I drink in the air like holy wine, like my last salvation tomorrow may burn, but I'll be ready for it.
She is spilled out – spilling out. A flood. Torrents held back by broken gates, seeping out through cracks and then plunging holes into the walls until there is no wall left at all, no stone, nothing; it’s all swept away. She doesn’t know how to swim. She knows enough to not drown, under most circumstances. On rare occasions her dreams are of that night in the maze and the ink-monster that chased her through Tempus’s creation, that river of black that tasted like ink and clung like tar when she managed to drag herself out and onto the banks, and sometimes she wonders if any of that ever really occurred or if it was just another nightmare, her mind struggling to fill spaces where something else should be. It grasps, sometimes. Seeks little threads. What was her name? (The real one, not that pale mockery, not that burning one.) Did her mother have a face? (She must have.) Her mind is not inventing any fictions for this particular overflow. It tastes too familiar, and it hurts too badly for her to mistake it for anything else, and, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t forget Raum, and she couldn’t forget what she had let him do.
She was never quite strong enough, never solid enough, never crafted of the right concoction of parts to be charming or intimidating or charismatic or powerful or tactical or ruthless or merciful or any of those things that leaders were supposed to be; there was always something carved out in her chest where those things should have been. Now, she is very tired. Now, with the taste of ash and blood and the scalding bitterness that she has come to associate with a particularly humiliating form of failure caught on her tongue, her feverish mind struggles to come up with a reason to grapple with the floodgates. She can’t patch them. She won’t win; she’s fighting a battle she knows that she will lose. She probably deserves it – Solis only knows how many people are dead because of her. She’s condemned them again, now. There is a river swarming down the canyon, and she can’t get out of the way of it, and she can’t hold it back. All of her stones are swept away, and, even if they weren’t, she can’t build anything with them before the water will hit her. There isn’t the time. She can only watch, suspended, helpless, flailing in the muddy riverbank as the water crashes closer and closer, the sound of its froth against the banks growing to a deafening crescendo-
but there is something else.
She has felt it before, faintly. Deep down. Deeper than she likes to look, and it flickers like a lantern or a tiny sun, even in the midst of this- overwhelming darkness. She feels it occasionally. A prickle. She is ashes, smoke – a dash of grey. She is not fire, just what comes trailing after it, but, sometimes…
sometimes it wants to burn.
She grasps blindly at this little ember, this spark, and she begs it to flame. She is a Solterran. She should burn, shouldn’t she? There is no honor in a body dragged beneath the waves, only one reduced to ashes atop a funeral pyre. But the water comes as a rushing darkness, and she doesn’t even have a candle, and-
She is dying, and she wonders if dragging it out is worth the fight.
Nevertheless, she can’t let go of that little light – she can’t let it go, or she will lose more than her life, she will lose…
She doesn’t know. She clings to it anyways, a solitary flicker against the black.
tags | @Isra notes | hello, I have no idea what's going on here, but there's a lot of delirious imagery. fun fact, the opening line of "Woman King" was the tile of the thread in which Sera became sovereign.
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
02-18-2019, 08:58 PM - This post was last modified: 04-05-2019, 05:27 PM by Seraphina
Isra who hunts like a wolf
“If I told you I'm trying to save the world, would you believe me?”
Isra should have turned and walked back towards Denocte.
There are still winter-flakes of poison in her veins. It's not enough to cool the deep magic in her, or keep her legs for moving. But it is enough to make all of her ache as she walks down from the mountains on a trail stained with blood and something that smells acidic and wrong.
She is hunting, and she cannot find it in herself that care that she promised to return home (to safety). Tonight she doesn't want comfort and she doesn't want healing.
Isra wants what her magic wants. They want vengeance, and justice, and war. They want to crumble the rotten parts of the world (and a certain ghost's bones) and turn them to clay. The magic wants to make feasts out of dead-trees. Isra wants see just how quickly she can turn a tree into a blade and just how slowly she might turn flesh to stone.
Perhaps her magic is the most innocent part of her now. It might have been better if the poison leached out all her magic too. But it didn't and it's a stronger river of it that runs like wildfire with the rage in her heart.
Ahead Fable leads her onward, crashing through the trees and over the stone like a river. The deer paths are too small for him now and the trees fall like soldiers before him. Isra only smiles and touches each crumbled oak and pine in his trail. She makes them all into apple trees that will bloom with ruby-red fruit. Once she would have cared about his destruction, once she would have been afraid to follow a dragon through the mountains.
Once she was afraid of violence too.
Now it's violence that leads the dragon and the unicorn onward. The ghost might have left the mountains long ago, he might have turned his flesh to a hundred different things so that tracking him wasn't easy. They might not be moving quickly on the trail and Isra already knows that they have looped back on their path more than once. But they never stop moving and that violence never stops growing, and growing, and growing inside them.
It feels like they are walking towards war. Their hearts sing in their skin like drums and the wind screams through her horn like a trumpet. On and on they go, looping like a river (unstoppable and faster, faster, faster).
I can smell blood. It's fresh. Fable almost howls the words in the sea of rage they share. But something in his instincts tells him that the blood, that makes the air metallic, is not rotten. This blood isn't familiar to him and so instead of taking to the skies like a dragon should he only turns back to Isra so that she might read caution in the tense curl of his neck.
Isra doesn't pause though and she only quickens her steps towards the low-ground, ducking under Fable's wing as she gallops past him.
At first all she can see if blood, a trail of it (a river of it). All she can think of is rage and the phantom taste of foxglove that makes her tongue burn. But when she sees the body and the claw marks something in her heart shatters and then remakes itself into steel thick enough to hold back the rage just a little.
Her hooves are feathers over the sand and the dirt. Diamonds bloom like daisies in her wake as she circles the mare. When she fills her mouth with dirt and sprinkles it over the wounds each piece of sand turns to a drop of antiseptic, medicine made with magic and intent alone (and maybe empathy too). After, she grabs what sticks and grass and small stones she can find. She lays each gently over the wounds and the moment they touch blood and medicine they each turn to bandages made of silk.
Just as she drops her nose to the other mare's throat (she's looking for teeth marks of course) Fable joins them. He raises his wings over them and his eyes blaze like a predator's as he watches the battlefields around them for further dangers.
try try your whole life to be righteous and to be good wind up on your own floor, choking on blood
That little lick of flame lingers, and it tears her apart. She wants – the peace that the blackness promises, the comfort of the darkness that wants to swallow her. She needs – to keep fighting. She hopes – that this is some nightmare, some terrible dream, that she will wake in familiar sandstone walls any moment now and breathe a sigh of relief. She knows – that will not happen. She must – stand up, somehow, find some way back to herself, return to her people, to her kingdom, to her. She cannot – abandon them, abandon everything, watch it all be swept away like the shifting of the sands, watch herself be erased. But, but, but, but-
She doesn’t know who she’ll be if she wakes up.
She wants to wake up, she needs to wake up – she wants to let go. She cannot help but feel that there is no point in pulling herself one way or another; she will yield to time if nothing else, because she cannot save herself, and no one is coming to save her. But she doesn’t have it within herself to abandon what light remains, and, as hard as she’s tried to push it all out of her, – push out everything, hollow herself thin, freeze over entirely – it remains, and she can’t let go of it, not even now, not even when it means nothing at all.
She is vaguely aware of the movements of something massive. She is vaguely aware of another presence, perhaps two; in her delirious haze, it is difficult to discern anything outside of the cage of her own body. She wonders if Raum is back, come to kill her, or if some passing stranger has decided to put her out of her misery.
Seraphina is not prepared for the searing pain that comes with medication and pressure; she is not prepared for bandages. She is not prepared for the sudden, nauseating revelation that she might survive this.
She tries to sob out some desperate plea to let her go, just let her go. She doesn’t want to wake up, not to – this. If she wakes up, it will make all of this real, and she will be forced to look it in the eyes and find some way to handle it, and she can’t, she won’t, she doesn’t want to. She wants it to be over. She’s tired of fighting. If she dies like this, she will have died a death befitting a Queen of Solterra, but, if she lives on, she will have been robbed of everything, of every piece of her, of her kingdom and her pride and her honor and her hope-
But she can’t speak. Even if this stranger would have yielded to her begging, her words will not force their way out of her unyielding mouth.
She does not know how long she lingers between places, vaguely aware of the ministrations of whoever had come to save her. She barely remembers stirring, or the fluttering of her lashes. At some point, she raises her head, and she doesn’t remember the movement; she looks at the sea-touched unicorn who has come to her aid and the expanse of her dragon, but she doesn’t see them at all. Her gaze darts over them as though they are a part of the landscape, not even a hint of recognition in her glossy stare. She is vaguely aware of the dragon’s wings, a canopy over her head, vaguely aware of the unicorn’s muzzle at her throat, vaguely aware of how she twitched away from her lips on instinct as they neared her silver collar, vaguely aware…
In those first, stumbling moments after she opens her eyes, Seraphina is swallowed by an overwhelming sense of dismay.
If she had died, in spite of her failure, she would have been granted an honorable death. Far from home, certainly, and lonely – and she likely never would have been given proper funeral rites. Her body would have rotted out alone on the pocked, lifeless turf of the steppe, robbed of the pyre her culture demanded. (If she had been denied her ashen burial, would her soul have still joined the sun god? It was no matter now.) That would have been devastating, but she is not sure that it is not less devastating than living on, shamed by her loss and dishonored entirely by her salvation. Her stare is defocused and blank as she stares up at the hazy shape of the pale moon, pupils dilating to all but swallow the brightness of her eyes, and, perhaps, the faintest hint of a snarl pulling at the dark corners of her lips.
This world has taken so much from her, and it won’t even grant her a good death.
She has nothing left to give.
Her first impulse is to run. Surely, Raum thought that she was dead, and he would certainly brag of it; it would be a convenient excuse to disappear, to flee this land, to take the freedom that she’d always been deprived of. It passes as quickly as it comes, leaving her with a burning sense of shame in its place. She can’t leave. She has a responsibility to her people, to her nation – she can’t run from what has to be done. But what can she do? She has shown her weakness, and Solterra resents nothing more than the weak. Has she ever been particularly strong? Perhaps that is her worst and most undeniable failure. Seraphina has always admired the warrior-queens of her nation’s history, blood-soaked and vicious, armed with teeth like knives and sharper convictions, and she knows that she has never been one of them. A tremor wracks her spine. Certainly, she has killed before, but she has no flame, no spark, nothing-
But that little bright thing is still twitching in her chest, clawing at the insides of her throat. She is horrifying cognizant of the fact that it wants out of her, that it has wanted out of her for years, and she does not know if she will be able to hold it in much longer. Her stomach twists with nausea, and sweat beads on her brow, and she is not sure if she is trembling because of the blood that still stains the ground beneath her or if it is because that brightness wants out, because that spark is bulging to flame… “I-I…” Her voice comes out as a hazy, painful rasp as the world blinks into focus; her odd stare turns on the mare and her dragon. “No, no, no, I can’t, I…”
She’s failed.
She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know how to so much as begin to know what to do, she…
Politeness manages to take over her stumbling words. “You…saved me. Thank you,” she says, scarcely able to afford a whisper, though she isn’t sure if she is actually grateful.
In the distance, she sees Veneror rising up towards the heaven, and, in the absence of any other answer, she is possessed by the sudden, desperate need to find Solis. For all she knows, he could be gone forever this time, and, even if he were, for some reason or another, up on the mountain, she doubts that he’d want to see her, after her loss. She is no longer his queen, and she is sure she’d never been his chosen. But she needs…something, to find…something, and that burning sensation – creeping down her limbs in feverish shivers – presses her towards the mountain. She is stumbling to her hooves before she is entirely aware that she is so much as moving, and, though she quakes like a newborn, she manages to take a trembling step forward. “I…” Her voice comes out shuddering. “I need…to go to Veneror. I…I have to…” She pauses, looking back at her savior and her reptilian companion. “I…I apologize. I’ll find some way to repay you, but I…I have to go. I have to…I have to find some way to fix this.” She sounds delirious, even to herself, and she’s sure that her rambling makes no sense to the woman at her side, but she is possessed by her urgency and her desperation and her frenzied need to make some semblance of sense of this situation.
(She is flickering, flickering, flickering, too hot and not herself or maybe more of herself than she has been in years, and she doesn’t know if she wants to fight the fire or let it swallow her whole.)
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
Isra who once was dead
“The old, defiant chant rose in her mind: If I want, I will fight. If I want, I will live. And I want. And I will.
Time has become a corporeal thing to her, a thin miasma of the world that moves in patterns unrecognizable to her. All she has to count her moments are heartbeats that each bring to her lips the taste of iron and brine. On and on they go, seconds and minutes and hours. Maybe she loses days too, there in the forest with a canopy of dragon wings and seawater instead of leaves.
All Isra does know is that she's has lost count of the times she's changed the bandages. Her teeth feel brittle in her dead-smile, caked with dirt and greenery. The skin on her knees is bloody and raw because the ground where she lays has long since turned to chain-mail when she let her rage run rampant beneath the surface of her skin while she worked.
It almost worries her that she hasn't found the new bottom of her magic-- almost.
Sometimes fitful dreams run across her eyes lids and their prints are clawed and hoofed and sharp. Sometimes Fable lifts back a wing and she can feel cool starlight rush over her skin like water. Sometimes it's saltwater that runs over her like tears when a fever of worry starts to rise over her skin. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes there are other things but there is always a unicorn, a dragon and a mare with silk bandages and iron blood. That is the only thing that never changes.
But finally her heart flutters in her chest like a prayer at the lips of a god when the mare moves. The mare's eyes flip open like a casket. Isra can feel the blackness of those pupils rising the hair on her back when she has no name but not there for the look the other mare's eyes. She wonders if this is how it feels to look death in the eye, swallow, and say No.
Maybe it is, for the mare is saying her denials over and over again like a hallelujah of suffering. Isra doesn't know if she's begging for death or for life and for a moment she wants to shutter those dark eyes so that her own sea-deep gaze might not ache for meeting them. But she swallows down the grit on her teeth and forces herself to smile like an angel might when the once-dying mare speaks.
“You aren't saved yet.” She whispers while they meet sea to blackness, silver and bay, iron blood to salted blood. The satin bandages are still blooming with blood that looks like ink-blots on the cream-white. Her magic is still hungry with the need to change, to consume and Isra cannot help but hope that the only thing the feeling means is that fate isn't done with her yet.
She hopes that it doesn't mean a universe of a monster is opening up its jaws inside her.
And it's because she pondering that thing in her, that seems to have no bottom, that she misses the way the mare lurches to her feet. She's too busy looking inward, deeper and deeper, to all the ways she is changing. This is not how it felt t save a life before; this feels like playing god and angel and devil all at once.
Fable is the one to alert her that the mare is moving. She drags herself outward quickly and violently and later she'll tell herself that is the reason her voice rose from her lips as sharp as a sword. “Stop.” It's a queen that looks at the mare now, all the unicorn has been devoured by magic and empathy and rage.
Ahead of them a rock turns into a wall and Fable drops a wing to block the path onward. His head shakes like a dog of a underworld, back and forth with froth and sea-water foaming at his lips. They both know that recklessness in this place means death.
“You'll die before you make it to the summit. Dead things cannot fix anything.” Isra moves to join her and the chain-mail underneath her ripples like a wave. It sings like one too in that silence between one step and the next. There is no one in this world that knows how to be 'dead' as well as she does or how to rise from that dark place to burn. And maybe that's why her smile looks a little dangerous when she says, “Let me help you.”
Two dead things will always see the world as it really is as they rise, and rise, and rise from the darkest depths of the world (and of themselves).
I have lost the things that I said I lived for and have continued to live
Stop.
Her blood rushes in a way that it shouldn’t. She turns to stare at the mare with mismatched gaze narrowed into a glare, ears snapped back against her skull; she was more obedient, before she grew accustomed to her own authority, and, now, it takes her a moment to feel anything but burning offense at the challenge.
She’s right. Seraphina knows, in her head, that she is right. Her heart, however, wants no more of this offense – her pride already hangs loose and worn about her, tattered as the skin of her face, and she doesn’t know how to piece it together again. She whisks her fervid glare between the mare and her dragon, but then her expression softens, reluctantly, to be replaced with a fresh bought of despair and a renewed misery.
She looks at the mare, this time, and she sees her properly – that rich bay and kiss of iridescent scales like flecks of foam left behind by the tides, that dark spire of horn, that cascade of midnight-dark hair, those endlessly blue eyes that are far older than the woman they belong to. She is a striking creature, in possession of a quiet, delicate sort of beauty, almost untouched by harshness, at least on her exterior; but then there is that curl of chain around her leg, like a brine-touched vice, and something in her eyes is colder than Seraphina might have expected.
She notes the chains of metal that pool around the mare with more than a hint of bitterness, a flash of envy behind those multicolored eyes; though she shouldn’t blame him for her own failure, she can’t help but think that, perhaps, were she not so spurned by her god, she might not have fallen to Raum. She thinks of her foreign advisors and their magics, and she thinks of all of her enemies and their magics, and she thinks of how all of her desperate prayers and all of her efforts have meant nothing - no matter how much she struggled for Solis’s approval, he never seemed to grant it to her. Mortal problems required mortal solutions, or perhaps she was merely cursed; at any rate, her devotion has never been enough for him.
That silver-scaled dragon only makes the sting dig deeper, burn brighter. Truly, this girl must be beloved by her patron, to be granted such gifts, and it aches. She supposes that she should be grateful for them, even grateful to that laughing moon, but it only further agitates her bitterness, her inferiority, her failure.
She watches the mare with those hollowed-out eyes, her mind struggling for the right words, and she is forced to confront that she has always – always – been alone in a way that she doesn’t know how to describe. It isn’t something literal; there are people around her, so she can’t be alone, and yet…
She wonders, at the back of her mind, if anyone would really have cared if she’d bled out on the Steppe – not as the Queen of Solterra or even Seraphina, the Queen of Solterra, but as Seraphina, period. She has always been a bit more title than person, and, now that she has lost her title, she is beginning to wonder what is left behind in its absence. Seraphina, soldier of Solterra. Seraphina, Solterran warrior. Seraphina, Emissary of the Sun. Seraphina, the Silver Queen. When all of that is gone, stripped away in great, bloody sheets, what is left behind but some vast emptiness, a space that she doesn’t know how to fill? She was resented or admired, but nothing more tender, and, even when her world crumbled at her sides time and time again, she managed to hold herself above the chaos and the noise with a manufactured elegance and icy dignity, but now she is the crumbling thing.
She still has a heart under her skin, and, as it burns and pulses against the walls of her ribcage, she wishes that she could rip it out. It was easier when she could keep it constrained beneath the promise of well-laid plans and a cool head. It was easier when the world seemed so very far away, when she could soar over it like a hawk; she used to be so distant, and it suited her. When had it begun to itch? (It had always been itching, but she hadn’t scratched, because she didn’t want to know what was beneath her if she peeled back her own skin. The idea of having to figure out what something meant had always been more terrifying than being nothing at all.) She doesn’t want to feel like this – she doesn’t want to be like this.
She can’t be like this, but-
when she tries to pull herself back inside, she can’t.
She doesn’t know what’s left behind for her to gather, so she rages against it; she doesn’t want to pick herself up again, but she has to. More than anything, for once in her gods-damned life, she wants to give up in peace, without the persistent prickle of shame or necessity biting at the back of her throat like a snarling wolf. For once in her life, she wants more than anything to be able to think of herself before anything else, because, really, what has this world given her to deserve everything that she is, but she can’t - but she gave up the option years ago. Her crown had been taken from her, but responsibility – for what he had done, for what he would do, for what she should have put an end to years ago - still sat like a leaden weight across her shoulders. But they wouldn’t want her back, would they? A dishonored queen was nothing, nothing, nothing; the weak meant nothing in Solterra, and now she was weak.
She is left with two fundamental truths: one is that she has been lonely for years, and the other is that she cannot fix what she has done alone.
Perhaps she could have, were she still Seraphina the Queen, who was predisposed to standing alone, to making herself the sole figure responsible for the welfare of her kingdom in the wake of Zolin’s irreverent tyranny, but now she is simply Seraphina, and she is still stumbling to piece together what that means. You'll die before you make it to the summit. Dead things cannot fix anything. Her words are spitefully true; they dance to the rhythm of the chain-mail that clinks like water (but Seraphina would liken it more easily to the push-and-pull of war) beneath her hooves. Let me help you.
Her smile is like a lit flame.
She wants to defy this mare, with her fire-licked smile and her sea-touched dragon, because she wants the strength to deny anything that has been put in front of her, – to drive her hooves into the ground and refuse to bend - but she knows that would be foolish, and, though she feels like one at the moment, she is no fool. “You’re right,” she concedes, softly, and the admission stings on her tongue. “I…would appreciate the aid. I must…speak to my god. I have done…” Perhaps it is because she does not know what to expect on Veneror; certainly not Solis, who never seems to heed her call or the call of any other. Perhaps it is because the conclusion of her sentence makes everything around her so terribly, undeniably real. In any case, her voice stumbles; she’s forgotten how it sounded, to tremble.“…I have done something unforgivable.”
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
Isra, crying molten gold "a cracked and torn soul reeks of the sweet incense it contains.”
T
here is a moment when the mare looks at her like a wolf, ears lashed back and teeth almost begging to come out like stars, that Isra wonders what almost-corpse she has stumbled upon. But then the dragon in her chest opens up their mouth too and the roar lashes like whips against her bones. At her hooves her chain-mail flickers to glass and then to barbed flowers. Isra is ready, ready, ready and the hair on her back feels alive with electricity.
It's a blessing then that the other mare softens and sheds all her fury for sadness. This Isra understands better; she's too raw for war, too raw for thoughts and kindness instead of fury. All that magic in her blood is still too much like a wild thing inside her to trust.
She still doesn't know if she wants to remake this world or destroy it. Does it, with its bitter gods and twisted karma, even deserve to be saved?
The space between them seems heavier, bitter with iron and sorrow. Isra, unable to resist the siren song of melancholy closes the distance between them. Fable drops his wing and the wall turns to just a stone. Hopefully there are no need for walls between them now. She has never been fond of walls and chains and cages anyway and something in her ached to have a need for them.
“Then we shall find him.” Isra struggles to keep the bitterness out of her voice, she struggles to sound like wildflowers instead of storm winds, rain instead of hail. There is no love in her for the gods, only a cold sort of dispassionate rage. Gods have taken peace from her, created for her a body she could not love, buried her city underwater and killed some of her people.
Isra trusts in herself, in mortals and she's learning to trust in retribution and fury too. In dragons too. Fable adds, dropping his head to peer at the two mares and the heavy, shrinking space between them. The night queen touches her nose to the Fable's and says silently, only you. He positions himself on the other side of the silver mare to catch her if she stumbles.
Time is still ticking around them and the blots of blood on the mare are still blooming into shapes like wolves and snakes on the white silk. There are no more demands pouring from her teeth sharp as swords but there is a coldness in her eyes (a cold, cold fire) that begs stillness.
Isra lowers her head to pull at the links of chain at her hooves and they pull off like dirty pearls. She lifts them one by one and presses them like kisses into the bloody, open tracks that are revealed across the mare's face when the silk bandages turn to dandelion seeds and blow away on the wind. Each link of chain crusted with dirt turns to molten gold the moment Isra presses it against blood. It's strange that gold, like a slow moving river that pours from her teeth like tears. It looks like it should burn but it doesn't, it is as cool as a summer lake.
She makes art from the mare's brokenness, art to show her that the world is not made of stone and unforgiving things. Everything can change (and she can't help but remember that everything can die too). It serves the purpose of stopping the bleed by giving her gold instead of flesh to fill in the claw tracks across. Isra thinks she's even lovelier now, all silver and metal.
The mare looks like she could be a weapon of war now.
“Will you tell me what has happened while we walk?” Part of her didn't want to ask, didn't want to know. Isra needs no more fuel for the fire charring names into her bones like crosses above a grave. She only wants to understand how she can better help this mare become whole again with more than just gold.
But a part of her, that terrible part that's opening up after a long, long slumber, wants more. It wants fire enough to consume the world. It wants a name and a reason.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3 and the novel continues
child of neptune, I'm the daughter of the sun keep showing me new constellations
She notes the way that she tenses, the way that she pulls at those chains at so much as the threat of violence – but, even if her reactionary anger weren’t stamped out as quickly as a stray ember, she notes, bitterly, that she couldn’t defeat her if she tried. Not in this condition, and certainly not without magic. (But, of course, she doesn’t want to fight. In fact, she’d rather do anything but fight, at the moment.)
She draws closer, and Seraphina shies back a step. Normally, she is so rigid, so militant, but now she is trembling, a cornered animal more than anything; she has never realized how much the fear of repercussions that Viceroy instilled within her impacted her mentality, her perpetual hesitance, her perceived toothlessness, but now, without anything to keep her grounded, she feels it run like ice in her bloodstream. As her dragon relaxes, and Seraphina forces herself to acknowledge that there is no threat in the bay’s features now, she manages to steady herself, accepting her presence, though somewhat unwillingly. “Then we shall find him.” She is not sure what those words sound like – they aren’t exactly kind or soft or whatever she might have expected, if she expected anything at all, but she instinctively recognizes that the mare will help her. She feels a pang of guilt for the trouble; the woman has already saved her life, and now she’ll accompany her on a certainly ill-fated quest out of nothing but concern and…some inner goodness.
She is so unaccustomed to kindness that she doesn’t know what to do with it. “I doubt that he will answer,” she admits, quietly, her words punctuated with a soft exhalation. Once, Seraphina had excused her god’s absence with the assumption that it was merely the way of the gods to shy away from the affairs of mortals; they might exert some, subtle influence, but they never intervened directly. Now, she had stood at the side of the sun god. Now, she knew better. “He never answers…but I…I need to try.” She needs to try, because she doesn’t know where else to turn. Solis has never come at her call before, and she doubts that her loss will ingratiate herself at all to the sun god, but now that he is back, now that he has come back to them, the foolish little girl inside of her who spent years praying to him to save her wants to hope beyond all reasonable hope that he might try to intervene, to crush this tyrant before he had a chance to destroy Solterra all over again.
She doesn’t want him to forgive her. She merely, tiredly, foolishly, wretchedly wishes for him to fix her mistakes.
The mare catches long strings of chain metal in her teeth and presses towards her. Seraphina wants to move back, but she heeds the warning in those hauntingly blue eyes and remains stock-still. Her magic is something unfathomable; the world around her spins to her will, flying in the face of the rules of its own creation. Seraphina does not try to understand it, struggling to trade her bitterness – and jealousy – for appreciation, because it is a beautiful thing. The bloodied bandages tied tight around her wounded face turn to flowers and drift away on the breeze, and, as she watches them disappear from sight, she is abruptly reminded that she is still bleeding. (Her pain is a distant throb, largely buried beneath her emotional distress; now that she has remembered it, it begins to sear.) She moves closer still, those chains still caught in her lips…
and she fills in her scars with gold.
She does not know what she anticipated, but that was not it – where she once had skin, she soon has pooling metal. It is cold where it should be scalding hot, and the chill provides a soothing balm to her mounting pain. She forces herself to remain steady, even as the mare’s lips dust the scarred skin dangerously close to her silver collar, and, as she finally draws away, her meticulous artwork complete, Seraphina tries to meet her eyes. She is not sure that she knows what to make of this gesture, but, perhaps, the kindness of a gentle creator – to make a grotesque symbol of pain and tragedy into something gleaming and beautiful, something stronger. “…thank you,” she says, quietly. She feels like her words are escaping her again, just like they always seem to when she has need of them; she never knows how to respond to an outstretched hand when it is offered.
She steadies herself, glancing at the mare; she doesn’t know what she expects to find at the peak, but she knows that she needs to go. She is met with a request. “Will you tell me what has happened while we walk?”
She supposes that she owes this stranger the truth.
Her stomach turns knots at the prospect, but she offers a reluctant nod, directing her stare at the path in front of them. Her steps are awkward, at first, stilted by her swelling nausea and the distant sense of a pounding headache, but she soon settles into an even, albeit slow, stride. She is still struggling to collect her thoughts, much less to organize them into any reasonable order; it takes her several moments to begin to speak. “My name is Seraphina, and I am – I was - the Queen of Solterra.” She almost stumbles over the tense of her title, and it brings a renewed rush of bitterness scrambling up her throat. “I was summoned here for a challenge to my title…from that crow, Raum. I fought him, and…” Her head sinks, despair creeping back into her tone. She doesn’t need to say it; she is sure that her phrasing is already implication enough. However, some part of herself needs to be punished, so she forces the admission out of her throat anyways. “…and I lost. I failed. He took my crown and my honor, and he quite nearly took my life…” She trails off, and her next words are barely even a whisper, as though she does not want the mare to hear them at all. (She doesn’t want to say them, and she regrets them as soon as they are out of her mouth, but her words are spilling out of her like blood from an unstitched wound, and she is no longer sure that she has it in her to keep them inside.) “…and I do not know what he has left behind.” She doesn’t let them linger. She considers, for a moment, explaining what he has taken from her – that in Solterra you are your blood or your actions, and her actions mean nothing in the face of such a loss, that she is dishonored and forgotten, that any good she might have done has been blighted by the way that she has fallen, that the nobility that might have been afforded her death has been stripped to humiliation instead. “…but it does not matter what he has done to me. What matters is…” She doesn’t want to think about it. She doesn’t want to, for once; she is normally a painfully contemplative creature, content to run her thoughts in circles no matter how much they hurt, but these thoughts…these thoughts are ones that she wants to run from. “…what he will do now that he has power. He wants nothing but destruction, and my people…” She chokes, abruptly, her throat constricting around her words like a hangman’s noose, like the tight steel collar around her neck. Rhoswen. What would he do to Rhoswen? She had been broken enough already, and their daughter…and Bexley! Bexley, who’d nearly died by his knife once already. (And her daughter – Apolonia. What would he do to her daughter? Surely he wouldn’t hurt the child of his own brother-in-arms, but, then, she has heard of what he did to the Night Queen, and she once thought that the Crows had no higher loyalty than to their court.) Eik. Perhaps her dearest friend, what would he do to him? Teiran. Teiran, who was so like her…what would he do to Teiran? What of Jahin? Surely the Davke man would be fine – he was a survivor at heart. What of El Toro? Elif? Mathias? She knows little of them, but she knows them – she has spoken to them. Gods, even Torstein – she doubts that Raum has any love for the great, three-eyed beast of a man, and, in spite of the trouble he had caused her in the past, she couldn’t help but call to mind his aid against the elk who’d consumed the kingdom in frost…and his earliest suspicions of Raum. The memory almost makes her cringe. “…my people will be his instruments of war, his…his first victims. I…have faith in my nation’s resilience. We have weathered worse, but…” She hopes that they have weathered worse. Surely Raum cannot be worse than Zolin, but “better than Zolin” is very little consolation. “…but there will be a…cost to weathering the influence of a madman hellbent on our destruction.” There will be blood. By now, there might have been blood spilt already, and she feels sick, because she could have – should have – prevented it. “I’ve failed them. I should have had him killed years ago, when he nearly murdered one of my citizens…” She is speaking more quickly, now, a note of panic entering her trembling tone; she hears herself through water, and she thinks that she sounds hysterical. “…but, when Denocte’s Emissary came with his dragon, when I saw what Caligo’s Regime was capable of, with their magic and their monsters…” She recounts her reasoning like it means anything at all, now. “…when Reichenbach himself assaulted a member of Florentine’s court, I…” She grasps for a way to make this entire situation her fault, because she knows that if she is the problem, at least she can fix it; she has control over herself, or maybe she doesn’t, maybe it all went seeping out of her body with the copious amounts of blood she’d lost on the Steppe, she doesn’t know anymore, she doesn’t know anymore, she only knows that she needs to control something, because this situation has spiraled so rapidly out of her grasp that she doesn’t know how to fix it, and she has to fix it. “…I recalled how dear his Crows were to his heart, and I did not want to risk inciting a war. We had only just been attacked by the Davke; we would not have survived it.” She wants to keep rambling, but she manages to shut herself up, with a long, shaking breath. “…that matters little now.” There is nothing she can do.
She is quiet, for a moment, struggling to gather her resolve – but, when she speaks again, she sounds frightened and exhausted more than anything, hardly the beast of fire and rage that she needs to be. “I…cannot stand aside and allow him to succeed.” She knows this, logically. Realistically. She has to do something.
She does not know how to stop him.
Not now, with her crown stolen – not now, without power enough to counter his deadly shapeshifting. Parts of Solterra were loyal to her, and others would be happy to hear of her death; still others, perhaps many others, would greet the news with apathy. She had trusted, at least, in her capability as a warrior, as a weapon of war, but he had taken that from her, too. Seraphina had always been something; she had been a soldier, albeit an unwilling one, or an Emissary, or a Queen. She had always had a path to follow and some semblance of an identity that had accompanied it. Her life was in service of something greater, so, although she’d never placed much emphasis on herself as an individual, she had never felt as though she was without purpose, without meaning. She had faith in her own capability, her own resilience.
And now she felt hollowed-out, like empty space, like something entirely disposable. Her years of training had failed her when she needed them the most, and her own resolve felt fleeting in the wake of this revelation. She was not sure if she was Solterran – if she returned to who she had been before, he would try to finish what he had started. She was certainly outcast, or perhaps a ghost. She had no path set before her to follow, no easy conclusions left to draw.
When all those titles were stripped away, when she was lost for her duties and her obligations, she was left with a collared, trembling thing, crushed beneath the weight of her own uncertainty.
(Yet still, there is that little flicker in her ribcage. Without anything to keep it silenced, it burns brighter and louder than she has ever remembered it; she can feel it in the sweat beading on her brow and the nausea curling like a serpent in her stomach, in the way that her legs tremble and threaten to buckle although they feel as heavy as lead weights. She is not sure if the sickness is the blood loss or the burning, or some combination thereof, but either way, she dislikes how it is building, how it hovers at the back of her mind like a storm cloud on the farthest reaches of the horizon, a tendril of grey creeping closer and closer, almost inescapably. She is not sure that she can put out the fire that she has started, and, perhaps worse, she is not sure that she wants to; she is not sure what she wants, but she thinks that she might find it somewhere in the ashes, in what is left behind after the blaze.)
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
Isra with the war-drum heart “Move swift as the Wind and closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain.”
I
sra wants to tell the broken mare that she does not think that her god will answer her either. She also looks at the gold shining bright where blood and torn flesh should be. And looking at that she thinks, what need have we of gods? But Isra swallows down the words like bile and her soul nudges at all the cracks in her heart cut out with words like betrayal, and religion, and peace. She knows the mare needs hope to carry her feet up, up, up the steep and sloping path.
Her own gait matches the slow, swaying steps of the mare. It feels so strange her to her, to walk instead of run, to feel something like softness when she was starting to feel only rage, and fury, and something darker that that. On the other-side Fable tries so very hard to move slowly and not shake the footing inside his shadow loose. I could carry her. It would be faster.
Not yet, she needs to walk I think.She replies because she would need to walk too.
Isra is done with being saved.
So she walks on, and on, and she ignores the way the mare's voice shakes and trembles like bones in the wind (because she understands, oh, she understands). Her magic slumbers in her bones as she waits and she forget to count her steps. All she does is look up towards the mountains and wonders what she would do if they found gods hiding up beyond the low layer of clouds. She thinks, maybe, that she might turn their altars to sculptures of elk and thunder-birds. She thinks she might turn their stones to flakes of snow and flowers that say, we know now, we know what you are.
It takes her a moment to realize that there are words between them now in stead of silence and hooves on rock and loam. Perhaps it's terrible that at first she skips right over the name Seraphina and lands on Solterra. First she thinks of Eik (she always thinks of Eik).
But when she circles back around, there is no relief at having a name to put to her companion. There is only a sharp cut that forms on her heart, and a low smolder that makes her shiver in the cooling air. Isra listens, and listens, and her in her wake small shards of sharp rust catch the wind where there was once only grass and dirt.
Isra is stuck on that name Raum and it circles in her mind like leaves caught in a river's eddy. It circles and circles through her mind like a snake eating it's own tale. It circles, circles, circles and just as it's about to break she listens to Seraphina talk about Denocte, and crows, and war. She wants to feel bad, she wants to say she understands but she can't. Not now, not with all this fury running through her like a tornado. Oh how it runs faster than a meteor in her blood.
Fable tenses like a dragon should (like one of the old dragons of the night sky). His eyes flash white with sea-foam and his skin ripples with a storm like a wave in high-wind. He too remembers that name Raum and it is the first thing in this world that Fable has learned to hate. Unconsciously he flaps his wings as a hundred different instincts flare up in him. They say fly, protect, defend. And maybe they say kill too, but Isra is too lost in her own dark thing running through her to notice what words are living inside her dragon.
“He will not succeed.” There is no doubt as to what her voice sounds like now. It's poetry written with steel and inked with blood. It's a hundred stories of war bound in leather and dotted with tears. It's rage, it's fire and it beats in tune with her heart-beat that is now a war-drum. A hundred more blades of rust crack and flake in the wind as the land before them starts to sweep up towards the places where the gods first taught her how to grow a bloom of rage in her heart.
And that thing in her that was circling like a shark around what little was left of the word forgiveness, finally implodes. It collapses about itself like a sun and she burns. Isra burns and her magic rushes out from her like a wave.
“I am Isra, Queen of the Night Court.” Her teeth flash like stars and small moons in her sneer as she looks behind them towards where Raum might even now be destroying a hundred more lives. For the first time her title feels like more than a chain she wasn't quite ready for. It feels like a calling, like the reason the sea washed her up on a shore instead of carrying down into the deep dark.
“And I promise you that in the end he will not succeed.” The look in her eyes promises blood, and vengeance, and justice. It promises death. There is nothing left of the unicorn that filled all Seraphina's wounds with gold. Now she looks more than a unicorn who will take life before she saves it.
And oh, oh, she should be worried that she loves this dark, violent craving that is rising in her like a tidal wave against a cliff.
She thinks then of Acton and how his blood felt like hot tears against her throat when he died. She recalls how his eyes always looked like smoke and fire and all the things left after the words has burned. Isra wants to be like his eyes, those eyes that looked at her covered in dust, fearful of the light and said this is something worth saving.
That war-drum song that has replaced her heartbeat thrums and beats and throbs in her chest. Her magic is still rushing out like waves from her and the world is trembling and changing. The world is becoming like that dark and dangerous thing inside her.
Isra pauses (she doesn't know that she looks like a lion ready to pounce) and her horn flashes in the shadows of the mountain like a star, bright and sharp and hot. “You will not be alone when it comes time to free your nation. Raum has more crimes than this new one to answer for, and I promised myself that I would collect justice from him” The words, from his corpse, almost slip past her small moon teeth but she swallows those. They taste like soot and cinder instead of bile.
Fable is still watching them both and all the words are still moving around inside him like a current.
Her hoof, once poised like a blade above a throat, falls to the ground again. She starts to walk again, keeping her pace slow despite the fury that is yelling at her to run, run, run until the hard dirt becomes sand. A mission is a mission after-all and Seraphina deserves to figure out what form her own vengeance will take.
Isra's magic already knows what the unicorn's price will be.
Around them all the trees have become weapons. An oak is now a sword, rising silver and sharp towards the sky. A rock is now a pile of chains, rusted and coated in seaweed. The broken branches and leaves that once littered the ground around them are arrows, feathered and shining.
Isra doesn't notice what her magic has wrought and she if did---
If she did, she would have understood that they have no need for gods.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: we will have an actual book at the end of this
the truth is, I think we all want to be held after we let go I think we all want to be saved
She is met with rage, not sympathy. Seraphina prefers it; pity would only sting her already-wounded pride, and, though she feels herself falling to pieces, - feels it, like she is spiraling downhill slowly or falling off a cliff, watching the ground come rushing up to meet her, knows that she is seconds away from the crash and knows that she is unable to stop it – she is unwilling to suffer it until she has – fixed – this. She is always fixing, picking things up, forcing them back together. She is always-
The only way that she can stave it off – the parts of her that are frayed at the edges, threatening to tear themselves off her skin – is by looking elsewhere. Her eyes are on – consequence. Her thoughts are – calculations. Counting the dead. Counting losses. Counting days. Imagined days. She doesn’t know how long it is – what day was it when she fought Raum? She knows that it is fall. She knows that it is – dark. She stumbles for logistics, for plans; if she does not give herself the moment to breathe, she won’t give herself the moment to – collapse.
(Because she has lost too much, and she is sure that she is nothing. She does not fail to notice how her name registers nothing, nothing, nothing - at least for a moment, and then it is swallowed up by Raum. She does not console herself with the thought that she will be mourned in Solterra, because she won’t be. She won’t – delude – herself with the thoughts that the sun court will care about her death. She is a gaping expanse. She has been consumed, stolen, eaten alive. She is an afterthought; she is still smoke. All of her struggles have amounted to nothing, nothing, nothing - everything that she has worked to create is nothing. She is tired of fixing. She is tired.)
The Night Queen. Of course - she struggles to bite back her bitterness as she glances again at that beautiful dragon and that swirling magic, at the way that the world warps and twists to her will. She wonders if she knows how beloved she must be by her goddess to have been given such power, to have been gifted such a title, to have been chosen. (Solis’s words come back to her, his reassurance that he is always - always! - watching. Her god left her to bleed out in a field. Her god left her for the crows.)
Isra promises vengeance – she promises blood for blood, rage for rage. She knows, instinctively, as she watches the landscape, that she will take it. She knows that the Night Queen can bring Raum to his knees with a magic like this, that she can strike him to dust as little more than an afterthought. Her anger swirls in the air between them, a maelstrom, but she lingers just outside of its edges, still swirling. She should feel something at those words, anything. She should feel something.
But she is not comforted by her words, nor soothed by her rage; there is nothing but a quiet bitterness that comes creeping in from this promise of war and blood. Seraphina was raised in violence. Her life has been one long stretch of violence, with a few quiet moments in-between – she isn’t moved to any particular inspiration, save for a sort of resignation, by the thought of more of it. He will not succeed, but what is success? Any chaos he creates – a win. Any destruction. Any loss of faith, of love, of trust, of mercy, of kindness, of self - all a win.
Those things are always the first to go, in a war. If that is what he wants, she thinks, when she stares into those leonine blue eyes, those stormy seas, he might have already succeeded.
(Perhaps it is better for the fledgling Queen of Denocte this way. You cannot last long in this world soft; Seraphina knows that better than most.)
(But she wishes it were otherwise.) It is not the end that worries me, she wants to tell her. I know that tyrants always meet a bloody end. She knows that Raum’s downfall is inevitable, but the cost…
They are her people. She is not sure that Raum is fool enough to use his newfound power for war against the other courts in the immediate future; she thinks that he will be momentarily content to hold his new power and influence over the sun kingdom like a noose, to sate his thirst for violence and vengeance on the Solterrans. Isra has her vengeance to win. Seraphina has a nation’s worth of people to lose.
And here she is again; defining her motivations by negative space.
She should be furious, she knows. She should be furious enough to rip the world to shreds, furious enough to burn and burn and burn until nothing but ashes remain; but there is nothing left to burn, and she is still too busy counting her losses, struggling to figure out what place she has in this world where she is no longer a citizen of her court, where she is no longer a queen, or an emissary, or even a shoulder, where she is nothing but a woman who should be dead. What is her duty? She knows that it ends with blood. She can taste it on the tip of her tongue already, burning a copper brand into her mouth, into her words, into every little piece of her that she shows to the world. Her bleeding has been staunched by Isra’s gold-lined kisses, but she is still blood-coated, and, as she looks at the tempest of a woman who walks beside of her and sees war, war, war in her gaze, she wonders if she will drown in it, like she does in her dreams.
(The court is on fire. The Terminus laps red against the docks. And the eyes, following her everywhere – she is never out of sight. She is never alone. She always carries those ghosts like a funeral shroud.)
She is full of puzzle pieces that are still trying to figure out how they fit together. Her heart does not normally come barreling out of her chest, but now it is in her throat, and her collar is burning around it. It itches around the edges, – how long has it been since the band of silver has itched? – and, in spite of the cool autumn air swirling around her, it feels as hot as the sun, searing like an iron brand into her flesh. (But the fire is some internal force.)
She wants to take it off. She wants to take it off.
For a moment, her mind lingers on the clasp, but she does not shake it off. She is being foolish again; the collar will never leave her throat. (But it is choking her.) She tries to summon forth something, to let that flame burning holes in her stomach come dribbling out of her mouth in volcanic streams, but her oration, as always, fails her when she needs it. She tells herself to think, but she isn’t listening. She chains herself to the idea of Veneror, to the distant goal of regicide, and she tells herself that is all that matters. As long as she gets there…
As long as she sees this through to the end. (But it is never over, and she can never breathe. The collar tugs tight around her throat, and she feels like she is choking, though she knows that it is no tighter than usual.)
She does not have any grand words to offer in response, so, instead, she grapples for a question. “What has he done to you?”
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
Isra and her thoughts of war “then you speak it like it's a still-beating heart clenched in your fist ”
A
A million thoughts are running through her head in pillars of spiced smoke. There are maps blooming out in the space behind her eyes like blots of ink. Weapons are etching runes into surface of her bones. All of the trees start to look like arrows and blades jutting into the canopy instead of something mighty and full of life. This journey up the mountainside does not feel to Isra like a pilgrimage.
It feels like a rising, like she is flame and smoke and the mountain nothing more than a pile of dried wood begging to burn.
Each step blurs into the next and they're still walking. She's as aware of Seraphina's introspection as she is her own whirlpool of change that's dragging her under. Fable is a steady current at their side and each wolf and cougar in the woods only watches them pass with something like wariness staying their predator wants. The ground slopes up and up and Isra still thinks not of gods but of magic and the beast it's becoming inside her bones. (she thinks of rage too, always rage).
And if the pebbles turn to bits of rust and bone at her hooves who is there left to blame for the beast?
She wants to swallow the story when Seraphina asks it off her. She wants to drown all the words in blackness and silence. Isra doesn't want to think of anything but fury now. She doesn't want to cry. But she's still a storyteller (though she wants to be war) and the words are already pooling like magma and rock against the ivory of her teeth. So she narrows her gaze to nothing but the span of Fables wings and the darkness gathering there.
The words start to pour out like ash and she tries so very hard to not think of them as anything more than words. “It started out as a disagreement between only he and I on what motivates those with empty bellies and broken-hearts. I did not think violence would be the only answer for them.” Something in her own gaze shatters when she realizes that all she has left now is violence-- violence, magic and a dragon. All she has is hope of revenge and that maybe, just maybe, peace might come in the shadow of Raum's grave. “Perhaps if I didn't turn his blade to a daisy only words would have lived in the space between us. But I did and he attacked and the war between us was mounted.” This time when she looks away from Fable her eyes catch on the sleek shine of gold in the dim light. They blaze a little brighter, a little more like a sea lit by a hundred falling stars.
“I should have killed him then and then Acton, my first friend in this place, would still be alive and your court would have been safe.” And oh, her look promises a thousand injuries destined to be carved out on skin pale as bone. All her regret has turned to rage and all her rage to purpose that pulses like a sun in her bones. “He used a boy to drug and steal me away at the end of the midsummer festival. I awoke in a cave on this mountain.” She swallows all the details that might suggest the existence of that wickedness lurking in her skin. That part she's still saving for war (hoping that perhaps she might drain it out of her with the drops of Raum's suffering).
Her eyes still blaze when Fable interrupts with a soft huff and the thought, there are statues up ahead, they look broken.. Isra remembers then that this, for Seraphina, is more than just a path to the battlefield. The brightness in her gaze gentles as much as it can, becoming a moon instead of a burning star. She tries to smile too but it's too tense to be soft. “I hope your god can help you.” Her voice falls short to the silence because what she wants to say is that, even if your god does nothing for you I will, I promise I will.
But she knows how hot the fire of religion can burn. Once she believed in the sea and the night, now she only believes in unicorns and dragons. And so she looks back into the gloom and shadows like she imagines a protector might.
Isra and her dragon begin their waiting, and between them runs not comfort but plans for the coming war.
