CROWNS HAVE THEIR COMPASS-LENGTH OF DAYS THEIR DATE-
TRIUMPHS THEIR TOMB-FELICITY, HER FATE-
Kisamoa had made death. He’d sharpened bones upon blades, carried sepulchers across the wake, enscribed, etched, sketched tombs for his making. Mauna had watched as each of their gods sacrificed themselves, one by one by one, until they were swallowed and consumed by a single, solitary false paragon’s power, by the crowning of treachery, deceit, and dominion. He’d witnessed his mother and her siblings pulled into the reaches, striving to overcome, striving to protect, striving to reach in and pluck him apart – until they too, were just as devoured as the rest. There’d been the other families, brethren, kin, and citizens, screaming for their lives, plunging for portals, for means of escape; and he’d been pushed in amongst them, rescued and liberated, only to fall –
He sucked in a breath, let the chill sink into his veins, pour out his hooves, in the abrupt movement. She didn’t ask him anything more on it, and he went no further.
Wouldn’t.
The pause she took when deciphering her own name made him curious; but the beast was too polite, and she hadn’t done anything rude to him, so he let it go. Callings carried weight sometimes, altered and changed, morphed and warped, scalded and deprived. His mother had been The Mountain That Knows – but never enough to ensure her own livelihood. There’d been scores of them, lacquered and layered like legends, and all of them coming to the same fate.
He lived and breathed in his – to be those peaks and summits, to be the earth and stone, to fly into the void.
Sera; and she’d be right, it bore no measures to him. Not to a youth who’d existed on edges and fringes, hoping for the boundaries to come meet him. A nod was granted and given, and then a brow raised at her insinuations.
What he’d always been searching for.
He stared straight ahead immediately after, as if the surroundings would guide him. “Helovia. I was born in the Dragon’s Throat.” He didn’t allow the hope in his soul to rise up, to brew, to quell, but gods he could feel it stirring, just like every other time. Just like every other moment he thought he recognized a friend, a land, a home.
in the end, the World takes everything. Somewhere else, I am alive still, saying.
The Mors are ever-shifting.
The Mors are ever-shifting, and each morning, the shape of the dunes is not quite the same as it was the day before. In the past, she might have noticed the differences, but nowadays, she finds herself far less attentive, far less wondering. (It matters so little, now that she has found herself frozen, awkwardly suspended in time.) Still - she knows her way from the Oasis to the capital, even without thinking.
It has been some time, she thinks, since she has walked with someone across the desert. Ereshkigal is usually there, but she is so little company that she may as well be alone when only she is present at her side. It doesn’t feel strange, exactly; she spent years accompanied or accompanying before that. It doesn’t feel quite right, either, but she disregards that, pushes her persistent compulsion to all but marinate in her own loneliness down her throat.
She will be relieved, she thinks, when they reach the capital - but not entirely.
The youth’s remark comes with less reluctance than she anticipates. Helovia. I was born in the Dragon’s Throat. Seraphina turns her head - looks back at him over her shoulders, a prickle of recognition in her mismatched eyes.
She is surprised to find the name familiar. “I knew a man in Denocte - the night kingdom, south of here -, once, who was from Helovia.” Perhaps saying knew was too generous; the king that she served locked him up for crimes he didn’t commit, and she was the diplomat who petitioned for his safe return to the kingdom of night, before they provoked another war. “But he – left, or disappeared some time ago. However…” And here is where she trails off, her tone turning thoughtful, and she reconsiders what she knows – what she remembers – of the other courts and their most influential denizens. “I cannot say for sure if this is true, but perhaps you should go to Terrastella, the land of Dusk, once you are settled. I think that you may find someone there.” She can’t remember who. It has been two years, nearly three, and, if she spends much more time considering it, she will also be forced to remember that she has been an outcast nearly as long as she wore an unseen crown on her brow.
This is half-remembered, information scavenged when she was a queen, rather than a ghost, intent upon proper diplomacy – but perhaps (she hopes), it could be of use.
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
CROWNS HAVE THEIR COMPASS-LENGTH OF DAYS THEIR DATE-
TRIUMPHS THEIR TOMB-FELICITY, HER FATE-
Mauna had learned to expect nothing. Then he wouldn’t be disappointed, when memories failed or naught came from his search. Then he wouldn’t be disheartened, when the answers were clear and concise. Then he wouldn’t be surprised, when the ghosts only embedded and infused themselves in his aura, in his soul, and he was the only one that couldn’t let them go. It allowed the worlds to come and go, naught permanent, naught staying, naught to flicker in his wake, to instill an anchor, tie a tether; only bound to the skies, and the neverending sojourns for things he couldn’t, wouldn’t have again.
So he nearly stopped entirely when recognition seemed to pierce through Sera’s eyes, vaguely tilting his head to study, peruse, and try to understand what sparked the notions, the alterations, the semblance – until her words formed, lacquered, and stuck to his skull. His own gaze widened, and his heart lurched, stirred, wires crossing, membrane compiling for strangled, shocked synapses all at once. The surprise stayed rendered on him, until something else bolstered and heightened, tightened around his heart like a noose.
Hope.
Far more than he’d had anywhere else, where the shadows crawled and the unknown hovered, stayed, entranced and bewildered by every other precision. There was someone else out there, and he committed the words to memory, the Terrastella, land of the Dusk – and perhaps because he was young, because he’d spent so long searching, he was indifferent as to who might be immersed there, and only that they were. An existence much like his own once, beseeched and enthralled from a world he thought he’d only know, carry, and forge away when his time had ended.
For the first time in a long, long while, the boy smiled – a juvenile sort of charm dimpling along cheeks, staring at the ground at first as they continued through the sands, the fatigue varnished and garnished away for a few seconds as the possibilities cycled through his head. Something bright, instead of diminished and torn, serpentined its way through his gaze, lifting it back towards her with unmistakable gratitude. The grin remained. “Thank you. That’s…that’s all I need. It’s enough.”For now.
Because they were aspirations and ambitions, rather than dreams.
OF NOUGHT BUT EARTH CAN EARTH MAKE US PARTAKER,
BUT KNOWLEDGE MAKES A KING MOST LIKE HIS MAKER.
in the end, the World takes everything. Somewhere else, I am alive still, saying.
She isn’t prepared, exactly, to feel a jerk of something more like anxious pain than relief when his expression brightens with a sudden, luminous emotion that she recognizes dully as hope. His lips curve up into a smile which is almost childlike, suddenly befitting his youthful, dimpled features, and her heart makes an awkward stuttering movement in her chest, like a clock with a broken hand. For a moment, he is bright and alive, and she can’t help but remember that this, this is what hope does to people. Seraphina cannot help but remember the hopeless expressions of the people that she found while Raum was in power – the beggars on the street, war-orphans, half-starved widows – and how they had looked when they saw the gold-scarred face of Fia, the way that she had told stories of perseverance, of cities that grew back up from their ashes, of battlefields worse than this-
And, with a momentary close of her eyes and a quiet, ghostly exhalation, she recalls a city full of statues and the hungry mouth of a basilisk, a madman who could not allow any other living creature to be happy because of his own misery, and suddenly there is nothing worthwhile about hoping for anything at all. The reality of any situation will always find a way to be crueler than any of her imaginings, she knows.
The boy thanks her, and she wonders if he will still be thankful if she is wrong, or if something has changed. (She can only hope that she was correct, rather than irresponsible.) It is enough, he tells her, for the moment. A part of her longs to hope that is true. She longs to believe that it is enough for hope – however beaten-down and battered - to sustain you until you find something else to live for; and not just for the boy. Perhaps she also longs for the sake of the two lives growing inside of her, and, more selfishly, perhaps she longs for herself. “I only hope,” she says, softly and reluctantly (because she has almost forgotten how to hope for anything much), “that anything comes of it. You can find a guide to lead you to Terrastella in the city, I’m sure, once you’ve gotten settled.”
(She almost offers to guide him herself, but a kick in her stomach suggests that she might not be available when he wishes to leave.)
And she keeps leading him across the dunes – towards the gates of that great sandstone city, a beacon to travelers among the harshness and the cruelty of the desert, burnt and rebuilt and burnt and rebuilt time and time again.
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
Kisamoa had made death. He’d sharpened bones upon blades, carried sepulchers across the wake, enscribed, etched, sketched tombs for his making. Mauna had watched as each of their gods sacrificed themselves, one by one by one, until they were swallowed and consumed by a single, solitary false paragon’s power, by the crowning of treachery, deceit, and dominion. He’d witnessed his mother and her siblings pulled into the reaches, striving to overcome, striving to protect, striving to reach in and pluck him apart – until they too, were just as devoured as the rest. There’d been the other families, brethren, kin, and citizens, screaming for their lives, plunging for portals, for means of escape; and he’d been pushed in amongst them, rescued and liberated, only to fall – 
