my blood will fill the ditch // my blood will bury the mountain // but for now it sits still in my mouth // just waiting on the tip of my tongue
The sun hangs low in the sky, staining it red. A faint, clean twang in the air – in the far distance, Seraphina thinks she can see the smoky tendrils of rainclouds. A storm is brewing on the horizon.
Her slender limbs carry her through the maze of canyon walls, thoughtlessly, carelessly, rhythmically. She has walked these canyon walls a thousand times under a thousand circumstances. They are home to her, more comfortable than the recesses of her own mind, so she knows when they have changed – when she finds herself facing the cavernous darkness of a cave that sounds wrong as the wind howls through it, she knows that it was not so when last she passed it. She would have been content to leave it uninvestigated (the desert shifts by the hour), but dusty wind blows out the unmistakable, bitter scent of blood.
As Seraphina descends into the blackness, she grows vaguely aware of the sound of breathing; it is quiet, but unmistakable in the stillness. She draws in further, seeks the noise, seeks the smell…until a passage brings her to face a sea of crumbled rocks, speckled with sunlight from the gaping opening from which they seem to have spilled. The light illuminates them, draws her eyes down, down, down.
She finds the source of the smell.
There is Bexley Briar, her body crushed beneath the canyons that should have protected her – there is Bexley Briar, left bloody and broken in the lands of a god that should have been watching over her. Seraphina stands frozen, statuesque, her eyes flying the length of the girl’s frame (or what she can see of it) as she struggles to grasp the scene in front of her. Realization comes with a dull, subdued horror. She stares her in the bloodied face, her mouth dry and tongue cold even in the suffocating heat of the day. “Bexley.” The golden girl’s name rips its way free of her lips in what is practically a strangled scream that feels wrong, tastes wrong – a voice that doesn’t feel like it is her own. Silly girl. Silly girl, you shouldn’t feel a thing. But she does.
She’s running towards her fallen, crumpled form before she realizes that she is in motion, white-hot adrenaline pumping panic Seraphina has forgotten how to feel in her veins to the frantic flutter of her heart. Solis, no, no, no.“Bexley?” Her voice is steadier, then; she reigns herself in, searching for the cold that seems to have escaped her. “Bexley, can you hear me?” Only the faint heave of the girl’s sides tells the silver queen that she still lives. She breathes in deeply and forces herself to focus – surveying the rocks that cover her as she searches for a way to pull the golden girl free, she reminds herself that she has seen far worse than this.
One thought crystallizes; a million answers are quick to follow. Who did this to you?
@Bexley - wasn't 100% on what happened to bex/the geography of the cave, so, uhh. <3
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
03-04-2018, 07:58 PM - This post was last modified: 06-23-2018, 05:44 PM by Seraphina
Dull pressure sends smoke through every inch of Bexley’s body - pulsating pain behind her eyes, a flat ache that glazes each muscle. The weight of fallen stone pins her to the ground. Dust shudders from her eyelashes with each twitch. The stubborn brag of her heart, quiet at best, feeble in reality, and only barely does it manage to keep her alive, Bex saved only by the persistence of her body.
She is only dimly aware of the direness of the situation.
Anyone looking down would be sure death had caught her, but hazy as Bexley is, she refuses to believe it. Her brain does not recognize the quick trickle of blood down her side, down her cheek, down the many shining planes of her body. A glimmer of gold in a dark, dark cave. The air smells of iron and unclean water and burns the inside of Bex’s mouth, a violent reminder that something is incorrect, that things are not as they should be, but not quite violent enough to stir her from her confusion. God is unreal. A voice sounds through the air, muffled by dust and blood, and Bexley’s ear flicks in an unconscious response.
She cracks open one blue eye, with immense effort, and catches the shimmer of movement. From between two layers of thickly curled lashes there is a mirage of legs working. A chest breathing. Bexley. Again, the voice, silverly and unduly cool, echoing in the small, broken space of the cavern that has betrayed the both of them. Bex stirs slightly, feels the pressure of weight against her leg, stops. She opens her eye wider, against the hot pull of blood, against the exhaustion that has flooded her, with an unreal stubborness, and meets Seraphina’s gaze: Bex’s eyes are glassy and utterly vacant, delirious, even, but still trying.
Yes, she answers after a long pause. Her voice is throaty and hoarse, completely unlike its usual heavy lilt. Speaking almost makes her wince; there is a heavy layer of dry dust that coats her mouth and makes it difficult to talk, but she does her best to response, as ugly as the broken sound may be. I hear you.
Another pause, then. Bexley forces herself to breathe deep. To re-enter her own body. To blink a little more awake, making her more aware of the pain, but not by enough to make her flinch. I am alive. The thought goes through her head again and again. I am alive.
my blood will fill the ditch // my blood will bury the mountain // but for now it sits still in my mouth // just waiting on the tip of my tongue
She stirs, then, and Seraphina breathes a soft sigh of relief. Blue eyes twitch open, glassy and delirious but alive, and alive, she has learned, is what matters. Seraphina isn’t entirely sure what she has thought of Bexley Briar in the past; she exists as some incomprehensible, flickering entity, a little golden flame that Seraphina can’t quite wrap her mind around. She is all broken bones and bloodied lips, and Bexley…Bexley is supposed to be something else. Something radiant. When she looks at her now, however, crushed beneath the weight of stone and slashed across her beautiful face, she feels the sudden twinge of some strange, kindred bond burn like fire across the scars that roll beneath the wiry quicksilver of her coat. Against all the desert’s ravenous elements, she should not have survived, but there she lies – still breathing.
Her ears twitch forward to catch the girl’s words. “I’ll get you out.” Her voice comes gentler than usual. “Just stay awake.” Seraphina scans the rocks that cover the golden girl with a methodical calm; her throat is burning a ring as she shoves what remains of the twisting, writhing sensation in her chest down deep, locks it away until she can find a better use for it. For now, she searches for the first rock to move. If she isn’t careful, she knows that she could send the entire pile crashing down on the golden girl’s head. Finally – reluctantly – she reaches out with her telekinesis and begins to remove the stones with teeth-clenched concentration, one by one. As she pulls stone after stone away from Bexley’s broken frame, she begins to consider how she can transport her back to the court. She’d stitch her up temporarily, just to keep her from losing any more blood; it wouldn’t be sanitary or pleasant, given that she has little to work with but the dry, spindly grasses that sprout in clumps on the canyon walls, and Seraphina is far from a proper medic besides. With that done, she’d have to find some way to bind her legs and take her back to the court without causing any further damage to her presumably-broken bones, and, frankly, the silver isn’t sure how. No sense in wasting too much thought on it before she knows how well Bexley can move, anyways, she tells herself. Not before she has answers. “Can you tell me who did this to you?” Just in case there isn’t the chance to ask her later, she tells herself. Just in case. Whoever had the nerve to attack Bexley and leave her to die – on their own soil, no less - had to face justice for it, and Seraphina would see it done.
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
The world hums and goes silent, and Bexley falls deeper into it. The cool sand against her cheek, and the dust filming her yellow skin, and the cruel, mocking sun, faint where it touches her, if it ever does. Seraphina’s voice is a low, warm buzz that floats above her head, like the slow movement of so many bees. Her eyes flutter closed. The pain that moves through her body is dull at best, but never-ending - laces each nerve, each muscle, spreads thin little tendrils into her brain and roots there, tugging, pricking. Her breath goes ragged in her throat. There is the absence of noise, the absence of feeling, and then Bexley smashes into sleep all at once, fainting dead against the ground.
What feels like just a moment later, she’s awake again. The sun drips red now. Lashes thick with tears and dust, Bexley blinks, blinks again, attempting to clear the shimmering scotoma from her vision. The rocks that used to pin her in place are shoved off to the side now in haphazard piles, and Bex realizes blearily that she could move, if she wanted to, and then a moment later, that she couldn’t - every one of her muscles is bleeding or bruised, and deep inside, she feels the stirring of a broken bone, more than one, most likely. Ache pulsates through each joint. And, as much as Bexley struggles to wake, to speak again, to use her words in a way that would make any kind of sense, she can’t. She just can’t. Something hard and horrible presses into her brain, and, despite her best efforts, a tear seeps from her eye to water the earth.
Who did this to you?
She looks up at Seraphina slowly, reluctantly. There is so much to be said and no way to say it. So much to unravel and no desire to detangle it. All she wants, all she needs, is a way to tell the story without putting herself in it - a way to detach herself from what happened, to explain without being involved. Bexley closes her eyes again and grits her teeth, attempting to go numb, and failing. It’s not an option anymore, to ignore things as they come.
Acton, she says finally, hoarsely, and Raum. The - the spy. Bexley listens to herself talk and almost can’t feel it, the words as they escape her mouth, float through the air, disembodied in someone else’s tone. Someone - weak, and broken, and absolutely helpless. Couldn't be her. Not possibly.
my blood will fill the ditch // my blood will bury the mountain // but for now it sits still in my mouth // just waiting on the tip of my tongue
In that dappled light, stripping away rocks for the space of minutes that seem to her like hours, Seraphina thinks that she sees Bexley Briar cry.
A single tear – hard to tell if it is inspired by rage or pain. She can’t blame her, either way. (She suspects that she would feel much the same, under the circumstances, at least when she was younger and felt much at all. Sometimes she envied her people and the ways they felt, all of those little pinpricks that were not pinpricks to them, the flickers that she could never quite coax to flame. This was not one of those times.) She looks up at her, slowly, reluctantly. Seraphina wonders if she can even believe that this is real. There is some part of the silver that does not. “Acton and Raum. The – the spy.”
Seraphina feels a rush of something white-hot and inexplicably cold run through her like lightning at those words. Anger, maybe, or betrayal, or indignation. Some small, small part of her asks, childishly, how could they - how could they. She had not interacted with Raum, but she had been kind enough - just enough – to wait for confirmation before branding him a spy. (This was her fault. If she had just acted sooner, then…) And Acton. She remembers the gold-orange boy in the canyons, and her lips curl up at the edges as she chokes down a snarl. Seraphina had known, even then, that he was up to something. She had known that he would be trouble. She had known, and yet…and yet she had been hospitable, even as he had thrown barbs at her.“They will answer for this,” She says, softly, low venom brewing in the lilt of her voice; in the mouth of anyone else, it would have barely been perceptible, but any emotion blares out like a foghorn when she is the one who speaks it. Seraphina is not a vengeful creature, but she is just by her very nature, and some darkling urge inside of her insists, furious, that justice be done.
(Her kingdom’s justice, however, is vengeance – a hungry cycle, or a snake that swallows up its own tail. She wonders if there will ever be an end to it. She wonders if seeking out Acton and Raum for their crimes means bringing the cave crashing down on the heads of all of her people.) “Can you stand?” She asks, finally, her eyes darting the length of her broken, twisted frame. It’s a miracle, she thinks, that Bexley even lives; the stones should have stolen her life from her. If she can stand, she can begin the agonizing process of walking her back across the desert, if she can walk at all. If she can’t…there are materials enough to try to make splints. She can’t carry her back, but she can’t leave her to go find help, either. (Or, rather, she won’t.) Thoughts of vengeance and Acton and Raum would have to be filed away until she had time enough to deal with them – for now, it was just Seraphina, a broken golden girl, and a desert merciless enough to swallow up the both of them.
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
Won’t they. It’s almost funny, that Seraphina bothers to say so - as if there were any way Bexley, Bexley fucking Briar, would ever let them get away with not answering.
She smiles, then. It is a ghastly thing. Pale with rock-dust, teeth shiny with blood, the birdlike bones in her face flooded with red sunset, Bex’s nostrils flare, her lashes lower. A grin slashes across her mouth. It is unmistakably violent. She will be a dead girl walking - that is, when she can walk - and the benefit there is she has nothing left to lose. No beauty, or reputation. or friends begging her not to. They won’t, and if they do, she will not listen. Nothing matters but the face she sees when she closes her eyes (Acton) and this simple, embarrassing fact: the sound of her breath, loud and rasping, is absurd in the emptiness of the cavern. It brings tears to her eyes, almost, to hear the imminent reminder of her own mortality, each breath punctured and gravelly, tainted with copper, increasingly ominous.
She hates it. The omnipresent ticking of a clock, or more fittingly, the flickering movement of a sundial. You are dying. You are dying. You are dying.
Can you stand?
You can stand -
With immense effort, Bexley breathes deep, swallowing the sharp pain that follows with only the most fleeting visible grimace. Slowly and jerkily, she scrapes her body into working order. One leg adjusted underneath. Then a second. She hiccups at the pain the movement brings, but tolerates it. Toleration is all she can manage. Shimmering with silvery bruises, darkened in places with blood, Bexley’s body takes on a life of its own, a shell of what it once was, or a marionette, one that jerks and twists to sitting up straight, to kneeling, then standing. The world goes dim-red-and-dark. For a moment, wobbling as she stands, Bex thinks that she might faint. Her head drops and blackens. The scent of sand and copper overwhelms her, and a thick, hot cloud of nausea pools in her stomach. This is a miracle, she reminds herself. My bones. My blood. This continent - the whole damn thing is a miracle.
Bexley’s head snaps up. All at once, something enters her eyes, sharp and violent rather than defeated. Her jaw sets. The expression is rabid, perhaps, but ten times more relevant - more effective - than defeat. That fisted heart, as stubborn as ever, chokes up the salty trail of her throat. Yes. Seraphina’s gaze, in the dark, is a comforting, familiar shade of blue, almost like Bexley’s own. And yet it seems warmer than usual. Less guarded.
For both of their sakes, Bexley does not mention it.
She steps, agonized, toward the mouth of the cave.
my blood will fill the ditch // my blood will bury the mountain // but for now it sits still in my mouth // just waiting on the tip of my tongue
The smile she gives her is glasgow; her lips split, revealing, gritty, bloody teeth, and Seraphina is put in mind of some vengeful, lingering spirit, clawing her way back out of her grave of stone and sand to have her revenge. Oh, she knows when she sees that smile that Bexley Briar will have her retribution, regardless of whether she sanctions it or not – she could try to keep her caged and sooth her temper, but she has a feeling that would be as effective as throwing water on volcanic lava. (Even if it were to work, it would leave an ugly, ugly mark.) However, as she looks at the gnarled, oozing scar across the girl’s face, at her battered limbs, at the stones that would have buried her alive, as she sees her struggle to stand, to even move, chest heaving for breath, as she remembers Acton’s gods-damned smile-
Oh, no. Her gaze is faintly conspiratorial as she watches Bexley make her way to her hooves, as though she might have been sharing some secret with the golden girl. She wouldn’t sanction any actions that might further trouble their relationship with Denocte, but Seraphina had been raised on a steady diet of retributive justice - if she wanted blood for blood, scars for scars, mangled limbs for mangled limbs, death for death attempted, then the silver wouldn’t stop her, regardless of how much trouble it might cause her in the future. As Bexley struggles to straighten, her gaze hardens, and she feels a fresh sting of carefully-contained outrage; she has seen worse, in the days of the war, but, in this case, worse was usually dead. Black, black bruises, and dark smudges of bleeding beneath the skin; long, sand-stained gashes dripping hot, precious blood out onto the stoneswept floor; bones twisted and jerked at awkward angles, a miracle she could move; and that scar across her face. Even if the other wounds would heal, she knew that one would mar her forever, deep and possessive and intentional. He wasn’t content to kill her, she thought – he had to mark her, too. Couldn’t even leave her corpse to peace. Here she stands, teary and wobbling and broken and absurdly wrong, and Seraphina can only watch in silence, shifting forward in case she falls. She searches for words, but, as usual in times of the most desperate importance, they refuse to come to mind.
Bexley, by some miracle or divine blessing from the sun that still pokes and prods through – or, perhaps, pure resilience - , begins to press forward. Seraphina moves to walk at her side, hooves practically dragging the ground; the walk back will be agonizing, and a part of her wonders if she will even survive it. (No, she tells herself. She’s already survived this much.) “Lean on me,” She says, finally, and offers the other girl her shoulder as they begin their long trek back to the court.
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
The blood that drips down her cheek, so slow and monstrous, seems to have a pulse of its own. Bexley feels what might be her loudest heartbeat ever throbbing just underneath the pain that sizzles electric-shock across her face. Chest heaving, blood rushing in her ears, skin crawling with sweat and dust and just-suppressed pain, Bexley’s head drops to her chest, and with herculean effort she steels herself: winds up those aching muscles, rolls her shoulders, and takes her first steps forward.
Light at the end of the tunnel. Literally - through the haze of tears and settling dust the outside world hangs like a yellow discus in the cave’s entrance. Exhausted and trembling, Bexley presses her weight against Seraphina’s steady shoulder. She says nothing. Does not remark upon the subtle warmth in the Sovereign’s mismatched eyes, nor on the strange reverence in her voice when she speaks. It’s horrible - all of it. To be weak, to be crippled, to be dependent on someone when she hasn’t been in years, feeling the awkward crunch of bone shifting under her weight, of blood pooling where it shouldn’t, of sweat sticking her curls to her neck. In her head she curses everything that she knows, and in her heart she can feel those curses, that hatred, calcifying into scar tissue.
Each step aches. Every movement sends a new kind of pain to waking underneath her skin. Teeth clenched and jaw pulsing with effort, Bexley pushes forward again, weight leaned against Seraphina’s, blowing up clouds of incandescent dust, and that is how they exit the cave - stunned to bruising, thirsting for blood.
