and my spirit with its loss knows this; though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.
The air is hazy with candlesmoke, so thick that it is nearly difficult to breathe. She could not stay at the party; she could not do it. She tried, she really did try, but she couldn’t bring herself to linger any longer than felt absolutely necessary upon entering, and even that was tense and disquieting. Every passing glance made her skin crawl. Seraphina had scarcely been out in public since her so-called death, and, although she had never enjoyed parties, they had never felt like this before. She knows that she is thinking too much, that at least half of the pressure is imagined – but it makes her stomach lurch whenever she catches a lingering gaze, on her scar or her silhouette or any other part of her. On the bird at her shoulders. Whenever she hears her name in passing, and she can never quite discern what the tone is. It never used to bother her, but now…
Now it doesn’t matter what it sounds like. She doesn’t want to hear it.
So Seraphina has found her way to the hospital, Ereshkigal lingering like a shadow between her shoulders. It was where she planned to go from the very start; she has always been better-accustomed to solemn grief than raucous celebration, and the more severe ritual attracts her, for the quiet and the candles and all the things that she has lost in the past year. She has no flowers or baubles or decorations, but she has a single, ornate candle, hovering in the air at her side unlit. She does not know what good one candle will do for droves upon droves of dead, but it is better than nothing. It is better, she decides, than forgetting.
This candle is pale off-white and rimmed with ornate golden filigree; the casing that holds the wax is decorated with cut-out suns, defined by their absence. She supposes it is as fitting a memorial as she can give her people’s dead, with its pale and pitiful burning, though she is no longer sure that her dead would want to be Solterran, least of all honored with the rituals of a god who’d all but abandoned them when they so desperately had need of him. (Turning them to stone was an excess of cruelty. Solterrans burned, returned to ash and flame. Even if they still wished for the proper funeral rites, there would be no way to give them to so many dead. You could not burn stone – but they could no longer ask if they wished to burn anyways, so perhaps it was for the best.)
She passes hunched figures and makeshift gravesites, adorned with candles and red, star-shaped flowers. Incense mingles with the scent of burning wax. There are no lights, but for the flickering, feeble gold of all those candles, and the corridors are narrow and, in some places, crumbling; she has to watch her step. She is grateful that these people seem preoccupied with their remembrance, holding their private but visible vigils. They do not notice her as she passes, her metallic coat flickering like a shade in the dull light, and, so as to preserve the silence, she allows her magic to flare, suspending her hooves a few centimeters from the stone. She makes no sound as she wanders the hallways, so silent and strange that she could easily be mistaken for one of the dead, with her hair floating behind her, bobbing in an unseen tide or wind. Ereshkigal had buried her face in her wings, her beak tucked beneath one joint, but she was still awake. (Seraphina was not sure that she needed to sleep.) Occasionally, her red eyes flickered open, and they seemed to glow with a light all their own, but that was impossible.
She drew deeper and deeper into the hospital, passing rows and rows of quiet, hunched figures until she found a relatively secluded spot in one of the rooms, right by the window. Moonlight poured in through the foggy panes of glass, pale and foggy; it was brighter than in most places, and, though illuminated by the wrong god, Seraphina found it strangely fitting. She settled down in the corner, hairs bristling at the cold air wafting in through thin cracks at the edges of the window, and places the candle before her, striking a match and setting it ablaze. The flame is slender and pale, and it flickers pathetically, but it does not go out. Ereshkigal stretches out one wing, resting it on the silver curve of her shoulder, and she lets her eyes fall closed. She does not sleep, but she keeps her eyes pressed shut, and she tries to piece together something to say in memory of the fallen, of that stone boy in the city or the agents she sent out that would never come home or those whole ships he’d sunk on a childish, vile whim, or, or, or-
But there are no words. She is not sure that she will ever find the right ones. (She’s never been much good at that.)
Her head bows towards the light – not quite in prayer, anymore, but almost.
@Moira|| whoops she's still moping "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
I'm surviving now while Rome burns. We're all just trying to be holy.
A
lways, always, there has always been a curtain between life and her enjoyment of it. Between those who exist and those who could reach through the veil. There is hardly an occasion that the phoenix can recall in which she has felt so wholly a part of the masses; welcome, equal, a part of them. No - it was never something to belong to the Tonnerre girl, not when she's been so ostracized from the start.
All of her odd edges just don't fit into the puzzles around her. They're too sharp or too round, too hard or too soft, too cutting or too passive. Always, always, there is always too this or that, and Moira Tonnerre is never enough. Almost - almost - she could have been (would have been perhaps) for one man, but he was too busy swallowing the sea to catch her when she plummeted into its depths.
He left her, too. Too much, not enough, too strange, too this, too that.
It bites her like the hoarfrost licking the Arma Mountains; it is the same frost that follows her soul through time and space, through house and home, demanding its pound of flesh no matter how far she runs. A Tonnerre will always return to ice and lightning. Moira is finding she now is more Tonnerre than ever having been before. It unnerves her, it delights her and makes her nauseas.
They are monsters.
Is she one, too?
She does not know. The phoenix sometimes will tell you yes, with honey eyes dark and wide and sad, unsurmountable loss and sorrow and pain glimmering along the corners, holding back bright tears that glisten along dark lashes. Other times, the phoenix will give you a secret little smile, and she will croon and she will sing and she will beg you pray tell her how one who seeks to heal and bring life into the dying could ever be just that?
But oh, oh! She does not know.
She does not know.
The thought howls around her, it is the breath of the wind along her ear, the grapple of unease along her spine, the sighing of pines that lean in closer on her trek ever Westward. Home? Her body questions. Once, it could have been. Once, when he still stood on the cliffside and she still wondered what it was like to fly. Only one of these things is still true, and how it breaks her and overtakes her. One by one, her feet still march on, her breaths are still pale clouds before her nose and then they are gone. Gone like him. Gone like a future that could have been and would never now be. Gone like a piece of her heart.
Sometimes, Moira is alright with this, but what bothers her is that she never knew that piece was missing until it had been too late. Without ever having known she was giving so much of herself to another, she'd let it happen anyway. Always, always, Moira is always so careful about who comes and goes through the doors of her life, through the emotions of hers that become so volatile when her interest is piqued and her mind set on another being. He slipped through the cracks of that door like sand in an hourglass - it only made sense that the sand, and time, would run out.
It is a tired woman that walks into Terrastella with a tiger by her side. The ghosts that they honor are nothing to the ghosts in her eyes, but she offers smiles to those who call her way. How many of Denocte walk these streets and celebrate?
None will compare to her cocoa-maker and sweet-bread baker. She knows this is to be true.
Weary feet lead her through bodies and stalls, through groves of people that sprout up alongside great boughs of trees; through side streets that are dark and those that are merry. Before her it all passes and nothing tries to pull her in and drown her. Perhaps nothing will ever drown her again. Red skin is a stain upon the ground, a splash of color in torchlight along houses, and she makes her way to the only place she ever knew to be numb.
Like a grave, it looms up dark and foreboding. Like a parade, people stream through the doors in lines unending. Within, candles are bright and sweet smells are plenty. Moira has only a small painting - the last she's done of him - and the fragments of her heart strewn in the stars that crown him King. She has only ever been a comet streaking through another's sky - perhaps she was their one wish, perhaps she left before they could ever finish. Better to leave first than be left second.
In she goes, the gaping building mouth swallowing her. Down its throat of halls she walks and walks, making herself smaller, tucking in, in, ever inward until she is only a reflection of the flame passing them all by. Tears and laughter are a trickling stream, smoothing over heartaches and sewing together scarecrow people: they are the aftermath of a silent and screaming devastation. Moira Tonnerre, like them all, was only ever a casualty of the war. There are others, she knows, who wear more sins and stains upon their skin than most. Theirs are the memories of battle and blood, of something broken they might never be set straight as a bone could be.
Tonight, she remembers them, too.
She is a ghost among ghosts, still alive but half dead, and in her halfling state does she find another ghost. There is smoke and fog, and it could just be a trick that glints silver in the room with velvet skin, but she is there whether she is real or not. In she goes, looking at the dancing flames in silence, Neerja is but a whisper of shadow behind her. No words are needed as she stares to the flame - she does not ask questions nor look upon the golden scars Seraphina has suffered, for scars have been her longest friend from the time she could walk. They are stories and they are memories and they are simply another part of the people who are not people, the patients who she stitches together into monsters again.
So she does not speak as she settles her little painting, the small fragments of herself and of him and of dreams that have been dashed against the rocks of reality, onto the window sill so that he is as silver as the woman that remembers before she can forget.
There will be a time for words, but this is not yet that time.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: i,,, wrote you a novel. I am so glad to write with you again !
