She almost drowned, once.
It was years ago, now, in a maze conjured by Tempus. She couldn’t swim. (It was starting to feel as though the gods had never been much good to her.) A monster, this…strange, bulbous thing made of oil or ink, she couldn’t tell, or maybe she just couldn’t remember properly anymore - it chased her over the edge of a jagged, sudden cliff, and she went tumbling down, down, down into a black, silty river. For a few minutes, she thought that she would die. The blackness was inescapable and suffocating. She knew they wouldn’t find her body. She knew that they wouldn’t even look.
When she thinks about it, Seraphina knows that she didn’t really start to believe that she was significant until – Maxence. The first time she’d ever - known - that someone would care if she lived or die was when that Teryr threw her across the canyon, and she bled and bled, bent and broken against the rocks. But she survived. And he saw something in her. No one else had, not really – not beyond something that they could use. Maxence was the man who’d made her his Emissary, his judge and his justice – who’d trusted her wisdom and her guidance. He’d wanted her. No one else had ever wanted her for anything.
She had been a girl – young and naïve and foolish.
Maxence was different. And then he was dead. And then Avdotya betrayed her. And then there was just Seraphina. And then there were other people. There was Eik. Bexley. Vadim. Rhoswen. Eden. Leviathan. Renwick. Acton. Teiran. Jaylin. Caine. All of them lost to her, one way or another – dead or gone or turned traitor, lost by geography or motivation or the dark clutch of the abyss. She is weighing the measure of everyone that she has ever cared for, and she is realizing, as she stares out at the dark flush of the waves crashing against the shore, that almost none of them are left.
She had thought that she was changing. She is alone as she has ever been.
The sky is magnificently terrible. Dark clouds eat up every speck of blue from horizon to horizon, coating it in a melancholy painting of greys: some magnificently and terrifyingly dark and others pale as dust. The light is barely visible, behind some of the softer shades, and it sifts through in a malnourished and desaturated white-gold, and it tumbles down – across the tumultuous waves and the low, rocky ridges of dunes – in patches. The water froths. The waves clamber against the shore, biting at the sand as though they want to swallow it whole, to eat up the beach – and the shore, and the desert, and everything that lies beyond it. She isn’t sure that she wouldn’t welcome it. Oblivion would excuse her from her duty. Oblivion is the only thing that would excuse her from her penance. It would not be absolution. It would be an end.
An end is all that she can hope for. The waves creep closer, towards the dark curves of her hooves. When she closes her eyes and listens, she can hear the roaring river, and the sound of the monster closing in behind her, and there is nothing but Seraphina and the Monster, one little leap between being eaten alive and Oblivion-
(Her hope is smothered beneath those dark waves. She can no longer see the surface – and the rush is all around her, pulling her in every direction at once. She can only hope that she will kick her way to shore, and the longer she is in the water, the more that it becomes a part of her. She wonders what will crawl out of that black river, when this is all over. She wonders if it will look like her. She wonders if it will be her, behind those jewel-bright eyes.)
Her eyes snap open. Seagulls cry out in the distance, swooping into the dark water; she sees squirming fish in their beaks, struggling to writhe their way free. The wind throws them back, sends water flying out of the sea. Salt tangles in her coat, and clumps of sand; the air is overwhelmingly thick and humid, and the smell of the ocean hangs heavy with each gust. The wind threatens to pull her mane from its braids, so she unwinds it herself, letting her long, long white hair fall freely about her chest. The wind tugs it. She knows that it will frustrate her to untangle it, harsh as the salt and the wind must be, but the cool air, bolstered by a wintery chill, feels almost soothing as it runs through it.
She lets it run like the furthest edges of a trail of smoke, washed out to sea.
After Seraphina had almost drowned, she’d taught herself to swim in the Terminus. She wouldn’t dare to go swimming today – this is Kelpie weather, and it looks like a storm is brewing (she is not sure if the booming in the distance is the waves against some far outcropping of cliffs or the roll of far-off thunder) besides. She wishes that she were herself back then, years ago; she wishes that her only trouble was a fear of drowning.
But the world is full of bigger, more terrible monsters, with sharper teeth and fiercer claws. She had always thought that you were only supposed to meet one of those kinds of men in your life – men like Raum and Zolin, or like Viceroy. Men that were not men. Men that had something that was-not-man behind their eyes, that crushed and consumed and broke apart. Men that ruined her. Men that ruined her.
What did it mean that she had met three?
She paces forward, towards the shore, and sidesteps beached jellyfish and tangles of driftwood. Fragmented shells crunch beneath her hooves. She walks until her fetlocks are submerged in the surf, and then she stands and stares out to sea. She does not know what she is looking for, if she is looking for anything at all. “There’s work to do.” Ereshkigal’s voice resounds in her mind. She glances up at where the vulture circles above her, like she is some dead thing. Her wings are buffeted by the wind, but she is no normal vulture – her arc is perfectly spherical in spite of the poor weather.
She knows.
@Boudika || woof this post is dark. she'll brighten up a bit when she isn't just...monologuing, I promise. "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
THIS IS A POEM FOR MONSTER GIRLS WHO HAVE NO STARS IN THEIR SKIN ONLY FIRE AND IRON AND SCALES, FOR THE GIRLS WHO WALKED ALONE INTO FORESTS AND INTO NIGHTS DEEP AND DARK AND ENDLESS IN THEIR EVERLASTING LONELINESS, FOR THE GIRLS WHO DIDN’T EMERGE WITH A CROWN OF GOLD OR A PRINCE INSTEAD REMAINED AMIDST THE TREES AND REFORGED THEMSELVES ANEW
It is so unfair, that from a distance, she looked like him.
It must have had something to do with the clouds and their dishonest light, reflecting from the sea, thin and weak. It must have had something to do with the sea itself, as it delighted mercilessly in its own tricks. Whatever the reason, from a distance, she looked like him. As soon as Boudika saw the small horse in the large sea, there was something off, something misleading—but Boudika kept the warnings at bay, too elated by the possibility that she had found him. They were the same colour of grey, and far off, with the glare of the waves, her stripes could have been dapples. They could have been, in the same way the glancing light off the waves created streaks of light across surfaces. The stranger’s head was dark enough, and sharp enough, to be his. The mane lashed in the wind, white in reality and off-white from Boudika’s hopeful perception.
And the horse was in the water of the shore where she had lost him. How could it not be him? Especially after she had travelled so far to find him? Boudika had been hesitant to travel back to Solterra, where she had first awoken on Novus. There was an ongoing war, after all, with a crazed dictator—or so she had heard. Although it was not enough to make her afraid—how could a tyrant be worse than a war with creatures imperceivable, brilliant, brazen, horrific?—but it was enough to make her cautious. If Boudika were being honest, however, half her hesitation came from her fear that she would not find him; it came from the fear of knowing.
But she had come. And she had come very far, travelling for quite some time. Boudika had run most of the distance, until her muscles ached and her throat ached and her lungs ached. Perhaps she was driven by the need not only to find him, but something deeper—that she believed, somehow, by finding him, she could redeem herself. That is the sensation that welled in Boudika when she saw the mare, mistaking her for someone else. Boudika had found redemption; the promised comfort of her entire life surmounted in one individual, an individual capable of removing her condemnation and replacing it with forgiveness. He had forgiven her. Boudika had known that; he had said as much. But that forgiveness seemed only to exist as he existed; without Orestes’, the weight of her deeds was too much to bear.
Then, of course, there was the tantalising potential to… to be Made. Boudika felt fear at broaching the topic—what would he think, if she were to ask to join him?
That is why she ran, when she saw the mare. That is why she descended the dunes with the elation of a small child, bounding atop the sand to strike at the shoreline with powerful hooves and a streamlined body. Within her rhythmic movements the power of a cavalry charge existed, as though Boudika were the point of said charge, as though all that force, that energy, was now directed forward—
It’s him! It’s him! Boudika had last seen him when she thought she was drowning. When she believed she was dead. And it had been then, and only then, with life escaping her grasp and the darkness closing in, that she had realised how deeply she loved him, how intimately she craved him. It was only after months of separation that she realised her existence, her self, was connected irrevocably to his—
“Orestes—!”
Boudika’s yell cut off abruptly and she came to a stumbling, haphazard stop some thirty yards away.
Boudika was ashamed to admit it was not at first the mare’s appearance that betrayed her identity, but the circling vulture. Vultures were not of the sea—and the stark wrongness of it, the out-of-place nature of the avian… it at once made so much sense, and none at all. Boudika was sent reeling—and immediately an abrasive voice rose within her, are you really so much of a fool? In what storybook would she have found Orestes washed up upon the same shore she had lost him at? In what optimistic, bright, forgiving world? Not this one.
She cleared her throat awkwardly, attempting to disguise the blatant and raw emotion that had been so evident in her voice, her posture, her expression. “I thought you were someone else.” Boudika did not attempt to disguise her disappointment, and allowed the words to fall into a heavy silence afterward, broken only by the waves.
Then:
“Don’t you know, the water is dangerous?” Boudika said it like one would an insult. “There are water horses out there that will sweep you away in a song and eat you alive.”
Boudika herself barely touched the water and at her own words, she stepped out of it, onto the wet sand that sucked at her hooves. Her eyes flicked distrustfully toward the sea.
It had already betrayed her once today. But was that not its nature?
FOR THE GIRLS WHO HID IN THEIR BEDS AFRAID FOR THE MONSTERS LURKING NEAR WHO DREAMED OF SLAYING THE DRAGON ONLY TO FIND THAT THE DRAGON LIVES WITHIN, FOR THE GIRLS WHO AREN’T YOUR PRINCESSES THE GIRLS WHO WON’T BE ANYONE’S QUEEN WHO WILL NEVER HAVE A CROWN OR THRONE AND NOBODY TO WRITE THEIR STORIES DOWN, THIS IS FOR THE GIRLS YOU DON’T KNOW AND FOR ALL THE GIRLS YOU WILL KNOW WHO LEARN TO BREATHE FIRE OVER MIST
BUT IT ALSO REMINDS ME OF TOWNS likely burned to the ground before they were emptied, or at the very least erased from the map. if you're small your best trick is to become invisible. even insects know this: how many generations for a moth to resemble lichen.
In the few, ragged memories that she retained of her mother, Angelie was often telling stories. With the virtue of age and experience, Seraphina often wondered how such a delicate, fanciful creature had survived in Solterra, particularly under the rule of Zolin. (Perhaps she was simply better at hiding her own harsh angles – certainly, as a young girl, before she was Viceroy’s, Seraphina had never thought that the world was particularly cruel.) Some of them were Solterran. Others were foreign. Regardless of the origin, there was a specific kind of story that she always remembered liking, and that was the story of recognition. The weary traveler, after years of trials, finally finds her lover, but he does not remember her; and she weeps, and her tears return his memories, and they find their way home, though their world has changed forever. The world will change, the stories said, but you will not be alone, if you are willing to love enough.
It is those stories that come to mind when she sees a figure cascading over a dune, howling a name - “Orestes-!”
but she is not her Orestes, and this is not a story of recognition. They are just two strangers on a stormy coast, meeting over a mistake. The mare realizes it, too – she can pinpoint the exact moment that the hope withers away in her expression. Bitterness grows up in its place, and disappointment. When she speaks again, it drips from her voice. “I thought you were someone else.”
She doesn’t know how to respond. I know? But that seems cruel. So she lets the waves make up the space between them, and she studies her, with her soldier’s eyes – her powerful physique and cropped mane imply a warrior, and she suspects that those horns of hers would make powerful weapons on the battlefield. Her tail is leonine, and there is something fitting in the comparison; though those crimson eyes are shadowed with disappointment, and, perhaps, a hint of shame, they feel sharp. Seraphina wonders what she is, where she has come from; she would make a good Solterran, in different times.
Now, she wants to howl at her to leave, to run as far as she can – only death awaits on the sands.
And then she speaks. “Don’t you know, the water is dangerous?” There is something to the woman’s tone that she dislikes – it makes her think of a slap across the jaw. “There are water horses out there that will sweep you away in a song and eat you alive.” She looks at the sea like one might look at a coiled snake, ready to strike at your ankles, and steps out of the shallows.
For a moment, Seraphina is quiet. Ill-contained irritation – a sin of Fia’s, lately – curls up in her chest and lingers, biting at her throat. Authority, she has discovered, is difficult to let go; though the silver spent her childhood in a state of blind obedience, she spent just as long as an Emissary, and then a Queen. And the desert nation had never cared for a queen with a collar around her throat – what respect she had finally earned had been won with tooth and claw and a demeanor that was sharper and colder than polished steel. But he had taken that from her, too, and left behind a hooded shadow, a wasting girl with hollow eyes. She can’t blame the woman for thinking her a pitiful little fool.
(And maybe she is. But she knows one thing – she does not fear water horses. To fear them, she would have to fear dying, and she is already dead; Seraphina is dead on the Steppe, covered in jewel-flowers, and Fia, the little flame sprung to life in her place, has no future. Like all fires, she will burn out with her tinder. She has plenty of fears, but, even as a girl, death was never one of them. It was not Solterran. It would have been even less appropriate for a soldier.)
(And, if there was a small part of her that, when the black came rushing for her like a tide, when Seraphina died – if there was a part of her that sobbed and begged and bargained for her life, if there was a part of her that wailed for anyone who could listen to come, not to save her but to keep her warm, so she did not die alone – well, that part of her had died with Seraphina, and Fia didn’t have time to entertain such fragile things.)
She turns her eyes on the stranger, ripping them from the tide, just as Ereshkigal circles low and, with a few great pumps of her sand-stained wings, lands on her back, just between her shoulders. For a moment, her wings remain outstretched, and they could have been the silver’s; but then they tuck in at her sides, and the illusion is gone, as though with the tide. The vulture watches the mare with her beady red eyes, but she does not speak – Seraphina gathers that she is probably just waiting for the right opportunity to strike, but she is nevertheless grateful for her silence.
One less thing to grate at her nerves. “There are more dangerous things in the world than water horses,” she says, finally, her voice a sharp chill against the warm sea air, “and they can still be killed with an arrow through the skull.” And, for her weariness, she would not hesitate to kill one if it came for her – there is nothing flashy about her gift, and certainly nothing beautiful about it, but it is deadly, and that will have to be enough for her. (She has always been a weapon. How long until that last, soft part of her became one too?)
She adds, then, hesitantly, “This might not be the best place to look for your… Orestes.” She knows nothing of this stranger, of course, or the man (she assumes) she seeks, but she knows that, if she is searching for him in Solterra, her efforts will likely be fruitless. “Most people are fleeing Solterra, if they can – or going into hiding. The nation has been overtaken by a monster, and he slaughters – or tortures, or starves – anyone who does not bow to him.” Her gaze darkens, and she looks back towards the sea – away from the city.
She does not move from the water; it continues to lap at her ankles, gritty and warm.
@Boudika || this post sure did take me *checks watch* almost a month,,, and I had it planned out since the night you posted your reply,,, "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
START BY PULLING HIM OUT OF THE FIRE AND HOPING THAT HE WILL FORGET THE SMELL. HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ANGEL BUT THEY TOOK HIM FROM THE LIGHT AND TURNED HIM INTO SOMETHING HUNGRY, SOMETHING THAT FORGETS WHAT HIS HANDS ARE FOR WHEN THEY AREN'T SHAKING. HE WILL LOSE SO MUCH AND YOU WILL WATCH IT ALL HAPPEN, BECAUSE YOU HAD HIM FIRST, AND YOU WOULD LET THE WORLD BREAK ITS OWN NECK IF IT MEANS KEEPING HIM. START BY WIPING THE BLOOD OFF OF HIS CHIN AND PRETENDING TO UNDERSTAND.
Although there is no tale of recognition, the disappointment that spans the the distance between them fills with the unspoken truths of their own realities. It is almost like recognition; it is almost like two shadows meeting.The banished general’s daughter encounters the unseated queen of the desert kingdom. Somewhere there is a story in that, too. Boudika’s hope is withering flowers; Seraphina’s is a dead garden. And perhaps that is what has brought them there, at the cusp of the ocean, staring into the desolate horizon. Perhaps that is what binds them briefly, randomly. Disappointment. Boudika does not know, but the falling pitch of her voice and the dropping fever of her joy mark the two of them as one of the same.
Has life not disappointed them both? Greatly?
Yes. If any girls know of such a sentiment, it would be a queen dethroned, and a military officer betrayed by her own ethos. And that is a chasm between them. It is only by nearing the other mare, by appraising her with hard garnet eyes, that Boudika understands her mistake in its depth. There is a slant to the woman’s shoulders, an abyss that opens in her eyes, an insurmountable and unnamable gauntness that Orestes once wore, a burden, a cross, to his death. It is fate, he had said. That I am the Prince who will lead my people to despair. My destiny was to hold them at the End. To promise them a future they would never receive. It was not that Boudika knew the truth of the similarity; it was not that she recognized Seraphina as the fallen queen she was. It was merely an echo, a shadow, of something she had seen before. And it struck her chest like a drum, and in her bones resounded the old beat of war, war, war.
Descending the dune, nearing the sea at a sore trot, Boudika is determined to dislike the other mare. It is in the way she wears her burden. It is in the way the vulture descends, gifting the silver mare briefly, ironically, a pair of wings. But Boudika recognises the fallen. She recognises them because they are her people, and her resentment for Seraphina is resentment, instead, for herself. She grits her teeth. She feels the storm welling within her, like so many angry waves tossing at the sea-floor. Yes. With all her rage, her sorrow, she could smooth glass and stone. Her disappointment roots in her like a parasite, like a hunger, and she feels a rawness where once there had been strength.
Then the silver woman speaks and Boudika smirks, wryly—the expression smooth, blade-like, mirthless. It was a relative of a smile, but not a smile. Something crueler. Harder. Because Boudika wants to say there are worse things than monsters but doing so would strip the word of its very meaning. There should be nothing worse than a “monster.” But then again, Boudika has spent her entire life believing water horses were the worst thing she would ever face—until she realised how deeply betrayal can cut. How unforgivingly ignorance castrates.
“I appreciate the warning, but I know.” And then, with a softening to her smile, she adds: “There are worse things than monsters.” She cannot help herself. She strips the word of the meaning, because it is perception, perception, perception. The words come unbidden, and she owns them without lowering her head. It is the most truthful thing she has ever said. Because what is worse than a monster? Becoming one, or tolerating one? What makes a monster? Death, torture, power? She doesn’t know. But the Mad King of Solterra, with all his fearsome rumours, does not frighten her. What frightens her is not knowing whether Orestes rots at the bottom of the sea, because of her. The ocean is singing to her. The ocean is always singing, and she does not know if it is crying, or raucous, joyous. It is just a song. Apathetic to her. And her tail flicks and her ears flick and she aches to know what the waves mean when they go hush-shush-shush against the sand and silver mare.
Boudika steps nearer. As it often did, her anger deflates. It has filled her with all the fury of a desert storm and all the brevity of one. Now, she only feels tired, as she enters the sea step by disheartening step. Her attention remains wearily on the stranger and the vulture until she stands knee-deep, with just enough buoyancy that the waves buffet her, force her to stumble and then step this way or that to keep her balance.
Despite her attempts, she does not dislike the other mare. “Is it your city, he torments?” Boudika asks and as she asks it, staring out toward a horizon she cannot reach, she thinks about drowning. She lifts her head into the breeze and it washes over her, and she thinks of how only months ago she climbed from the sea chafed and confused, uncertain as to how she had survived. Her chains had been struck from her ankles and throat; the salt had left her eyes stinging and her throat so raw she could not speak for a week as she wandered, lost and childlike, through Novus.
She asks: is it your city, he torments and as she asks it her mind is hundreds of miles away, on an island that Novus is indifferent to. And on this island she thinks of the Khashran enslaved in the same bonds she had worn. She thinks of them painted gold, all their Princes dead or lost, and all their souls Bound to never be reincarnated. She thinks of Vercingtorix's face when she confessed her love; she thinks of how her next words came out stutteringly, full of righteous fear, "I am not Bondike. My name is Boudika. It has always been Boudika. I am the general's daughter, not his son--" and how he had turned from her and it had been shadows, shadows, shadows. She thinks of how it felt a little like how the horizon looks stretching before her: untouchable. How he had betrayed her. How they had sentenced her to die. How he had sentenced her to die. And Orestes, with his singing. Orestes, bloodied the night she captured him. Orestes, shark-toothed and howling as the gold seared his flesh. Orestes, saying: It is fate. Orestes, reassuring her. You are not meant to die, Copperhead.
The sea is, again, before her. And her heart aches for the genocide she committed. Her heart aches for the suffering of a city full of people she does not know. Her heart aches for her apathy, for her helplessness. For all her training to do good, for years of being a soldier to do good, it is startlingly clear in that moment she has never done a good thing in her life. And she says: "I am sorry."
But it is unclear if she speaks to the sea, or the silver mare behind her. She realises how disjointed the comment is and she amends herself, awkwardly, with a glance over her shoulder. "For your city. I am sorry, for your city." Because there is no question, with how the woman has warned Boudika against the monster.
REPEAT TO YOURSELF: "I WON'T LEAVE YOU, I WON'T LEAVE YOU" UNTIL YOU FALL ASLEEP AND DREAM OF THE PLACE WHERE NOTHING IS RED. WHEN IS A MONSTER NOT A MONSTER? OH, WHEN YOU LOVE IT. OH, WHEN YOU USED TO SING IT TO SLEEP. HERE ARE YOU UPTURNED HANDS. GIVE THEM TO HIM AND WATCH HOW HE PRAYS, LIKE HE IS LEARNING HIS FIRST WORDS.
