And is it over now do you know how pick up the pieces and go home--
She has to wait until night has fallen to avoid the guards.
Seraphina has always been like night – like smoke. There is no fire written across the metallic silver of her coat, just a patchwork of shadow and steel. A snide person might say that she is better crafted for the Night Kingdom than the bright light of Day, an assumption she would likely silence with a sharp, offended glare; she might not be flame, but she is its aftermath or its harbinger, trailing ominously on the horizon for miles to see. It is, then, not too difficult to sneak past them and into the Oasis; it is a large space, and Raum hasn’t managed to afford many guards to patrol it. Yet. But she will still have to be quiet, and cautious, if she wants to avoid trouble; this is not like the night she met with Caine, where the barely-instated Sovereign was still struggling to gain any foothold in the rebellious golden kingdom. It was comfortable, then, even pleasant. Now, her movements are dogged with tension, and she keeps glancing over her shoulder. She could kill the guards – there are only two of them – if she had to. She knows that she could.
But – but they are her people, likely drafted into the new Sovereign’s forces by necessity, and it would break her heart to have to kill her citizens if she could avoid it.
Her mind still grasps at the steel arrow attached to her armor as she creeps along the bank, sheltered by the embrace of massive palm trees and emerald-green shrubs. She is quiet as a ghost; she might as well be a ghost, with her bloodshot eyes and dark circles, with the way that she has waned – no less muscular, but bonier and thinner, and she was a lean woman to begin with – in the wake of her death on the Steppe. Nevertheless, her mismatched stare is fire-bright and alert, and her stride, though wary, is smooth and comfortable, even as her hooves hover several inches over the sand. The silence is a relief; the levitation was an annoyance, at first, and she struggled to control it, but she has come to appreciate its stealth. (She was unaccustomed to sneaking, largely because she was unaccustomed to needing to and had therefore never had to hone her skills, save for on the battlefield. It made her a bit envious of the spies she’d managed to collect so far – she wouldn’t avoid the task, because the numbers of her fledgling rebellion were still so small, but she couldn’t match, say, Caine and his cloak of shadows for evasiveness. But, even if numbers weren’t so low, she likes to find people herself; she knows that she is walking into a war, and maybe it is because she wants to punish herself if – when – something happens to them or maybe it is because she feels like she needs to know every face that she recruits, but, in any case, it pulls at her sentiments. She needs to ask them herself.)
She’d heard rumors that Raum intended to wall up the oasis, and it was this that drove her to find Jaylin with a new urgency; she needed to warn her, and, well, perhaps Isra could help to free her from her palm-bound prison, but only, of course, if she wanted it. (But, she thinks, it might not be safe to stay – no matter how deep the oasis’s waters ran.) Shielded by the waterfall, she draws out from the cover of the trees, shooting an anxious look towards the guards; they are on the far side of the pool, barely silhouettes against the moonlight. They won’t hear her, unless she is – too – loud. A grimace curls across her charcoal lips as she draws the steel arrow free from the thick wraps of her scarf, allowing it to hover in the air beside of her withers; and then, abruptly, she shoots it out across the water, carving up spray. It only just breaks the surface, then hooks, flying back to her side. Seraphina eyes the water. “Jaylin,” she murmurs, lowly, and hopes that the hippocampus will come to investigate the disturbance.
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
04-02-2019, 07:05 PM - This post was last modified: 06-23-2019, 09:07 PM by Seraphina
rulers make bad lovers, you better put your kingdom up for sale
She has not slept for several days now.
It is too dangerous to sleep, when there is a ghost holding the crown and his guards patrolling the Oasis, seeking out any excuse to use the weapons at their side. Worse still, she knows the danger of being trapped here -- knows what a madman will see when he looks upon her, whether as his own weapon or as a vehicle to bear soldiers, and she knows how the ropes would burn against her limbs and the chains would chafe against her jaws as he tried to break her to his will.
Her father would not be here to save her this time -- indeed, there are few who know she exists here, in this aquatic prison, and still fewer she would trust to help.
Truthfully? There are none now who should would trust to be able to help without being harmed themselves. The silver queen lay dead atop the Steppe, after all -- and oh, how her heart had clenched when she’d heard the news, unable to reconcile the idea of the always-too-serious queen in life with the imagery of one in death. She hadn’t surfaced for several days, after she’d heard, except for a few gulps of air -- her mourning had been a rage, deep down in the still waters where even the guards could not hear her scream.
She has lost so many, already -- and she had, foolishly, thought that the silver queen might just have been a constant, a weekly occurrence she could look forward to, a monarchy with a foundation strong enough to stand the test of time. Seraphina had, at least, the heart and the grit to take care of her Court.
She should have known better -- once upon a time, she had been the Queen standing upon what she had thought was a sure thing, and yet--
That had ended only in broken bones and heartache, in the first of Ker’s many disappearances, and she should have known that this would only end in tragedy.
The worst is that she thinks she might have been able to help, were she not stuck here in this thrice-damned prison. Once upon a time, she’d been a healer, the skill passed down from her father, the knowledge learned in a gilded tower.
So she lurks beneath the water with something close to rage and something close to loathing in her veins, as patient as the crocodile waiting for the prey to venture close, and she dreams of all the ways she will drag Raum into the water and drown him, should he come near to her -- of how the blood will billow in the water and how the fish would flee before her, and her smile is full of waiting knives.
A disturbance near the waterfall catches her attention, a slender arrow slicing through the water -- and she fears discovery by the guards, for a moment, before it suddenly hooks around and returns to the land. Intrigued, the hippocampus slides from the rock she had been resting upon, relying on the cover of night and the deep waters to conceal her -- she is entirely silent as she approaches the land, ears pinned back and lips curled in a snarl, ready to bite whichever foolhardy guard had decided to invade her territory.
She breaks the surface of the water in an instant, the breath hissing from her lungs and her lips still curled into a fierce snarl, but there is nothing aggressive about the way the top of her head collides with Sera’s knees when she realizes there is a ghost staring back at her. Instead, it’s an almost reverent sort of affectionate, leaning into the limbs as though to reassure herself that they are solid beneath her touch, and she stares up at the silver queen with all six pairs of eyes shining in the moonlight.
I thought you were dead, She wants to say, but she’s sure Sera has heard it before already -- she is sure she’s not the first that the queen has come to visit.
“I’m glad you’re not dead.” She says instead, folding her knees so that she might stay anchored onto the land, her cheek still pressed against Sera’s knee and unwilling to move away.
If I find your soul do you want it? I see it everywhere, past the death visage.--
As a general rule, Seraphina is not afraid of dying.
Even – or especially – as a child, she was wholly aware of her own mortality. How could it be otherwise? She grew up on the battlefield; rather than fables or flowers, she was raised on blood, on the crushing inevitability and constant fear of death. The inevitability had never gone, but, with time, the fear had trickled away, like water through cracks in a dam.
It is not dying that she fears; rather, it is those things that accompany dying, remnants of a largely solitary (and horribly lonely) lifestyle based in duty, rather than the softer emotions that she has been told craft a life that is worth living. She prefers to sweep them under the metaphorical rug and pretend that she does not feel them, because she knows they will do little more than provoke her to further anguish. (They come creeping in anyways – most often in the darkest parts of the oppressive, empty blackness of the night. Before she had died, she thought them insignificant, or she assumed them the mark of a paranoid mind. Of course her death would be felt; surely she had done enough, tried enough to mean something. Of course she would be given a proper funeral; her people would not leave one of their own, much less their queen, to rot in a field of flowers and upturned mud. Of course, of course, of course. She was not who she was as a girl, an afterthought, an insignificant little slip of silver built up as a cog in some great, terrible machine. She had changed. Grown kinder. Spoken more – tried to mean something.)
(The truth of the matter was that she still means nothing at all – the idea of her was far more significant than she is, and, even then, the so-called silver queen was a largely unmourned, pale shadow. Perhaps it was selfish, to care so much about the reception surrounding the news of her death when a tyrant had taken power in her wake, starving her people and crushing them beneath a steely silver hoof, but still, she aches.)
When Jaylin springs out of the water, all sharp angles and snarling teeth, her first impulse is to jerk back; water splashes against the bright silver of her coat, staining it with drips of gunmetal in the moonlight. She does not move, though – does not shy away. (She wonders why. She is not scared of Jaylin, though her sudden, thrashing appearance was greeted with a jolt of adrenaline that, ultimately, locked her knees and made her stand rigid. Has her impulse become to meet violence – or, worse, death – by freezing? Like a deer in the headlights, she stands stock-still, only to allow a soft exhalation when she realizes that she has been greeted with a gentle brush against her knees, rather than blood and knife-edged jaws.) She is rewarded by a soft touch and an affectionate gaze (much like a lion with its head laid in someone’s lap), with quiet words that she has so rarely heard lately – but she has so longed to hear them. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
It is rare to be greeted with kindness, because the world is so often unkind, and she has become accustomed to it – an apathetic unkindness, at least, which is even worse than a harsh one. She feels a prickling of wet, stinging heat at the back of her eyes, but she blinks it aside. Her work is not done. She cannot break, cannot falter, cannot show the collapsing blackness swallowing up everything inside of her skin; she must look strong and untouched, even if she is not, because, in a world that seems hellbent on taking everything from her, all that Seraphina has is her dignity. The world spirals. She is all that she can control. “Thank you.” Her voice comes quietly, and she bends, just brushing her muzzle to the ridge of the fin on Jaylin’s forehead, rare affection from the silver. I almost died hangs at the back of her throat, but it never makes it past her lips. “I’m glad that you’re alive, too. Truly.” She has seen too many people die, lately – too many people tortured, flung aside, missing. Too many people gone. Seraphina had worried for Jaylin, trapped as she was in the Oasis; she looks at her with a furrowed brow, her mismatched eyes troubled. “…Raum intends to wall up the Oasis. He wants to keep people from the water supply.” Word on the street, word in the letters that Caine has managed to snatch for her, suggested by documents and missives and the supplies she has seen guards gathering.
She has more to say. She is filling in that space with business, as usual – letting plans eclipse the softer sentiments that snake around the back of her mind, distracting herself from the twisting whirlpool of unexamined hurts spin spirals in her stomach with work, always moving forward so that she does not have to think too deeply about the parts of her that are tender and raw, wounds stitched with salt, because, if she does, she knows that she will break, and she cannot break. “I have a friend who can free you, so long as you wish to leave. She has…immensely powerful magic that can create almost anything from anything else, and the aid of a dragon.” She struggles with the words, somehow. (She cannot save herself, or her people, but Isra can, and, much as she wishes them saved, she can’t help but feel a prickling of something like resent – no, bitter jealousy - wedged like a thorn in her skin when she thinks of it. She is too weak, too useless, and the Night Queen seems to her much like the embodiment of everything she wishes she were, everything she wishes she had, and she is no older than her, certainly no more devout, with even less time spent as a ruler. But she is so accomplished. So cherished. So loved, so loving, so fierce and kind and eloquent. Denocte blazed with fury when their queen was taken, and Solterra met its queen’s death with little more than apathy. She saved her. Seraphina knows should not feel so quietly, passively upset, unwound – but she is. She should be grateful, but it aches. She did not ask to be saved.)
But for now, her eyes are on Jaylin. There are so many other things to say - I am organizing a resistance or I almost died alone and broken, and I still don’t think that I know how to put it into words, but, for now, she decides to focus on the immediate.
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
04-25-2019, 09:25 PM - This post was last modified: 06-23-2019, 09:07 PM by Seraphina
She leans into the touch upon her fin like a tamed lion called to hand, and oh, she is so glad that her silver queen is still alive. She does not miss how Seraphina stands still when she bursts from the water, how her queen does not flinch or step away, and she wonders how much of that is bravery and how much of that is the exhaustion that comes with losing your throne -- she knows all too well how it might feel for the woman before her, no matter how little she had been attached to her own crown. Her head cranes up, brushing her muzzle against the bridge of Seraphina’s nose, across the plane of her cheek, a constant reassurance that this is not an apparition that stands before her -- and, perhaps, seeking to comfort the woman who stands before her.
“I thought so,” She thinks of the guards she has seen patrolling the Oasis and the resources contained within, of how they had murmured low amongst themselves and abruptly cut off whenever anyone had come close -- even she had never managed to creep close enough to listen, too afraid of tipping them off to her presence beneath the waters. They had begun to stockpile food here, as well, under heavy guard, and she is not so naive that she could ignore the signs, although she does not expect Seraphina’s next words.
“Dovahkiin?” She hisses out in surprise, the syllables coming to her tongue as a long-forgotten memory -- of staring up at Valyrian as she had painstakingly explained each word in halting common-tongue, determined that her child would know their heritage when it became clear that she and her child would be seperated, as Acheron had done his best to keep the language alive those long days locked up in the tower -- and her head cocks to the side in surprise, the main set of eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“Or -- Tahkiin, the small ones? Is that what you mean?” She has not seen a true dragon since she and her mother had been separated -- only the strange pygmy dragons that seemed to inhabit each land, or the wyverns who were cousins but not quite kin. She had found Linette, but her sister was only a halfbreed like her, not quite dovah -- they did not count, not really, except for where they did in the dragon’s endless dance of survival.
She heaves herself further from the water, hooves scraping at the rocks and the delicate fins along her stomach tearing slightly from the friction, but she barely notices. “I would like to be freed,” She agrees with a backwards glance over her shoulder, her lip curling towards the still waters of the Oasis. “I have been a prisoner far too often in my life -- I am tired of it. Even my crown once felt like a prison. I would wish to fly again, but I do not think that will happen -- so I will settle for the freedom of movement instead.”
Perhaps she might even be afforded the chance to hunt down the witch who had stolen her child.
“I can -- help, once freed. My father taught me how to mend wounds, how to treat ailments. I would be honored to do so for you.”
But how many of death's teeth have I stolen? It doesn't have any left.--
Her presence is a comfort.
Seraphina has lived a life that is largely devoid of touch, much less touch that is soothing. When Viceroy came to her, he was always violent; when she touched the other child soldiers, it was for the sake of sparring; when she met other soldiers on the battlefield, their touch was meant to end with their death or hers. For some time, she resented it, but eventually came to appreciate it – rarely – from the few people she could trust. Eik or Bexley, most often, but some rare others, so long as they never touched her around the throat.
Jaylin’s muzzle brushes her face, close to the curve of her jaw, but she does not flinch away as she might have when she was younger. The collar was gone; she ripped it away and left it to rot with Seraphina. She does not move. She does not even tremble, instead allowing her lashes to hang just a bit lower over her bloodshot eyes, allowing a sigh to escape her muzzle. She tries to relax, but she remembers the guards – just on the other side of the pool.
(They are still so young. She does not want to hurt them.) “I thought so,” Jaylin says, confirming what she already knows. Seraphina’s stomach turns at the thought of the hippocampus imprisoned in the Oasis, awaiting whatever Raum’s soldiers might do to her if they found her, and they were bound to find her. The waiting must have been sickening, she imagines, like the sick anticipation before a battle.
When she mentions Isra and her dragon, Jaylin’s eyes go wide, and she speaks a word that Seraphina does not understand. “Dovahkiin?” She tilts her head, blinking in confusion; she catches kin, but she wonders if it means the same thing as the word she knows. The hippocampus’s front eyes narrow in suspicion, then, and she inquires, “Or – Tahkiin, the small ones? Is that what you mean?” Seraphina shakes her head firmly, her mind drifting to Fable. He was still growing, from what she’d discerned (he was not nearly so large as Isorath’s dragon had been), but he was certainly no pygmy dragon. “A – large one, from the sea. Not one of the pygmies. He is still young, but I think that he will have wings that blot out the sky when he is older.” She almost shudders at the thought but maintains her composure. She has grown up in a land of sandwyrms and teryrs, but the thought of facing a creature like a dragon (though she never expects to fight Fable) would be enough to give her pause. “Dovahkiin – is that what you called them?” Her thickly-accented tongue slides awkwardly over the foreign word, and she bites back the urge to wince. She has never taken well to foreign languages. “I would like to be freed,” Jaylin says, then, and Seraphina nods, relieved. Before she can reply, the hippocampus continues, tossing her head over her shoulder to look back towards the Oasis. “I have been a prisoner far too often in my life -- I am tired of it. Even my crown once felt like a prison. I would wish to fly again, but I do not think that will happen -- so I will settle for the freedom of movement instead.” “Then we will free you,” Seraphina says, and her voice is a promise – but then she pauses, considering the rest of her words. “You were a queen, once? You…flew?” It occurs to her that, though she has met Jaylin here many times, and spoken to her far more than many other citizens of Solterra, she knows very little about her; she cannot imagine her with wings, for the presence of her fins, but she can almost see a crown on her head, for the way she carries herself. “I can -- help, once freed. My father taught me how to mend wounds, how to treat ailments. I would be honored to do so for you,” she says, then, and Seraphina feels a prickle of something – warm. Relief. Or the sensation of being touched; she has become so used to being hurt or betrayed or broken that she sometimes forgets simple goodness, until it is offered. “I would appreciate that more than you know,” she replies, and does not attempt to hide the soft waver in her voice. “We have so few healers in Solterra – and even less, now that Raum is in power. The sick and the wounded will need help desperately.”
She does not want to think of the violence she knows will come.
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 had known what awaited her upon her capture, but she had not fretted -- it was not in her nature to tempt fate so. She had only silently strengthened her resolve, beneath the murky and deep waters of the Oasis, that should she be captured, it would be only after she had taken out as many guards as she could in the process.
If she could drown Raum as well, that would be even better.
Her muzzle comes to rest against Sera’s cheek, and the dragon hybrid closes her eyes, soaking in the comfort of contact when she is finally reassured that the Sera standing before her is real. Perhaps the worst aspect of her imprisonment is the skin-hunger growling deep in her bones, how isolated she has been even with the previous travelers that had stopped for a chat or to trade gossip with the curious-looking hippocampus.
(She does not remember the ones who had jeered, or who had turned away in disgust. She had learned long ago to filter them out.)
“Yes, Dovahkiin -- Dragon-born.” She pauses, pensive, sifting through the memories of her mother until she finds the word she’s looking for. “He is Dovahokaaz. My monah would tell me stories when I was young.” Valyrian had been neutral about the Dovahokaaz, had admitted she knew little of the dragons who resided beneath the ocean waves, and it had taken her more than a few moments to even remember how the word should roll from her tongue in the dragon-tongue.
For a moment, she does not reply to the question about her crown, nor about her wings -- she is busy fighting back the pang of regret that sits deep within her chest, that draws aching from her ribcage whenever she thinks about all the lives she has lived in her years. She has gone from a daughter of war, to a naive wanderer, to an overwhelmed queen -- she has lost her crown, has watched two mates disappear, has discovered that she is still that wanderer from before but a little less naive now. The thought of Ker does not ache as much as it once did -- she is still certain, in the deepest corners of her heart, that her true queen will find her way back, “Myself and my first mate, yes. We ruled a place called the Iron Valley, in a land far from here where rosebushes grew like grass.” She sighs, soft as a whisper, and her gaze is shadowed when she looks up at the silver queen before her. She isn’t sure what hurts more -- the thought of her mate, gone into the wind without a trace, or perhaps the loss of her wings and her daughter to the desperation of a worried mother she had also called mate.
It is perhaps cold of her to think, but their daughter had been sickly, and if she had not survived, they could have attempted again. Even so, there had been the potential for her to save her daughter without the interference of the sea-witch -- except that Daeva had stolen her daughter away on the first morning of her life, before she could have told her this, and it had been in the search for her daughter and her mate that her wings had melted away. She had been tumbling, free-falling down into the water of the Oasis, and there had been no wings to save her -- only strange fins and the realization that she was trapped.
That, perhaps, hurt more than the midnight visit from the witch, where she had stood upon the shore and taunted her with all the things she had lost. She had learned that her daughter was alive, however, even if the witch had not answered her questions about her mate.
Ker, at least, had the good sense to realize a sea witch was not the first answer to the question of a foal surviving, and sometimes she wonders if she had been with Daeva for love or because she had feared being lonely.
She thinks she might know the answer, now that she is older and wiser than she was.
“I was born with the wings of a dragon, yes.” She wonders if Sera will put the pieces together -- the strange eyes, the many sharp teeth, the way there is something feral about her even now, as she rests at the silver queen’s side -- and she wonders if it will change how the warrior will view her. “I was cursed into this… form,” Her nose wrinkles in disgust, casting a glance backwards towards the fins that rise from her back and crest -- nothing like the sharp spines that had once adorned her, and she had even lost the spikes along the sides of her face. She is still lost within this skin, even after so many months, and she thinks she will never entirely grow accustomed to it.
She hopes she will not have to, and the thought of the witch’s blood in the water has her teeth bared in anticipation.
“--but even in this form, I can serve Solterra’s weakest. I have yet the strength for that.”
There were once jaguars everywhere around here. There will be animals in your deaths, won't there?--
There is something faraway in Jaylin’s eyes. Within them, she sees another place, another time, people who are long-gone; it occurs to her that she does not know how old the hippocampus is. Older than her, she thinks, though she does not know by how much. More often, there is something in her that seems younger, from her manner of speech to her mischievous way of addressing the oasis’s visitors. Now, she wonders if that isn’t the mark of the age difference between them – her seriousness an inability to process pain and live past it, Jaylin’s more jovial demeanor (or something like it) a sign that she had lived through it. “Yes, Dovahkiin – dragon-born.” Jaylin’s voice stirs her from her thoughts. She blinks at the hippocampus, abruptly stirred back to reality; there is something melancholic in her gaze, and it cuts deeply. “He is Dovahokaaz. My monah would tell me stories when I was young.” Monah – she assumes it means mother. (She wonders what it would be like to remember her own. She knows that Angelie told her stories, too, in the way that someone knows an irrelevant fact; it is just knowledge, without meaning anything.) The words roll of Jaylin’s lips in a way that she cannot hope to imitate, with her thick accent, but she appreciates the sound of them. It speaks of a world she has never seen, that she will never see – beyond the residue. Beyond the speech, or the figure in front of her.
(When she was younger, she wanted to explore. Like her father, her mother had said. Some man she’d never met. She’d figured out, eventually, that he probably wasn’t a good man, but he was a traveler. She hoped that was her only inheritance from him – that, and all her silver.) “Dovahkaaz,” she repeats, tasting the word on her tongue. “You’ll have to tell him, when you meet him – I do not think he knows much of other dragons.” She can’t be sure, but Fable looked like he was a young dragon, and, if he was young, she supposed that there was the possibility he was hatched by Isra. She doesn’t know, though. She only knows that he doesn’t seem like the other dragons she has met – there is something about him that is less bestial. “Myself and my first mate, yes. We ruled a place called the Iron Valley, in a land far from here where rosebushes grew like grass.”
She lingers over her words, for a long moment, and she doesn’t know what to say – to the longing in her voice, to the admission of her former crown, to a first mate that clearly wasn’t still here…and the way that first implied there was more than one. Surely, she couldn’t be that much older than Seraphina, though she was certainly older. How much had she lost in such a short time? “It sounds beautiful,” she says, sincerely. Seraphina hasn’t seen many rosebushes in her life, but she knows that she has seen some in Dawn, so she decides to imagine that this Iron Valley looked a bit like it – but, with a name like that, and a queen like Jaylin, she is not sure that it could. (Too many sharp edges.)
And then comes another revelation. “I was born with the wings of a dragon, yes.” She looks at her, with her strange eyes and her sharp, sharp teeth, and, for the first time, she wonders if she was only born with the wings - she can hardly imagine her in flight, with a tail like that, but perhaps she hadn’t always had the tail. Perhaps she hadn’t always been a horse at all. “I was cursed into this… form.” She sounds displeased, and the wrinkle of her nose further emphasizes the point. Seraphina wonders what it would be like, body twisted into something that was not your own – to not be yourself in your skin. “A dragon…” Her voice is dull with surprise, normally infallible composure minutely fractured because the statement catches her off-guard; she has heard stories of horses that started as one thing and became another, or horses that began as horses and became something else entirely, like Florentine, but somehow the concept is still hard to visualize. For everything that she has learned, Seraphina is naïve. “How were you cursed? Who cursed you?”Can I help you break it? is an implication, not stated outright – but she would. She would do anything for her people, she thinks, absolutely anything-
And she still stops short of letting the word friend cross her mind. Not now. She can’t. It’s too fragile, too – painful. “--but even in this form, I can serve Solterra’s weakest. I have yet the strength for that.” Jaylin, a noble thing, a creature that could heal – for her teeth and (metaphorical) claws, and the sharp fins-like-spines that ran the course of her back. “I have no doubt that you can,” she says, immediately, “and I thank you for it. It’s…” Seraphina chokes, stumbling over her words for a fraction of a second, and she looks away, quieting abruptly. “In the capitol, it’s awful. People are starving in the streets - children are starving in the streets. He’s sunk an entire ship of people for no reason but his own amusement, and he…” She sucks in a low, shuddering breath. This is not new to her – this is what Zolin did, too. But she could never have stopped Zolin. She’d never lived with anything but Zolin, and now she had, and she’d really thought that she could make something better of Solterra. “…he locks away or tortures anyone who dissents.” But the sands were beginning to feel like a vicious cycle, and one that she cannot break. “…we need all the help that we can get.”
Much as it hurt her pride to admit it. She’d have to speak to Somnus, and to Asterion – Isra, of course, was already in the city, or she had been.
But it hurts her to sink so low all over again. Memories of the Davke attack still burn in the back of her mind, mingled gratitude and pain from being brought to her knees to beg from aid. Solterrans didn’t beg - it was not their way.
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
07-01-2019, 11:09 PM - This post was last modified: 07-01-2019, 11:10 PM by Seraphina
Her tail swept through the water, the briefest of motions as she looks towards the silver queen, as she considers everything that she has learned of Fable and Seraphina, of the desert that surrounds her and the tyrant on the throne. These were dark days, and there could be no light at the end so long as Raum stood on the throne, and yet -- and yet, here there were dragons, here there were the remnants of her people and their cousin-species. “I know little of the dovah myself,” She murmurs, and there is no mistaking the sadness there, the tinge of regret that she should not have grown up amongst the people of her mother like her sister had been able to; it had not been safe for Valyrian to bring her oldest daughter home, not when she would be forced to reclaim her territory and her rank, not when Jaylin would become a target for those who wished to keep her from doing so.
The thought of her old home is bittersweet, as gorgeous as the roses and as sharp as their thorns -- oh, how she missed her old home sometimes, despite the strange way of the heretic herd, despite the way she had never quite fit within their ranks even as their queen. “It was absolutely gorgeous, especially in the spring when the peaks would still be covered in snow and the valley would be overrun by roses. You would smell them long before you came through the mountain pass.” It had been, perhaps, the easiest to defend strategically as well, with only a mountain pass for those born without wings to access the valley where the herd itself had resided. And yet, her downfall had come from within, from a herd member she had thought she could trust, even if they were not friends.
For a moment, the fins along her neck flare as though a warning, a gleam in her eye akin to fire sparking into life when she is asked about her curse, about the way she has come to be here.
“My second mate and I had a daughter. She was beautiful… and she was born sickly, enough that we were not sure if she would survive the night despite my best efforts to heal her. My mate… she panicked, and while I slept that night, she took our daughter to a sea witch. I do not know what deal she made, what occured -- when I left in the morning to seek them out, I found myself falling from the sky into the Oasis, and my wings had turned into fins.” She has spent so much time here since then that she thinks she might know every inch of the Oasis, every rock and every creature within the waters. “The witch -- she came one night, in the form of a land-horse. She told me that my mate was foolish, and that she is now dead, and that my daughter was now hers. That I would be trapped in here forever.”
When she shows her teeth, it is not a smile, could not ever be mistaken for a smile with those sharp knives displayed the way they are, ready to slice into flesh should she be given the chance. “She was mistaken. I will escape, and I will hunt her down to the ends of the ocean if I must, if it is the only way I will get my daughter back, and I will rip her throat out for ever daring to believe she could take my daughter and my mate from me and still survive.” There is no room for doubt in her voice, only the cold surety that what she has spoken of will come to pass, that the witch will feel her teeth on her throat in the last moments of her life, and that her sweet Varian would be able to come back home with her.
“There will always be those who seek to oppress the weak, because there is something inside them that seeks the fulfillment of their empty souls.” Despite the anger of her previous words, there is only kindness when her muzzle brushes across Seraphina’s knee, an attempt at comfort in such trying times. “Solterra is strong, and the sands do not forget that strength, only bide their time until the moment is right. There will be a time where Raum is only a distant memory, and his atrocities will serve as a reminder and a warning for the next foolish tyrant who dares to challenge the desert.”
