[AW] lily white and poppy red [festival]

[Seraphina]

DREAMS ARE SWEET UNTIL THEY AREN'T
men are kind until they aren’t / flowers bloom until they rot and fall apart

As she watches her daughter from some distance – close enough to see her, but without revealing herself to the dainty, black-and-white creature frolicking in the flowers (like a child should, she decides, with some relief) -, she finds herself thinking of the first festival she attended in Terrastella. She was younger, then, and different; a newly-appointed emissary, not yet burdened with the weight of a crown. At the time, she’d been optimistic in the only way that she knew how, which was with a certain coldness that she regrets, much as she knows that it couldn’t have been helped. Maxence had been unlike any native Solterran, and, though he was brash and impulsive, she’d thought that he could be the harbinger of a new Solterra, unhindered by the class divisions and cruelties that had characterized the kingdom before Zolin’s death. And – when she thought about it - he was the first person to ever show her an ounce of respect. It had meant something, at the time.

She’d been here on a diplomatic affair. She swears that she’d worn a crown of white lilies, and she almost thinks that she’d danced with someone for the first and only time in her life, but that might have been in Delumine instead. (The events are beginning to blend together; she is not sure how that makes her feel.) Now, Seraphina stands knee-deep in a swaying field of flowers, watching her daughter, and she tries to make peace with the whole of that – she just wishes that she’d ever felt like any of it was really over.

(And there are always these quiet thoughts in the back of her mind when she looks at her children. Children will grow, and they will find lives of their own – and someday, they will leave her. She doesn’t know what she’ll do, then, and she tries to tell herself that she can worry about it when it comes; but years mean less and less to her by the day, and there is some part of her that is paralyzingly afraid that the ones she has with her children will pass far more quickly than she expects.)

She raises her head, white hair sweeping out of her eyes, and she looks towards the sea. She can smell salt and fish on the crest of the wind; the tide is creeping up on the rocks, foamy tendrils of white against jagged and shimmering spires of raven-black. All around her, there is the sound of life – wandering partygoers, drunken lovers, children finally let out for the spring. Somehow, above the hum of it all, she can still hear the sound of the tides against the shore, the low rumble of each crashing wave.

She watches her daughter and sighs.

---

@whoever || <3 ||

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Leto]

This keening soul;

A silver woman stands in the midst of the flowers. She is as still as a statue carved of stone. Her stone is marble, Leto thinks, marble of white and silver. Yet there is a part of her that is not like the rest: her cheek. It is as if the parts of her jaw are held together with the beauty of kintsugi. The gold of her catches the light. Only the slight tip and turn of her head as it follows the path of a child, is any indication that she is alive at all. Even where the kelpie stands, the stranger’s skin looks hard and cold. This woman, the priestess thinks, is as firm, unyielding as the cliffs that stand upon the edges of the sea. Leto moves toward her; a wave coming in from the sea.


Oh, the sea. 


It is so far from her now. But her skin is still slick with salt, her body warm, warm, warm. There is no protection from her magic here and the stars watch her keenly. The laugh in their places and run their light like lances through the inky purple stain of the turning sky, They will set the meadow alight, if Leto would let them fall. 


She does not. 


Not here where children frolic in the grasses and flowers. Not here where lovers meet in the beauty of Terrastella. This is her home, her heritage. She moves through the flowers and they welcome her back with petal soft kisses across her knees. They lay perfume across the salt of her skin and try to rid from her the scents of the sea. The last time she was here, a man sat upon the throne. But he left, as he always does.


Leto moves toward the silver woman, stands beside her and watches the child play. The kelpie is the midnight to the silver of Seraphina’s starlight skin. The Terrastellan’s starfire magic is not lit enough to cut her body up with the glow of her blood - her vessels that map a firewhite map across her body. She simply stands black, black, black and lets the chimes of the bells and bones in her hair declare her arrival.


“Is she yours?” Leto asks after a moment and in the silence she has wondered what it would be to have a child.



@Seraphina

Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:

rallidae | art