come, come, come, come.
what is done cannot be undone.
Y
ou are hurt.
"I am always hurt," said Senna, mockingly.
And you are speaking like him again. The white gyrfalcon perched atop Senna's shoulder cracked open her cruel yellow beak in a cruel yellow caw. The nobleman's answering silence was met with a black-eyed apathy more feigned than felt.
Nestor could feel Senna's misery as if it were her own; yet what was it to her? She found him displeasing when he got like this. She did not know him when he was a feeling creature, because he was a thinking creature, utterly and fully — and falcons disliked hypocrisy.
Snapping her beak at his ear in a vicious display of hunger, Nestor leapt off of Senna's shoulder and winged up into the cotton-blue sky. Fix yourself before I come back. He was leaving a trail of bright blood after him in the harshest stretch of the Mors. No cacti stubbled these sands, nor rattlers or fat brown mice. Nothing but teryrs and wyrms and skulls filling in for tumbleweeds.
She would not be surprised if she returned to a pile of bones, licked clean by a desert-wandering cannibal.
Yet, what was it to her?
Shrieking wickedly, the falcon's white wings cut through a thick cumulus cloud, her parting words a singsong in Senna's head.
I should have ate him when I had the chance. A nightingale with a scarlet throat — how exotic!
* * *
What would Zofia say if she could see him now?
You have made a ruin of yourself. Her anger would be righteous; an echo of her brother's, his blood something she could never wash out. She saw Zolin in the sheen of her goldenrod eyes, in the swell of her Hajakhan brow; in the deepest river currents of her most secret desire for possessing and destroying beautiful things.
In repentance, she had lived in the most miserable way she knew how. She had been good, despite her unwavering belief in the evil of her birth — her greatest sin one committed whilst in the womb. She had been light, when all she had ever wanted to be was shadow. (By choosing him, she had sealed her fate. He was shadow enough to drown them both.) Sometimes, she would descend into a fit of silence so deep he feared she would never leave it, and wander trancelike through the castle for days. At night he would tell her stories from his rotten childhood; come morning he would wonder if she even knew him.
A Hajakhan's fatal flaw, Senna had discovered, was their obsession to break every beautiful thing they saw. For Zofia, it was herself. For her brother, it was everyone else.
You have made a ruin of yourself. Sometimes, he feared he could no longer recall the sound of her voice.
* * *
So you wish to die. Is that how it is? Little brother, you are more morose than I had ever thought you capable of.
A cool touch on his forehead, withdrawn quickly. The searing pain of carelessly poured iodine sizzling through pus-filled wounds.
As my parting gift I will bind your wounds for you, like I have done since you were a mewling kit.
A languid laugh. The smell of clean linen bandages, snapping in the wind. The sensation of losing more blood through creative bandaging. Water is forced down his throat; even in sleep, he laps it up like a dead man resurrecting.
Do not forget my kindness, Seneca. A silver scimitar slick with polish is slipped back into place at his hip. For you know I always come to collect. If you can spare the time, beware the Lion.
A meditative silence. It seems he is more determined than I had predicted. It makes one wonder, if Father had promised him the throne.
* * *
In the black and frigid hours of a desert dawn, Senna awakens to the keening wail of a teryr.
It is not a fully grown one; years of living amongst the desert-borne has taught him that matured teryrs spoke in a clicking language of tongues. And that matured teryrs rarely make the mistake of alerting their prey to their presence.
He draws himself to his hooves unsteadily, unsheathes the scimitar hanging at his bandaged hip. Solovey had come in the night; Senna's lip curls in a weak attempt at annoyance. He would recognize the nightingale's horrific bandaging in future lifetimes.
At least the blood has coagulated.
With the sun a copper rim at his back, Senna picks up what scant belongings he had procured at the Deluminian docks, sweeps on his traveling cloak, and takes into the sky. The Vitae Oasis is near, a half-day's flight south according to the star maps he had traced by moonlight the night before.
He flicks a crimson wing over his eyes, clearing away the sand. Nestor can find him at her leisure; he had little time to wait for her to fill her stomach with snakes and exotic nightingales. (And — his brow twitches — he is almost certain Solovey would let her swallow him, just to know how it felt.)
He arrives at the Oasis near nightfall, collapsing like a worshipper to kiss its silken surface.
Memory blooms a rash. I scratch to bleed. History is a dirty ocean. And I am dangerous with thirst. ☼
“Mother,” Diana says, without looking at her, “there is an injured man at the Oasis.”
If she didn’t know better, she might have accused her daughter of lying to try and distract her from her annoyance. She had snuck out again, and she had caught her following a pack of wild jackals, singing along with their high yips and howls. (Diana does not sing like any normal girl. Whenever she does it, Seraphina swears that the sound should come from some other creature’s throat.) She’d sneaked off again, and of course she had been upset about it, though that barely seemed to faze the girl. She had stared her right in the eyes for the entire lecture, two chips of even blue set into the polished stone of her face, and she had seemed more bored than anything by her anger, by her concern. Mother, she’d said, finally, you know better than to worry for me, but what Diana doesn’t understand, or can’t, is that she always does, and she knows that she always will, but she had given up on arguing with her eventually. She loves her daughter. She loves her daughter, and the cruelest thing that the sun god had ever done to Seraphina – and he had done a great many cruel things to her, and allowed even crueler ones to happen – was putting pieces of something into Diana that she could never hope to understand.
She doesn’t know how Diana knows, though they are not so far from the Oasis now, but she knows that she is telling the truth. She also knows that Diana does not care, but she knows that she would care, and that is why she is telling her, which is the closest thing to love that her daughter seems to know how to show, most of the time. She gives a nod of her head and turns towards the Oasis.
Ereshkigal, perched between her shoulders with her claws curved so deeply into the leather of her armor that she can feel their press on her spine, gives a low, unsettling rumble of laughter, but she says nothing at all. Diana skips along behind her, eager for the excuse to stay out just a bit longer, and she swears that she is humming, though the sound can barely be differentiated from the sound of the wind – barely any, tonight – across the sand.
The smell of dried blood and pus and grime and sweat and something else, something tangy – iodine, maybe, crisps of it, the aftertaste – hits her, hard. (Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Diana wrinkle her nose.) But she is not prepared to choke down a sudden wave of nausea, a sharp and red-hot jab of hate – like the scrape of claws across her face, or the press of a knife drawn from her sternum down her stomach, or the lash of one of Viceroy’s whips across her shoulders – that she feels tangibly and rolls around in her mouth like a marble under her tongue, like a language she’d forgotten but recognized the taste. It lingers in her jawbone and throbs, trails spiderweb-fingers up the side of her mouth; and still she swallows it down, like an impulse to bite, because she always does. She swallows it down, and she curls it in on itself, and she tucks it away somewhere in her breast, but she feels it take root like a seed to bloom or a wound to fester.
Her mismatched stare rests on Senna, and, for a moment, a smolder of embers sparks somewhere behind her eyes; but she stamps out the hot coals, leaves a trail of smoke.
He looks awful. It’s uncharacteristic.
Yes, he looks terrible - split open at every seam and poorly-bandaged for it, covered in grime and sand and sweat and the ooze of dried blood and sick (infection?), his tightly-bound hair left clumped and ragged and loose, his pose weak with ache and blood-loss and something like defeat. There is a scimitar at his hip, and somehow his wings and backwards-curving hook of a horn are intact, and there is a part of her that is nearly curious about what trouble he has found himself in this time, because Senna is a man of many means, but he rarely does anything himself; it is another reason why she dislikes him. Diana leans between her legs, unfazed by everything but the smell, and, really, why would she be? Seraphina still remembers the way her heart lurched in her chest when her daughter told her, idly, that she had led a slaver into a nest of sandwyrms when he tried to catch her, precious thing, and she’d watched as they tore his limbs off. (“It took him a while to die,” she murmured, strangely serene, staring off at a teryr as it spiraled above the ridge of a distant dune. “I didn’t realize that anyone could live so long with all their limbs pulled off – I thought that the blood loss would kill him quicker.” She yawned, sun glinting off the pearl-white curve of her teeth, and she pressed her cheek into the curve of her mother’s shoulder, and Seraphina couldn’t find any of the right words to say.)
She doesn’t have to be rid of Diana, she knows. Even if Senna has a scimitar, she could snap his neck without giving it much thought; if he so much as drew his blade, she knows, with a shudder, that she could kill him for it. She also knows that children are one of Senna’s few sympathies. Not enough to be kind to them – not enough to intervene if they are broken, if they are starving in an alleyway, if they are rotting in their own sick, if they have a collar wearing a scar around her throat. Still. She knows that he would not hurt one directly. She would still rather keep her daughter as far away from that snake as possible. Diana is precious, and strange, and blessed, but she is still a child, with a child’s naivete, if not a child’s sympathies. It would be better if he had never even seen her face.
She presses her nose to the curve of her daughter’s hip, breathing in sweat and sand and molten gold – sometimes she swears that Diana smells the way she remembers the sun, that indescribable burst of light and heat and sharp edge that she can’t compare to anything else – and, with a soft sigh, she says, “Go home, habibi. Properly, this time, or I will not let you out for a week; and, if your brother is worried, tell him that I will be home before the sun rises.”
Diana rolls her eyes – she just catches the movement, as she draws back – and purses her lips, looking as though she’d quite like to argue with her, but instead she heaves out an unhappy whine of “Fine,” and dances a step or two back, the gold press of her hooves touching the sand without so much as disturbing the grains. She shoots one more curious look at Senna around her mother’s side, craning her neck to see around her, and she sees her eyes narrow and her lips curve unhappily at what must be the scimitar – good girl, smart girl -, and she thinks that Diana would probably rather stay with her, because she has always liked protecting more than she has liked being protected, but, finally, like a sandwyrm retreating back into its den, she recedes back across the sands, though not without another suspicious look or two over the slender curve of her shoulders. She would rather go with her, but, on occasion, Seraphina forces herself to concede that there is almost nothing in the desert that could hurt Diana unless she let it, and the shifting of Ereshkigal’s taloned weight about her shoulders suggests that the demon has every intention of following her besides.
It is only when Diana is nothing but a dark fleck on the dune-curve of the horizon that Seraphina looks back at Senna. She forces her jaw to set, swallowing down an impulse that Ereshkigal would rather encourage (she feels a pulse in the back of her head, like the start of a migraine, which she has learned to interpret as “I would rather like to peck his eyes out and devour them”), and she turns to the Oasis, striding slowly and silently across the sand. There is no wind, but the unbound length of her white hair trails and twists like a nest of serpents in her wake, but she remains silent even as she steps into the water, the press of her hooves into the silty bank too slow and deliberate to provoke much of a splash.
The water is cold. She has never had much of a tolerance for it.
She won’t hurt him. She won’t - she won’t, even though the impulse lies dormant in the tension locked under her jaw, because she looks at him and she sees the bloody stain of not one tyrant but two, two that beat her and broke her and starved her people and reduced her kingdom to ash. (And there had never been any closure, with them. No closure with their deaths. Solterra ticked on like the hands on a clock, and it did not change, and she did not stop them; she did not even kill them. Would it have been cathartic? She’ll never know.) She won’t hurt him, of course. He never did it himself. He only allowed it, enabled it, aligned himself with it; and when he’d wanted her dead, he’d never done it himself, either. She won’t hurt him, even if he almost certainly deserves some kind of justice, because she knows better than to believe that justice is often done, and she knows that, if you wish for a certain kind of peace, you cannot go prying eyes out in exchange for eyes forever; Ereshkigal lingers a second too long on her shoulders, her dark form half-hunched and her bloody eyes fixated on his form, and her toothy smile curves up into a grin, but, if she could offer any assurance that justice could be done, she doesn’t, and she is very quickly gone.
She won’t hurt him. She won’t hurt him, even though there is that impulse to do something horrible, to catch him in her teeth and drag him even lower – to snap his jaw, or break him at the knees, to pull Alshamtueur from its hilt and drag those gashes out a bit longer, carve him open shallow and painful. She won’t hurt him. She won’t, and she knows that she won’t; but there is a part of her, a shiver of her that she represses, because she never really wants to hurt anyone and she knows it (it has always made her sick, and she knows it), a part of her that hopes that he thinks that she might, a part of her that hopes that, for a moment, he feels a certain pulse or a bloom of fear that is even a fraction of what she has been made to feel.
No. She won’t hurt him. She’ll help him, she'll save him – she’ll save him like an iron blade. Maybe he doesn’t know what that means, but she does. She does.
As she begins to unravel the bandages messily wrapped about his wounds and sweeps the cloak from his shoulders, her touch is tender in all the worst ways. She is cold-eyed, the steel curve of her lips very nearly resentful, and, at first, she does not say a word; but she unwinds each strip of pale cloth carefully, gently, too feather-light to cause him any further pain. The scarf around her neck uncurls like a snake, bends gold and weather-worn in the moonlight, and she dips it into the clear water of the Oasis once, then twice, and pulls it back to wring. (She does not watch him, not even the scimitar at his hip. Her eyes linger instead on the droplets of water that fall from the twisted length of cloth and disturb the surface of the Oasis below, pale and heavy under the stars as a shed of full moons.) She draws it back, then, and begins to dab at every inch the dried blood caked across his skin with the soft rolls of fabric, and, absently, she sweeps her glance along the bank, taking inventory of the plants growing on the edge of the Oasis. It is summer; she’s sure that a few would be good for blood loss, and then to fight off infection, and then to numb pains. “Surely your time in Solterra has taught you how to wrap a wound,” she says, unblinking, studying each gash on his frame and tracing it with her eyes, “Senna-of-House-Hajakha.”
@Senna|| hello have a LONG post ||here
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
