[P] I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORS--

[Seraphina]

AND THERE'S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE OF A GIRL AGAINST HERSELF

This place is a graveyard.

This place is a graveyard – and she still isn’t sure why she’s returned to it.

Ereshkigal perches on her shoulders, strangely silent; she has that damned look curled across her beak, Seraphina is sure, though she does not look at her for confirmation. Their reflections in the mirror-like shards of crystal ripple as she moves, chasing after them like shadows on the wall. Ereshkigal is a shape-shifter, in one lion-mawed and winged, in one chimeric and scorpion-tailed, in one thousand-eyed and flaming, in one an unrecognizable and tentacled mass. She is always similar to herself, but somehow looking at the other-Seraphinas is more horrifying than looking at the other-Ereshkigals.

She sees – reality, fractured. Recent. She doesn’t look for long; this is not where she wants to think of how she has spent her last few weeks.

She remembers the first one she saw. Still-collared. Still-young. Her features illuminated in the multicolored light of the stained glass windows that used to occupy the walls of the throne room – the ones that were broken and melted down in the Davke attack. She looked at it, and she was sure, somehow, that she was looking at herself the day that she had taken that accursed throne.

It is far from the worst of them, or the most frustrating. She sees herself as a child, dead-eyed and bloody, mimicking her movements. She sees herself a year ago, bony and aching, half-starved and mad-eyed. She sees herself as emissary, herself as queen, herself coated in a layer of blood and ash, herself suspended in those rare moments of peace that she can barely recall anymore; all the goodness is clouded up. (She is quietly sure that it used to be there, in the spaces between each jagged tragedy – but she can only see the spikes, not the lulls.)

But. But. But - the worst ones of all are the ones that didn’t come to pass. There is a Seraphina with a golden crown on her brow rather than a mass of metal scars, an aberration that she would never let come to pass; she is older, and wiser, and the wrinkles around her eyes seem strangely kind. There is a happy Seraphina walking opposite her, lips upturned in a smile that she couldn’t hope to mimic, a certain lovely fondness in her mismatched eyes that Seraphina – the real Seraphina – can barely look at because she cannot imagine it settling across her own face. (A Seraphina that loves on the left, and loves freely, loves with a love that is not borne of duty or obligation or snipped at the bud before it could ever reach blossom.) There is a Seraphina who never removed her collar, staring her down with haunting, dull eyes. She regards her for a moment. Sometimes she misses the apathy, even longs for it. It was easier.

What catches her eye, really catches her eye – as she turns a jagged corner, avoiding a toothy mass of crystalline spikes that poke out from the wall in a veritable trap – is the massive, unblemished chunk of crystal across from her. This reflection does not mimic her. It lies in a heap, like crumpled paper, and she can barely see something white growing near her fallen muzzle.

She shudders; shivers run the length of her spine, and she can’t seem to stop them. Her teeth chatter, hard, and Ereshkigal is laughing, but she can’t tell if it is in her head or aloud – either way, it echoes, raucous.

It’s wretched, seeing herself bleed out in third person. She looks at her reflection, jaw gritted, and she feels a bloom of resent pulsing up inside of her chest. Her eyes train on the bloody gash across her cheek, dripping a puddle on the muddy ground, and then on the crop of moonflowers – pristine white, where they aren’t splashed red with her blood. They are upturned towards the sky, and only barely visible. She resents them. She resents them, with their open-white faces, like she resents the way that the moon stared down on her as she lie bleeding out, like she resents the man who did that to her, like she resents the entitlement that bred him-

(But, then, it was the night queen who saved her. How ironic.)

She forces her eyes away from the sight – she has never been good at looking away from things – and keeps walking.

(She cannot help but look back over her shoulder before the shard is out-of-sight; the surface is broken in her wake, lined with hairline cracks extending from an impact wound in the center.

Her mind can do awful things. She must always silence that second heart that pulses and throbs within her, keep it still – she knows that, but it is much harder to do than it used to be.)

She presses forward, a cascade of white hair trailing behind her like a banner of surrender.

---

@Bexley || physically I cannot stand my anticipation for this thread

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Bexley]

“DEATH ITSELF IS NOT THE WORST THING.
worse still is to live when you want to die."

Bexley Briar is back from the dead.

Her first thought is exactly that. Well—I am back from the dead.

The second one is: Raum isn’t.

The third one she both thinks and casts down into hell, like a well-wish for the sinners, with a laugh: suck on that.

Bexley Briar is back from the dead. The amount of times she has narrowly avoided needing a graveplot should have been evidence enough that even a year in the aether, a year gone from the surface of the world, would not be confirmation of her death. (Whenever it does happen—if it does happen—the only valid attestation will have to be the body itself. Anything less would be an enemy’s wishful thinking.) So Bexley is less surprised by this development than she is resigned to the fact of it. She is not even particularly sure that she’d rather be alive than dead, but for revenge’s sake she’s committed to the bit, and anyway, fate has convinced her—being dead doesn’t really suit me.

But there is a stop between the stations of the dead and living that Bexley did not know existed until she stumbled into it. And this island is that stop.

When she wakes up—when she realizes, I am back from the dead—it is swifter than a gunshot.

Cleaner than a slash across the throat. One minute there is only darkness: the backs of her eyelids are patterned with paisley. The world, if there is anything left of it, is dizzingly far away, a shipwreck bound to the bottom of the ocean. There are noises, voices, that seep in from the outside, but they are muffled by those twenty thousand leagues. The world, if there is anything left of it, and the noises and voices that inhabit it, were all willing to drown to get away from her.

For a moment she wants to cry. The world is full of leaving; for her to leave it too would not be such a terrible loss. Acton has already left. And Florentine. And Seraphina. For a moment she wants to cry. The feeling builds in her, builds and builds, and every inch it crawls closer to her brain it seems to grow infinitely more powerful, more overwhelming, and now her whole body is searing hot, and her chest falls in on itself like it’s carrying the world’s greatest weight, and even in the darkness tears prickle behind her eyes until it feels like fire, and salt rises in her throat—

And the next second, she is up.

The world unfolds at breakneck speed.

Cold. Ice. When she blinks, her gaze is half-clouded with the snow that clings to her lashes, as though she has been laying out in the open freeze for days and days. The air has teeth; underfoot the grass is crackling with a thin iridescent layer of frost. And just as she notes all this a snow-flecked, loud-enough-to-roar gust of wind comes rushing out of the trees, making a keening noise like a wolf-howl, and smashes into her. First her chest; then it pours over every inch of skin and leaves her abruptly, aggressively, shivering.

It’s winter.

The realization does not creep up. It hits her—fast and sharp and hard, Joan of Arc’s arrow. For a moment she struggles to remember what season it had been when she—died, or left, or whatever it was—but some part of her, more awake than the rest, gently suggests that remembering at all might be a bad idea.

Yet, even without really remembering, Bexley is certain the island didn’t look like this the last time she was here.

There are no trees. No bushes, no animals. Instead, the vast expanse of the island is broken up by huge, towering shards of star-silver and glass. It is, as far as Bexley can see, a forest of mirrors: mirrors that reflect the weak light of the sun until it becomes bright, Solterra bright, hurt-the-eyes bright; mirrors that play off each other until they become a maze, dizzyingly cold and infinite; mirrors that show her, her, her.

(Bexley realizes, very faintly, and with a mild sense of disgust, that it must have been months since she’s last looked in a mirror.)

She steps forward.

In perfect time, a girl pours like molten gold into a mirror on her left.

The girl is... small. Rangy. She carries herself with an almost exuberant bounce. Her eyes are bright with mischief, and when she turns her head to call to someone behind her—someone, or some mirage, even these magic mirrors are not powerful enough to make an image of—her face is unblemished.

She opens her mouth to laugh, and the reflection shatters.

Bexley steps forward again. This time a body shows up on the right, and it’s far closer to matching the real one that precedes it. This one is full-grown and dull-gold. Her white hair is shorn into a long, blunt cut, and her head snakes low as she walks. She has the same scar, eye to nostril, but hers looks darker and more deeply healed, and white hair is even starting to grow over the edges. Bexley realizes what is wrong with her with a start.

Her necklace is gone.

She steps forward and another one follows, this time trailing a young Apolonia at her hip, the sight of which makes Bexley’s eyes burn; and again, and a new reflection shows her collapsed on the floor of the canyon, breathing in bright dust; the one after that shows her panting, spit-slick, with Acton’s blood spattered over her chest; and the one after that she cannot look at; and the one after that is—

Bexley stops.

“Well,” she says sardonically. “You’re not me.”

[Seraphina]

AND THERE'S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE OF A GIRL AGAINST HERSELF

Her corpse follows her.

The worst part about it isn’t the reminder. It is the fact that she has not changed at all. It is the fact that she still looks the same - there are no signs of the passage of time worn onto her face or onto her frame, no sense that she has outlived the dying girl confined to the frame. She is a corpse and the corpse is her, and, although only one of them is walking, they are both moving in the same direction.

She keeps walking. She walks faster and faster, but the image jumps from frame to frame, reflects itself from mirror to mirror. She walks and walks and walks and walks, but, even when she breaks into a run, her hooves skidding against the slick, reflective surface of mirror-shards below, she can’t escape it. (Even when she looks away, the image is burnt two-tone into her mind’s eye; she sees herself dead in third person, she sees the moon in the sky through a veil of blood and white blooms.) The world has moved on, and she is still the same. She died there, in that field. He killed her. He killed her. She doesn’t know who she is, now, but she isn’t Seraphina.

She is what is left behind after a fire. A city’s skeleton. Not its substance. She looks over into a mirror, and she is standing above her own corpse, her coat smeared with blood and ash. Who is the murderer here-? Oh, he’d ruined her.

(Oh – she’d ruined herself.)

She turns corner after corner, wanders the labyrinth. Her breath trails her, a spectral fog, and her hair untangles from its tight braids, billowing behind her as though she is suspended underwater; her hooves stop touching the ground, and she doesn’t even notice.

She isn’t looking to get out, quite. If she wanted to escape, she could – Ereshkigal is still perched on her shoulders, and she could easily fly up and over the spires, guide her back to the shore and the bridge and the desert in the distance. But she doesn’t. Some morbid part of her longs to smash her jaw down against the cold stone and scream at herself to look at the reflection. She has marinated in her misery for so, so long. (She has almost forgotten what it feels like to be otherwise.) There is a part of her that wants to confront it – and shatter it to pieces, like the mirror.

She winds a corner and-

Blue eyes. Electric blue, like a shock to the system or a knife to the ribs. She’d recognize them anywhere.

Well, says the golden girl, her tone acrid, you’re not me.

“No,” she says, “I’m not.”

So – there are two girls standing there now, in a sea of mirrors. One silver. One gold. Two dead girls, with two twin scars across their faces. Two wraiths, maybe (she is depleted enough for it), but Bexley feels more like a banshee.

She isn’t sure why she’s back. She isn’t sure why either of them are back, or still here. Most of the time, she doesn’t want to be. But she looks at the familiar features of her once-reagent, which are still gold gold gold, brighter and more brilliant than Solis could ever hope to be, and she feels a gnawing sense of something in her chest. It’s almost relief. She hasn’t felt it in a while.

She could laugh. She could cry – but she never does.

“I thought you were-“ Her voice stumbles, slightly; catches in her throat, like she isn’t quite willing to spit out the rest of the sentence. (When she’d heard it, when she heard that Bexley Briar is- gone, she hadn’t wanted to admit it. She couldn’t admit it – not that she’d failed her, too, not that she’d abandoned her like every other sharp and fragmented shard of her former lives. That would be too much.) “-dead. I should have known better.” Who could kill Bexley Briar? Or, the better question: why would she ever think that either of them would be allowed to die?

They always say that the worst part is the wound. The knife. The bear’s claws. The cave. But Seraphina knows better. She has always known better. The worst part is remembering how to stand, and-

and even if you remember, you never quite remember right.

---

@Bexley || hello my Sera-Emo is rusty but I love you both

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Bexley]

“DEATH ITSELF IS NOT THE WORST THING.
worse still is to live when you want to die."

Perhaps Bexley is less disturbed than she should be by these herself-reflections. They do nip at her heels; their faces crowd the edges of her vision, peering out at her from shards of mirror in the same way a sunflower cranes toward the light.

But she is not… afraid. Not disturbed, not even when these versions of her start coughing up dark blood, or split their own faces in half by pulling, in a manic frenzy, at the pale-gray seams. (Underneath, they are not muscle or bone but pure yellow light; when their lips split, gold spills out, and splashes onto the silver ground with an almost-acid hiss.) Still—she is not afraid. And perhaps it is because Bexley knows how little of the world is guaranteed to be real, and she knows this because she has done her fair share of making illusions.

For the first moment Bexley sees Seraphina, that is her thought. This must be an illusion. Solis is once again playing tricks on her, or Bexley’s own brain has suffered so much that it cannot not make things up. Her imagination and her magic must be acting as a shield, subconsciously trying to protect Bexley from the knowledge that without Seraphina—without her and Acton, without Eik, without Solterra as their home—there is simply nothing left to love.

For that first moment, Bexley thinks dryly that her magic must have grown more powerful in sleep: she’s really outdone herself this time. Seraphina is perfect. She looks solid and lively. The gray of her skin is just as it should be, and the scars on her cheek catch light like real metal; even her eyes stare back at Bexley with an elan that is unusual for phantoms, brighter and deeper than most of these mirror-girls’ gazes.

But then her mouth opens.

Seraphina speaks. Her illusions—they can't do that.

And Bexley slams through all of the stages of grief, shock and realization instantaneously.

Her body flashes sun-hot, then ice-cold; her lips part slightly. She’s rocked, enough that she almost physically stumbles, by the sharpness of the breath she inhales—by the sheer, mind-numbing surprise that crashes through her—but the feeling that follows that is unadulterated relief.

A relief so strong it sets her teeth on edge. A relief better than a bar-night buzz, a relief that—despite the creeping sense of being watched by this forest of mirrors, and the knot that still rests in her stomach—manages to break Bexley’s face into a wide, catty smile. For a moment, the feeling is so strong it becomes dizzying, and Bexley feels as though she is falling: the world opens up on all sides, like the unfolding of a flower, and she is plunging out of the hungry stomach-pit of this terrible world and into its enchanting, paradisaical counterpart.

I thought you were dead.

Bexley laughs.

It must be the first time she's laughed in months, and the sound of it is... not quite right. It is not an easy thing, either. It rips out of her hoarsely, pretty, in a terrible way; a song beaten badly out of shape. Windchimes that haven't quite been allowed to click.

When she hears it, her mouth snaps shut abruptly. It's hard to tell whether the sudden stop is out of embarrassment or simple shock, that she is capable of making a noise like that—but it is only a moment later that she huffs: "Yeah, well. So did I."

Silence, then. The forest of mirrors seems almost to tremble around them. In its many silver surfaces, Bexley realizes that their reflections are starting to interact. In one, they stand side by side in front of the walls of the city; the spot where Eik should be is filled only by a darkness in the shape of him. In another, they fight viciously on the steppe, a metallic blur of movement, cut up in places by the flash of hooves or teeth. And in yet another—and this is the one that makes Bexley's stomach drop, her teeth itch—they are not themselves at all but two headstones, unmarked, in an overfull Solterran graveyard.

She looks away. Clears her throat.

"And you," she says, suddenly. Her eyes flash to Seraphina's; for a moment they grow dark, almost-but-not-quite angry. "You were supposed to be dead, too. You've been gone. Uh. A long time."

She does not say the rest of it: long enough for me to miss. Badly. Like a phantom limb.

Long enough for me to worry about.

Long enough that I want to say I love you.

Bexley says none of it, and ducks her head, so the sudden wet shine in her eyes won't catch the light of the mirrors.

[Seraphina]

AND THERE'S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE OF A GIRL AGAINST HERSELF

Seraphina does not feel like herself, lately.

Sometimes she feels like she is unraveling and then the room unravels with her. She finds herself standing among a sea of shattered glass and broken objects, and then it sinks in slowly why they are broken, why she is cut, why she is bleeding. She doesn’t mean to do it. She barely even thinks about doing it. She should feel terrified by it, but more often she feels nothing at all. Seraphina does not feel like herself, lately, and, although she knows that she should be getting better – she has no reason not to be better, with Raum dead -, sometimes she thinks – knows – that she is becoming worse.

They are standing among a spiral of mirrors, their mingled reflections dancing the surface of the glass. Her eyes are trained on Bexley – Bexley solid, beaten gold, real and warm and alive in front of her – but she sees the images stained across her peripheral vision. She sees the past, in fragments; finding Bexley mostly-dead in a collapsed cave, appointing her Emissary in the wake of Avdotya’s betrayal, standing at the summit of the gods. (There are bits of futures, too, and things that never came to pass; but Seraphina is barely sure how to piece that blur of images together without context, and she doesn’t think that she wants to know. She looks away. At Bexley.)

When she speaks, she sees stages of shock settle across the golden girl’s features. (She looks older than her, now. Still lovelier, but older. The revelation makes her feel colder than the wind, like her skin is in danger of icing over.) Stages of shock, and then something familiar - that wild-eyed, ferocious smile breaks across her lips. Seraphina doesn’t know what to do with it. She’s relieved, because it is Bexley; she’s horrified, because it reminds her of a past that haunts, and she can’t see past the teeth. I thought you were dead, she says, and then-

Bexley laughs.

It is a wild, hoarse sound that somehow reminds her of Ereshkigal. It sounds like she hasn’t laughed in months. It sounds like she just crawled out of a grave – like her mouth is still dry and dirty from the coffin. Seraphina doesn’t smile, exactly. She barely remembers how; but she feels some strange, faint warmth at the sound, ugly as it is. It is gone as quickly as it appeared, Bexley’s mouth snapped shut – she isn’t sure if it’s vainglory humiliation or more shock. Both options are plausible, with her. Yeah, well. So did I.

And then silence. She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t know what to say.

She clears her throat. Her eyes train on her – sharp and cyan. And you, she says, her tone not-quite-accusatory and not-quite-angry; it makes her wince regardless. You were supposed to be dead, too. You’ve been gone. Uhh. A long time. For a moment, Seraphina imagines a world where she could have made some triumphant return from the grave; where she could have stepped out of this perpetual darkness and back out into the sun, where she knows that she should be.

It is reflected in the mirror, behind Bexley. A Seraphina crowned again. A Seraphina who looks happy to be alive, a Seraphina who isn’t alone, with a figure she thinks that she might recognize, or a few of them. There are two smaller silhouettes, two, a girl with ice-blue eyes and a boy with gold – but they are gone before she can get a good look at them, scattered like ashes on the wind, and then she is just staring at the dark form of herself again, depleted and miserable.

It wouldn’t be realistic anyways.

She tries to find the right words. “After I ‘died,’” she says, “I didn’t know how to...how to return. I’m…sorry.” The apology fits awkwardly in her mouth; she isn’t quite sure what to do with it. She still doesn’t know how to return - she doesn’t know how to be Seraphina anymore, for herself or for anyone else. She hadn’t thought that it mattered, and she isn’t sure what to do with the revelation that maybe, maybe it did.

There are horrible images scrawled on the walls. On the mirrors. She wonders what they would look like shattered, a sea of broken glass swirling around their hooves, carried thin and glittering by the breeze; she wonders and wonders and wonders. A hairline fracture appears in the glass in front of her, right over her face. She forces herself to stop wondering.

Her eyes train back on Bexley. Her head is dipped; she cannot meet her eyes. “What happened to you?” She’s sure that she could have found out, if she’d tried – but she didn’t want to know. The thought made her feel empty and nauseous and bitter and angry, and, Solis, she hadn’t wanted to know. She was so tired of knowing horrible things.

But now she wonders. Earnestly. Maybe it is some terrible desire for something to relate to - what horrible thing killed you and brought you back a revenant, too?

---

@Bexley || wondering if this is coherent because I wrote half of it at like midnight on days of sleep deprivation BUT I've gotta say, I'm really loving how mutually unhinged they are

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Bexley]

“DEATH ITSELF IS NOT THE WORST THING.
worse still is to live when you want to die."

They have changed, Bexley thinks. Or they haven’t at all—and the deep sense of dread that fills her when she looks at Seraphina, and the terrible, magical world in the mirrors around them, only means that she is what is wrong with both of them.

Because Seraphina looks almost the same. She looks young, and clean, carefully kempt; her coat is the starshine of real silver, still bright when even it’s trapped inside this maze of mirrors; and Bexley cannot remember the exact moment they first met, her memory clouded with the passage of time and a fierce refusal to look into the past, but she thinks Sera must have looked nearly identical. Stoic. Proportions so perfect they’re almost doll-like, if a doll were made for killing. Her eyes are molten in the strange gray light.

Back then, when they first met—whenever it was—Bexley would have been young too. (Child-young, she thinks, looking back at it. It would have been less than a year since leaving home. Less than a year since her first taste of death, and back then was so long ago she remembers being convinced that that heartbreak would be her worst.) But she has aged by now; Seraphina has not. And when Bexley swallows her bitterness she can’t help wondering just who is so dedicated to ruining the both of them.

Worst case scenario, she thinks, it is no one: it is not that they are being punished, but that they are punishing themselves, and no one cares enough to stop them.

But that—that is too horrible to think about.

So she doesn’t. She won’t. She pushes the welling horror down, down, down, into the pit of her chest, into the crevices of her ribs and legs, and if Bexley feels any real, dizzying, black-at-the-edges panic—well, it does not make an appearance. At least not as much as her body might threaten to show it. Her only visible reaction to the thought, and to the scenes that play over the mirror-walls, is a short huff of breath that rips into the air with wild teeth. (But inside she is trembling, almost. Stupid lamb in the slaughterhouse; deer fleeing the arrow. The visions of them follow her like a hungry dog. The happy scenes are almost worse than the violent ones, because Bexley can imagine being dead but not being content: their sheer impossibility will haunt her all the way down, into the dark.)

I'm... sorry.

Bexley's reaction is instant. "Euch," she spits, face screwing up in a flash of immediate disgust: "Don't ever say that again. It doesn't suit you." Her expression remains half-cocked, somewhere between repulsed and unconvinced, like she can’t quite believe the phrase even came out of Seraphina’s mouth and wouldn’t want to, anyway; the fact that the girl-queen can’t even meet her eyes afterward only cements the feeling that this is wrong.

Maybe, Bex thinks, half-serious, they aren’t real. Maybe this space between them is a mirror, and the real gold and silver girls are somewhere far away, outside this little hell. Maybe they are watching from their paradise on the outside, and maybe they are laughing because the situation is so ridiculous, or crying because it is so real; and she cannot decide which one would be worse, and for who.

It doesn’t matter. None of this is real. Nothing is real.

Bexley runs her tongue around her teeth. When Seraphina’s words hit her, they do so with completely undue force—she winces at the sound of it, scraping, grating against her ear, making her teeth itch and her shoulders tense together. Rigidly she pushes a piece of bright-white hair off her face and settles it behind her cheek.

“I…” Her voice trails off; but before it fades completely it wavers, and Bexley wonders bitterly who she has become, who is this girl with a failing voice. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Her mouth settles into a thin line. She watches Seraphina’s mismatched eyes fall away from her and down to the mirror-glazed ground between them.

And then—against her better judgement (although really, when has good judgement ever been a factor?)—she reaches out to brush her mouth against the girl-queen’s cheek.

[Seraphina]

AND THERE'S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE OF A GIRL AGAINST HERSELF

It is easier to look at the Bexleys-in-the-mirror than the real thing. Seraphina wonders why. It is probably guilt. (It is usually guilt, nowadays.)

Her disgust at Seraphina’s apology is palpable, and she thinks that it is probably overstated; nevertheless, she gives a nod of her head, and she resists the urge to apologize for apologizing, which would be quite the opposite of what Bexley had just told her to never do again. She doesn’t seem to believe it. Seraphina does mean it, though – she just can’t quite believe that her disappearance mattered in the first place.

But that is irrelevant.

The question - what happened to you? - makes her wince.

Seraphina wonders why; she assumes, then, that she doesn’t want to talk about it. (Does she want to talk about her death?) At any rate, Bexley offers no answer. I… she says, and then trails off, her tone wavering in a way that is quite unlike her, I don’t know. Does it matter?

She doesn’t know. Seraphina cannot help but think that it is a bad thing that she doesn’t, maybe even a terrible one – because surely she should. (Unless she is lying.) But she can’t bring herself to say it, to press any further. This all feels far too fragile to threaten.

“No,” she says, slowly. “I guess it doesn’t.” It probably should; she can’t quite imagine a Bexley Briar that wouldn’t react to such an offense with hellfire and brimstone, a Bexley Briar that wouldn’t come back from the dead ready to drag whoever – or whatever – had put her into the ground down into the grave with her. Compared to the simple fact that Bexley is alive, however, Seraphina can’t help but think that it is irrelevant.

She moves, then. A streak of gold-and-white-blonde, reflected a hundred times in little shards of mirror. She watches her reflection move, not the real thing, even when she can feel her breath on her skin. She watches herself in third person.

When she presses her lips to Seraphina’s cheek, she does not jerk away.

She probably should, she thinks, belatedly; it would be more Seraphina-like if she did. But she doesn’t. She remains frozen in place until Bexley herself draws away, and then she is the one to carelessly breach her personal space. She rests her jaw against the curve of her skull, sockets her forehead against the curve of her neck – something like an embrace, but not quite.

(The mirrors refract the image horribly. She does not look at them – she won’t look at them.)

Somewhere between the love letters, or one set of moon-silver eyes or another, or a rare, unguarded touch – somewhere amidst all of that, she’d come to the terrible realization that she could love someone, after all. Maybe she did. (Maybe she does.) The revelation was cruel. It doesn’t matter. Her heart is probably broken. She probably did it to herself. It doesn’t matter.

She’s loved plenty of things in her life, when forced to consider it. She doesn’t want to think about it, but she has – she’s loved Solterra, and she’s loved her god, and she’s loved so, so many people in so many different ways.

She hasn’t deserved a moment of it. Not the affection she’d received, nor the faith, nor the loyalty, nor the devotion. She couldn’t make any of them happy; she’d never be able to do that. She’d done nothing but ruin them, drag them down with her.

But – the worst of it is how desperately she doesn’t want to be alone.

The worst of it is how desperately she wants to beg someone to stay. The worst of it is how desperately she wants to be found, no matter how she runs. The worst of it is how she can never, ever let that happen – the worst of that is how she knows it only means pulling someone else into her misery. She wants to be alone. She is an infliction, now. She doesn’t want to be alone.

She lingers. Not for long. Long enough to mean – something, probably -, but not for long. Not long enough to matter. And then she pulls herself away, and she steps back, forcing her expression into something unreadable. (Ereshkigal is laughing. Laughing, laughing, laughing - and the sound rings horribly between her ears. Foolish girly, she hisses, like a breath of wind. Seraphina ignores her.)

“Should we look for a way out?”

---

@Bexley || hahahahahahahha(hahahahahahahahahahahahhaha)

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Bexley]

“DEATH ITSELF IS NOT THE WORST THING.
worse still is to live when you want to die."

What happened to you?

The question rings in her head long after she’s answered it. It surfaces again and again in her thoughts, crawling through the dark haze of all those lost memories: it is audible even over the sound of Seraphina’s voice, Bexley’s own voice; audible over the pounding of her heart in her chest, her breath in the air, her blood in her ears.

What happened to you?

She blinks hard, struggling to focus. All these mirrors are starting to blend into one another. The world is smudged like an oil painting, fuzzy where the colors meet and spilling all over the place. The question, she knows, is not a rhetorical one: Seraphina really does want to know what happened. Why she disappeared. Where she was. And Bexley doesn’t remember—really, she doesn’t—but what happened to you as a question doesn’t make her think of the amnesia, anyway.

It makes her think of all these past Bexleys, living in the mirrors. The version of her that still exists as a child, unscarred and god-magical; and the one that is slightly older, brusquely overconfident on her way into the desert; and the girl that grew flames for hair and broke her lover’s knee; and, more important than all of these, the version of her that she remembers being most purely: Seraphina’s Bexley. Regent of Solterra. White-haired, blue-eyed, all-powerful.

What happened to you? Bexley thinks bitterly. She thinks it as she gazes blankly at that girl, who stands in a piece of silver glass, her head turned away, poured over by ten thousand urns of golden light. I was meant to be you. Forever.

And when that girl looks back at her it is all she can do not to scream.

She sniffles without thinking, and a glob of liquid gold dribbles out of her nose and onto the ground. She does not notice that her skin has become to shine, to grow warm and sparkle, and the harsh, glittering light only gains intensity as it bounces from mirror to mirror to mirror. The island grows unbearably bright, a thousand white lanterns, a hundred suns; Bexley’s coat sizzles and turns dark at points, like she’s being burnt; some of the mirrors seem to melt at the edges—

When she touches Seraphina, the world goes blissfully dark.

For once in her life Bexley swallows down the urge to speak. Instead—she breathes. In. Out. Seraphina is living-warm; she smells like home, the ashy heat of sand, dust from blocks of limestone, nag champa. Up close, the golden girl thinks, her stripes are almost like Neerja’s; and from here, just a few inches away, she almost thinks she can see the strip of matted-down skin where Sera’s collar used to rest.

She tries not to think about the strangeness of this. How deeply and completely she’d expected to be turned away. What happened to you? she thinks, and she is both entranced by and afraid of the soft touch of Seraphina’s throat against her poll, Seraphina’s jaw against the side of her neck,

Seraphina,

Seraphina,

Seraphina.

When they draw apart, Bexley tries not to think of how half-full she feels. How cold her skin is suddenly. How she almost shivers when the wind rushes in against the spots they used to touch.

“Right,” she says, and clears her throat. “We should. Let’s.”

And she follows the queen into the maze of mirrors.