AVDOTYA
they have achieved nothing
altered nothing
and will die for n o t h i n g
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they have achieved nothing
altered nothing
and will die for n o t h i n g
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She has struggled to find reasons to leave Elatus Canyon. Her mind is busy, far too busy to concern itself with the meaningless tasks that await her in the Capitol. Indeed, Avdotya is busy. She is alone and she is angry, brimming with a venom so hungry that it damn near drips from her chapped lips - but hers is a poison that is labeled with the name of a man she marks at the top of her list. She holds that name close to her savage heart, ready to rip into it and swallow it whole as she has done with everything else that’s ever stood in her way. In this case, something - someone - has been so wrongfully stolen from her... now it is only right that she collect the debt Raum owes her.
Her sister is dead under his rule. The last of her family is gone. What is it that he holds dear, who can she take from him as repayment? A life for a life.
This is the question that keeps Avdotya awake; however, she keeps herself busy with other things. She’s been looking, hunting. Not for what a king's empty soul cherishes, but for a once dead queen she hears rumours of. Whispers, many of them if one can find the right mouth. She lives, they say, the queen lives! And the viper laughs. She laughs a terrible laugh that is not at all graced by the glowing fingers of joy. It is rasped with jagged nails, made hoarse and dry and utterly unpleasant. Seraphina lives. Of course she does, how could Avdotya ever be so foolish as to believe that a crow could kill a queen.
But she wants to see it for herself, so she seeks her out. She tracks her like prey, following tracks and watching from far off places, but is it really her? Is she actually alive? The woman curses the nerve-gratingly large amount of gray horses in the world. The white stripes, though, they are distinct and particular in the way they crawl up up and around her body even in spite of the clothing she dawns. She stands out to one who once served as her regent. They hold Avdotya’s blazing eye and she decides that this mare is worth risking a moment of potential stupidity - she could always slit her throat if she was proven incorrect.
So she slips out of the shadows, she unveils herself to the brutal heat of the sun and steps into Seraphina’s path. She looks at her, thoroughly, up and down and all over. Her collar is gone. Avdotya’s eyes narrow. ”Mmh,” she grumbles, ”yes. You certainly look like death.” She knows no humour, thus there is no joke in the way she speaks. This is not the Seraphina she remembers and she will not spare her the pity. "It does not suit you."
