[Worship] it is perfectly common to say god is fire

[Seraphina]

a terrible angel song / only the dead / or nearly dead / can hear

She can’t seem to pray properly, lately.

Oh – she goes through all the motions. She lights the candles, and the incense, and she bows her head to the altar, and she keeps it bowed until she has recited the prayers that she was taught as a girl, words so familiar that she doesn’t even have to think of them to say them. But not thinking to say them is as good as admitting they no longer mean anything at all; she is sure that they used to, when she was younger, when she wasn’t doubtful. Her childhood was cruel, and violent, and reprehensible.

(It was easier, though. It was easier being the victim entire than- whatever pitiful and terrible thing she has become. She wasn’t allowed to choose. Maybe that was why she was never prepared for choosing, much less choosing wrong.)

She can never pray in silence, because, if she is silent too long – like she is silent most days, when Ereshkigal no longer bothers to speak with her because she knows that she will not respond -, she will begin to think of things. Seraphina will begin to think of terrible things, like dying, or a city of stone, or a battlefield as a girl, or Zolin/Raum/Viceroy (their faces all blend together, most of the time), or flowers, or drowning in a maze or in the sea, or pressed flowers in a letter, or the capitol when it was her city, the only city she had ever known, or everyone that she has ever, even for a moment, loved, and then will come the desperate longing, like black water crashing through floodgates. It’s vile. It’s terrible. She resents it nearly as much as she resents herself, and she knows – and she knows - that, if she lets herself think too much, too long, she won’t ever be able to recover. It will eat her alive. There will be no turning back.

She could cry. Weep. She is sure that she could, but she doesn’t, not often. She can’t remember the last time that she did, though she thinks that she does most nights, in the ugly, marred darkness of her dreams.

In her dreams sometimes she-

She stands in front of the altar, and she is slapped across the jaw. She stands in front of the altar, and it comes to life, and sometimes it is Solis, but sometimes it is quicksilver and blue-eyed, and-

Seraphina stands in front of the altar. There is a lit candle beside of Solis’s golden hooves, and three sticks of sweet-scented incense in a jar of green blown-glass. Ereshkigal is outside, her feathers ruffled as a shield from the biting cold, and she is silent. (Her silence is nearly a punishment, nowadays.)

She looks up at Solis, gold and hard and empty, and she feels like she could sob. (She did sob, when the gods appeared. She thinks it might have been the first time her heart broke, the first time she was ever truly disappointed in anything. She was resigned to the world being cruel, to Solterra being cruel (but always capable of growing better; what a terrible irony), but not the gods. The gods were meant to be – more.) She looks up at Solis, her lips falling half-open, and she doesn’t know what to ask for-

(There is a haunting image of her in the back of her head, in third person, unscarred, collared, hair in tight braids, ordinary but for her title – trailing in the steps of Solis as he spins gold from thin-air and grants little wishes. He asks her what she wants. She doesn’t have an answer.)

“Can’t you…tell me what to do?” Her voice comes out quiet. Barely a whisper.

He doesn’t answer.

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closed. || making it 10 for...good luck? || Nicole Connolly, "I Don't Know Why My Internet Algorithms Suggest Articles About How to Keep Teens in the Faith"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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