Seraphina offered, “You’re quite skilled.” Her words were genuine, but, in the mare's cool, throaty tones, words slurred softly with her desert drawl, they sounded like less of a compliment and more of an observation.
With that, she waited; she would have more to say once she had a chance to gauge his reaction.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
10-20-2017, 03:15 PM - This post was last modified: 10-22-2017, 07:10 PM by Seraphina
Bitter was the pill he had been forced to swallow, the realization that something within him had cracked, fragmented like ruptured glass. That something in his chest throbbed with a hollow ache that not even his dimmed outrage could appease; a dark abyss that choked the breath from his lungs and left his sharp mind reeling before the onslaught of sheer emptiness. It was as if he stood on a precipice looking down, and the world begun to tilt beneath his hooves to send him careening into that void. He moved from the Steppe with stiff, robotic strides, his eyes gone from the world in favor of his own introspection. He tried to analyze that emptiness, tried to place it among the other, neglected, emotions dimly flickering through his soul, but it defied his mind in it's complexity. It was not just the thought of the one most beloved to him that helped the void grow like a fat maggot on rotting flesh. It was many things, culminating into one sodden mass flavored with nothingness and despair. It was the loss of his magic, so integral to his being and his passion. It was the loss of the warm gold that would drip from his antlers and fade away when it fell from his body. It was the loss of his country even when they betrayed him. And finally, it was the loss of the one he had held most dear, lost by his own pathetic inaction.
It was also, strangely, a sort of loss of his innocence.
Innocence, perhaps, not of the sort like a child or a virgin might have, but the innocent and naive trust he had wholly placed in the hands of his masters, his beloved, himself. It was a solemn thought, a dreadful realization, and with a sharp jolt and flash of pain from his clotting wounds he returned to the world to find himself no longer in the Steppe, but rather once more in that endless sea of soft grass he had arrived in. This time, however, there were differences. The green grass was beginning to brown by the relentless sun now masked by grey clouds, and the wind held the spice and chill of autumn in silent warning of the changing seasons. He paused and lifted his crowned head to the wind, tasting that soft breath of fall, drawing on it to steady himself.
That was when he saw her. She was easily seen on the flat landscape now that he had focused his gaze on the world, her limping gait closing the distance, stubbornly pursuing him. He braced, turning 'round to face her with neck arched and tines pointed towards her, but she maintained a fair distance from him, making no move to approach further. Although he raised his head and moved to relax the tension coiled in his spine and haunches, his guard had slammed up, ghastly eyes watching her with apathetic emptiness. Her lips moved, but her words were delayed by the breeze. 'You're quite skilled.' He waited for more, one ear flicked towards her, his own voice silent and still. Was that all she had to say? She had hobbled so far from the Steppe, risking exaggerating her injury, just to compliment his skill? He doubted that strongly. "Speak thine intentions or bother me not, thou should concern thineself with thine injury." He called back, his forward-pointed ear flattening back against his dark locks, and he allowed a look of annoyance to cross his features.
'Vasher', as he was, had little tolerance for word games. (An irony that never ceased to amuse the raven.)
I STAY EMPTY, I FEEL THE HUNGER so simple when I was younger--
The Emissary was cautious by nature.
She was collected, contemplative, fettered, propelled only by a dedication to rationale and duty; even when Solterra had no sovereign, she had continued about her duties with a mechanical insistence, shackled to an equally mechanical future by a past that she could only remember in shards. Every inch of her skin seemed to reflect this restraint. Even with disjointed pain throbbing in her hindquarters, spreading like salt in the sea, her stance was stiff and rigid, muscles tense and chin raised in statuesque posture as though she felt nothing at all. She could explain the compulsion, of course, – it clung to her neck like a permanent metal noose – but, insofar as she was concerned, her behavior, abrasive or distant as it might be, like rough sandpaper or winter wind, required no explanation. The Emissary, therefore, might have been a pitiable creature if it weren’t for her perpetual obsession with distance. She was not particularly pleasant; she would never be sought out at parties for a good time or pulled aside in gaping halls of Solterra’s sandstone fortress for anything but business. For her politeness, she was not regarded poorly, but she didn’t imagine she had much of anything close or valuable among the dunes. If this bothered her, she was disinclined to change.
(She told herself, at least, that she didn’t care.)
She watched the stallion with those cold, quiet eyes, dragging them the length of his inky black form; he met her with thinly-veiled suspicion and eyes that made her stomach twist into knots – something was wrong in their emptily white depths, something colder than the dead. Tension bled from his frame as he seemed to realize that she held no ill will, but those eyes didn’t change. (She did not flinch away from those strange, apathetic eyes, however; they were disconcerting, but they held her gaze. She didn’t dare to look away.) Silence dragged out in the distance between them after the mare spoke her part, save for the incessant growl of the wind. She had always been patient by nature, and so she waited, though she did so without anticipation or eagerness. Business was business.
Her ears twitched forward to catch his words when he finally, finally spoke; the wind distorted them into ghostly echoes, but, even if she hadn’t gathered the irritation in his tone, she could see annoyance flit across his features. His accent was strange, and his dialect…archaic. She had no difficulties understanding his words, but they sounded more like words she’d read from one of the aged scrolls in the library than something she might expect to hear aloud. She didn’t spend much time considering his dialect, however, and even less to mull over his words – she had the distinct impression that she’d already made a misstep.
Words drawled coolly from her charcoal lips, though she was still forced to raise her voice over the hum of the wind; she considered moving closer to him, but she opted to keep her distance, for the time being. “Concern for my sake? I’m touched.” Her tone was lighter than usual, though, if there was any genuine humor in her voice, it was difficult to discern. “I’ll state my intentions plainly, then.” Brisk and surgical. “You seem to me a wanderer – if that is the case, I would offer you a place in Solterra. We are always in search of skilled warriors.” Seraphina was neither disingenuous nor opaque; if it was her intent he desired, she would give it to him freely. With that, she receded, her eyes never flitting free of his own as she awaited whatever response he might have to offer.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
She held his gaze, and for that he eased her some owed merit. Many, even back in his own time, had found his gaze disconcerting for it's apathy, for it's similarity to the foggy gaze of a corpse. However he maintained his gaze with hers, as unwilling to look away as she was, though it was far easier to hold her own blue gaze, even if it rang of a similar yet lesser hollowness to his own. However, at last and at length she spoke, surrendering to his demand and stating her intentions shortly. He did not bother to hide his interest in the sharp prick of his ears, in the faint stir of brightness in his void eyes, the slight raise of his head as she extended her offer of home and hearth to him. Yet then...
He laughed, mirthless and sharp, a shattered crystal sound that was barely loud enough to be called a laugh yet rung of humorless amusement and carried on the wind to her. "Thou think I bear the banner of a warrior?" He mocked, walking towards her with grace he did not feel, without the stiffness of his wounds he had shut down the pain on. "Thou doth believe, from a single spar, I harken to the call of war?" He would, if he needed to, but with that resounding hollowness in his chest came a wave of bitterness at the thought of partaking in further battle, of feeling that emptiness at his side and in his heart. He came to a stop before her, ghastly eyes flat as the grave and never once leaving her own. She thought him a warrior... he could laugh further over it, but as swiftly as it came his bitter laughter vanished before he had even moved towards her.
"Thou offer thine home knowing nothing of who I doth be, of what I align to. I applaud thine determination, thine skill, but thou should'st be more cautious of whom thou offer sanctuary to." He warned. Why, he didn't know. It served him nothing to give her such warning, such glimpses of the shadowed raven beneath Vasher's mask. Perhaps he was simply curious as to what she would do with such faint signs, such a bitter foreshadowing. "Alas, I fear thou art but a day late. I come this way to pledge mine services to Denocte and the Night King." He flicked an ear, gaze still locked to hers, impassive and emotionless yet somehow amused. "If thou art from Solterra... I fear we shalt meet as foe once more."
For some reason, it intrigued him to see how this mare rose to his baiting. He did not fear her physically, not with such a glaring injury like hers; if she attacked, he would simply cripple her and continue along his path once more with nary a care for her screams. He was far more interested in seeing if this mare would show skill aside from battle.
I am the villain of this story What else could i ever be?
I STAY EMPTY, I FEEL THE HUNGER
