[AW] and I'll love some littler things

[Seraphina]

I CAN'T TELL IF IT'S WORSE TO WALK THROUGH
a forest with a path or without (a path). / damage done and damage made. / can I be gentle? / I mean / can I be gentle

☼

The realization is closer than anything to hell.

It is winter and it is dark. The night is not clouded; in fact, it is almost perfectly clear, and the moon is round and full in the middle of the sky, half-way through her nightly arc across the cosmos. The grass in the plain, which normally rises flaxen-gold to her stomach, is dead and flat. (She is trying not to think of her stomach.) The corpses of each blade crunch beneath her hooves, mingled with a fine coat of frost, as she walks the crest of a gentle hillside. Her magic is absent. When it stirs, she feels other things inside of her stir with it, and, and-

Her thoughts have been a cacophony of no no no for – she can’t put a name to the amount of time. It doesn’t mean anything to her, anymore, but she wishes that it did. Seraphina does not like to admit to it, but there have been many moments in her life when she has thought to herself, I cannot do it. She has never felt any of them so deeply, so sharply, as she does the one that she is standing in.

She did not think that she would live past a year. (In many ways, she was right.) She did not think that she could serve as a proper Emissary. (She was right.) She did not think that she would make a good queen, though she wanted to be one. (She was right.) She did not think that she would be able to defeat Raum. (She was right.) And oh, Seraphina did not want this. She would not have chosen this. When her gaze strays to the soft, silver swell of her sides, barely noticeable now (but not for long, she suspects), she knows that she would not have chosen this.

And: when she thinks I cannot do this this time, her worst fear is that she will be proven right all over again.

She stops beneath a gnarled and barren tree. Any refuge that she finds beneath its empty branches is pointless; it is either dead or sleeping, and probably dead, and the black arc of branches and thin trunk provide no shelter from the elements, or from the bite of winter cold. She barely feels it, though. She isn’t cold. She knows that she should be, that she always is, but she isn’t.

Seraphina doesn’t want to go home. She wants to be anywhere else. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go – so now she is here, in a place that she has scarcely ever visited, hoping to find some semblance of reassurance (or a distraction, at least) in the utter insignificance in the winter-crushed landscape.

Ereshkigal, her black form like a cloaked reaper in the branches above, whispers between her ears in a voice that is the upward curve of a sneer. “What are you going to name them?”

When she whispers a response, she speaks it aloud; her voice quakes, and then falters entirely. “Them?”

Ereshkigal smiles. In the sheen of pale light, the arc of her teeth puts her in mind of a crescent moon. “There are two.” She knows, of course. She would - the demon, the soul-collector, the judge. Somehow, Seraphina does not want her to look at her. Somehow, she does not want her to look at them.

She feels that her legs might give out beneath her weight, but, instead, they lock beneath her, going stiff and straight as oak. (They are quivering, and not from the cold.) Not one, but two. Of course. Of course - she cannot even bear the thought of one, but there are two. Seraphina feels like she could sob. She feels like she could weep, and she could collapse, and she could crumble. She longs for it, even.

She does not cry. She does not weep. No wordless sobs pass her mouth, or bubble in her throat; not even a silent tear tracks the charcoal curve of her cheekbone. The only thing that escapes her lips is a ghost-white exhalation, the pale heat of her breath against a vast and nebulous winter sky.

---

@ absolutely anyone || still working on figuring her out like this; bear with me || lily wang, "prayer" 
Sera || Eresh

@

[Adonai]

the lord's gonna come for your first born son / his hair's on fire and his heart is burning / so go to the river where the water runs

I am watching a drowsy brown spider amble up the furled petals of a snowdrop when I see the vulture.

It is not an altogether unnatural sight. Slowly I push up from my crouch, my hooves slipping in the frosty grass, and move my head in gradual degrees to follow the bird's shadow as it arcs across Caligo's night.

Vultures are drawn towards fresh death. In this bone-chilling cold, deep in the wilted brown expanse of Eleutheria, death is as frequent as white capped mushrooms after a rain. The fact fails to move me. In my youth I had abhorred death; in my maturity, I greet it like the comforting sight of a hale old enemy.

The vulture seems to have banked towards a skeletal tree, though the gnarled branches barely protrude above the jagged mass of shadows it hides within. The shadows are where the distant treetops of the Viride join with the horizon, conglomerating into a blot of black ink that slashes up into the velvet sky.

My eyes strain to make out anything more. I have lost the bird yet still I scan the tips of the skeletal branches, watching for movement. I am deeply interested by the vulture as I am deeply interested in anything living I can find in this decaying, haunting land. I am like a child greeting its first spring; nothing can keep me away. If I only close my eyes, I can pretend that there is not a dark head of curls hovering worryingly in the dim distance, the twist of her frown permanently imprinted into my mind.

Of course, I could not have made it here alone.

Louise is with the caravan. There is a driver and a footman and even a doctor's young apprentice, all bundled in thick woollen blankets, all huddled miserably like logs in a woodpile in the narrow seat I had kept warm on the jaunt here. The edges of the Eleutheria is not far from the edges of the Ieshan lands, which is not far from the edges of where I am usually allowed to roam. Put together, it is a succession of not-very-far distances joined up to make a fair distance, navigable only if I am not the one doing it, and accompanied by a minimum of four others responsible for delivering me back alive.

It was the most agreeable arrangement I had managed to settle on with the new doctor.

I wish to see the vulture up close. From the bare glimpse I had gotten of it as it had winged past me, it had seemed different from the average, pink-skinned sort. A bloody red eye, a black striped head, and a raising of the hairs at the back of my neck.

"Louise," I shout. The echoing trill of my voice across the plains is thrilling. "Do not follow me. I wish to continue alone. Come only if more than half of the hour has passed."

My lake-eyed maid's answering cry, made small and reedy by the whistling wind, comes mercilessly quick. "Prince Adonai! You cannot be serious!"

"But I am, and if must be, then it is an order." There is nothing she can say to this. I am being unfair. Grinning, I imagine the furious silver stream of her breath as she tucks her anger deep inside herself, to be saved for when I return, and then brushed off quick and flouted against me like a jousting lance. I will laugh as it rests across my chest, and then her frown will break, and everything will be just as it has been for a hundred days and a hundred nights. 

Sometimes, I wonder if death would be more bearable.

The distance to the skeletal tree is shorter than I anticipated. Its branches cast cloying shadows over me as I crest the small hill it sits atop, wreathed silver by the light of a full moon. My breath is faintly panting yet the exertion has done only good for my circulation. I can almost feel my legs, and my cheeks are scraped raw by the wind. My heart ricochets inside its ribcage and this is good as well; there are days when I barely feel it, days where I question if it is even beating. 

I crest the hill. I am far from the first to do so.

A stab of exultation gives way to a stab of shock, and then to a stab of pain. There is a stitch in my side and were it not for the sight of a stranger before me, I would not have had the pride to ignore it. Above me in the overhanging branches comes the faint whisper of wings flapping together, and I look up, quickly. There is the vulture; its beady red eyes seem to flay me open and I almost flinch. Yet I do not, because here, in front of me, is a woman.

I walk closer.

As I do—my jaw rends tighter and tighter as I begin to put together the pieces. Pale white hair braided into fine white loops cling to her silver-grullo neck. Legs latticed by a patchwork of silvery stripes fade from grey at the thighs to black at the hooves. Her noble figure is criminally thin yet there is a faint swell to her stomach that must be from poor nutrition; it cannot be from being full.

I am taken aback and more. I am horrified; I am feverish; I am certain. She is not a stranger. Standing before me is the phantom of the Silver Queen, Seraphina. 

When I speak, it is not to utter her name. It is not even to ask, "were you not rumored to be dead?" because similar things have been asked about me, and I am aware—painfully aware—at how difficult it is to arrive at an answer. It is never enough to say, I am not. I am still alive. Somehow, it is always a disappointment.

I wet my lips and taste blood from a split in the flesh. Frost lines the hem of my fur cloak. "You will freeze in this cold if all you are planning to do," I say softly, moving up to stand besides my past queen, "is stay there."

« r » | @Seraphina

[Seraphina]

I CAN'T TELL IF IT'S WORSE TO WALK THROUGH
a forest with a path or without (a path). / damage done and damage made. / can I be gentle? / I mean / can I be gentle

☼

Her dread hangs like a seed in her stomach – persistent and rooted and growing, waiting to be brought to light.

I cannot do this. She loathes mirrors because she cannot stand to look at herself, because she can barely recognize herself; she is falling apart and she has been falling apart for years, now, and she always imagined that she would fall apart entirely, but now she can’t, but she doesn’t know if she can halt her own decay when it has come so close to overtaking her entirely. I cannot do this. She tried not to let Raum rake every tender part of her out when he raked open her face, to let him crush the little softness that she had come to possess in the time after Zolin’s death, but sometimes she only feels deep and dark and aching, and it is only her careful composure that keeps her from doing something terrifying. She has loved – she has loved, she has loved and been in love, but she is sure that she has always done it wrong. I cannot do this. There is nothing loveable left to her, only bits and pieces with hard edges, sharp enough to the touch to cut. She is not worth loving; she is not even worth regarding. She could never make anyone happy. (She has never been able to make anyone happy.) That is one reason why she ran.

How could she possibly love them like they deserve? How could she possibly be a-

She can’t finish the thought. I cannot do this. She cannot keep them happy. She cannot love them; and she is scared, even terrified, that she will disappoint them just as she has disappointed everyone else.

Ereshkigal grins through her pain, but she does not notice. She does not notice anything before the crunch of hooves on dead grass, the sudden transgression of another presence.

And – when her eyes come to rest on the golden form of the man, on his approach, the tremor of her thin frame slips out of her like a breath. The Silver Queen is reduced, but her posture straightens, and there is a stubborn dignity to the way that she raises her chin to look at him, her gaze hardening like molten steel. Adonai is far from the worst of the Solterran nobility. (In fact, she would venture to say that he is one of the better ones.) Regardless, her pride will not suffer to look so pathetic in the face of him, or anyone of his bloodline. She has spent too much of her life crushed beneath the whims of Solterra’s noble houses to crumble before him now.

She had hoped to avoid all thoughts of Solterra, coming here, and all thoughts of what the sun had done to her. It seems that she could not be so lucky; the desert always has a way of finding her, no matter how far she runs from it.

The last time that Seraphina caught sight of Adonai, he was sick; but he has further deteriorated since then, and, looking at him, she struggles to understand how he still clings to life. She recalls that he was beautiful, before this, though she hardly noticed – spun of pale gold, and blue eyed. He is still pale gold, now, and his eyes are blue, but his fur has gone dull and dark-pocked, bony rather than elegant, and his glossy eyes are watery where they should be sharp. He looks a bit like a corpse, drowning beneath his furs. He looks a bit like a corpse in noble’s garb, dressed for a funeral.

She would be nauseated, but she has seen far, far uglier sights than this.

Even dying, she cannot pity House Ieshan’s firstborn son. As she examines his sickly frame, she knows that it is pure indulgence that has kept him alive. She can hardly blame his family for clinging to him. She can hardly blame them for all the doctors they have called to his side, for all the – likely futile, given the way that Ereshkigal is looking at him from the branches; given the way her worm-like tongue snakes out from between her beak and drags along her teeth – treatments they have attempted. No, she can hardly blame them at all – but she can quietly observe the way that she has seen people die from something as simple as a cold in the slums, the way that she saw people starving to death on the streets nearly every day when Raum was in power.

And here he is, alive – and healthier than most of them, though he is dying of something far more pervasive and inevitable than a seasonal illness or malnutrition.

She can’t blame him. She can’t quite pity him, either.

“You’re right,” she says, softly, “but I’ve barely noticed.” She did; but she supposes that she needs to care for herself more, now that she is-

She can’t even finish the sentence inside of her own head. She doesn’t want to, least of all now – if she does, she might crumble in front of him, and she could not bear to do that. “I would think that the cold poses far more of a danger to you than to I, Prince Adonai.” The title slips off her tongue with something that is not quite disdain, and not quite contempt; it would be more accurate to say that the word is spoken with an absence of respect, her flat cadence indicative of an empty platitude. Still, there is the faintest prickling of something like concern in her soft, distant voice, the hint of an unspoken question - why are you here, all alone, in the middle of winter? She does not ask it.

A laugh splits from the branches. It is a terrible noise, a noise like skin-crawling dread; low and rippling, like a laugh heard from beneath the surface of a rushing river. Seraphina does not have to look up to know that Ereshkigal is watching them with her beady, blood-red eyes – she can feel her stare like a physical weight as it drags down the curve of her spine, and finally recedes. She suspects that she is looking at Adonai.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ereshkigal croons happily; she punctuates with a high-pitched, deranged giggle. “He will die soon. It has already been decided.”

Seraphina does not give demon so much as a glance. Her stare remains trained on Adonai – on his eyes. She cannot argue with Ereshkigal’s assertations; the prince has one hoof in the grave already. Regardless, she says, “My companion is a rather vile creature. I wouldn’t humor her taunting; she’ll take it as an invitation to trouble you further.”

To a demon, who has eternity, soon is relative, and all things die.

Still. Looking at Adonai, who is already more dead than alive, it seems comical to deny the veracity of her statement.

(Isn’t she the same?)

---

@Adonai || ilu (& him) <3 || lily wang, "prayer" 
Sera || Eresh

@

[Adonai]

the saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound / i hunt for you with bloody feet across the hallowed ground

When the only monarch I have ever sworn my allegiance to sees me, her posture stiffens. In that instant, she is like a marionette being jerked together by its strings. Limbs fall into ribs fall into a mechanical, beating heart, all of her twisting itself back into the shape of a woman made rigid by the weight of a crown.

A twist of sadness blooms in between my lungs at the sight. I know that I am thinking far too much of myself to be hurt by this—that in front of me, a fallen prince, Seraphina must still weather herself against the memory of a savage court's savage customs and the words they had seethed at her.

I am used to dismissal. I am used, even, to being loathed.

I am unused entirely to being seen as someone capable of cruelty. So when she looks at me, at the bruises beneath my eyes, at the gouges in my cheeks, I flick my gaze away from her to the dead, frozen grass. I allow her the time to look. I allow her the time to gather herself up again.

There is another brown spider crawling jaggedly up the stem of a decaying, half-crushed leaf. Blinking, I kneel down into the frozen dirt, my cloak billowing in a black circle around me. I do not look at Seraphina, yet when she is standing and I am kneeling it makes for a crooked display of fealty. I both mean it and don't. I am not certain what she expects of me; I am not certain what I expect of her.

I stare long at the shivering spider.

“You're right, but I've barely noticed.” I shift; my brows draw low over my eyes and it is as close to disapproval as I have ever been able to manage around her. I look up to her and my mouth sets in a fine line. I know how ridiculous it sounds from a man dying as he speaks, but I say it anyway. “I don't think,” I murmur, my breath frosting in the bitter cold, “that you have ever paid much attention to your own welfare.”

I am unused to saying such things. Miriam is. Miriam is far better in the art of gentle admonishment than I. When I do it, when one of my siblings breaks a leg or a heart or a doll, my reprimands roll off my tongue like a priest's sermon. It is no wonder they prefer Miriam to I. I do not prefer myself, either.

“I would think that the cold poses far more of a danger to you than to I, Prince Adonai.” The spider has fallen off of the leaf, scuttling away into the undergrowth, and so I have nothing, anymore, to keep me kneeling in the ice-hardened dirt. But I don't get up. I shift slowly to my heels instead, tilting backwards until I feel the tree's scaled trunk join with the ridge of my cloaked spine. 

I wish I could say to her, instead of shrugging off a bare chuckle, Even now, you worry about others more than yourself. There are some who would call that a defect of character. But that is a priest's sermon. And I am very far from becoming a priest.

“So even you have heard. About my—condition.” My voice is sober and quiet. If I am shocked at her knowing this I do not act it; I am full of shock already at her own miraculous survival and have no room to apply any residual amount of that to myself. I look to her wearily, as silver as a sword above me, and linger my gaze at the hollow between her ribs, and that swell—minute, even from below—that softens her form like a scrap of wool caught on a bramble bush. “Yet you outdo me, my queen. Close as I have come to death, I am not yet a ghost.”

I clench my tongue, my smile thin. That is a bold thing to say. I do not wish to offend her. Yet before I can say anything more—either to soften or to further reprimand—a peal of laughter rings out from above the branches of the skeletal tree and my heart leaps inside my chest. It is the vulture. 

The vulture speaks. Her words are a prophecy sealed with wax: He will die soon.

If I hadn't wasted all of my energy clambering up this hill, I would have pushed myself up to my hooves before the echo of the vulture's clicking giggle can fade to ringing silence. Yet I remain propped against the tree; I am as skeletal as its winter-bare branches. “How soon?” I cannot hold my voice steady; I glance, stunned, towards the ghost queen and wonder if upon her return to the land of the living, she has brought herself back a demon.

And then she cautions me to leave the demon alone, but it is too late. I have already spoken out of turn, and I have yet to receive an answer. My wing extends warily from my side, as if reaching towards the laughing demon; it closes on air. My jaw settles into rigidity.

“Your companion,” I say slowly. The House of Ieshan is a holy house. The existence of a demon should horrify me much more than a prophecy of my coming death. Yet it is the condition of the dying man to fear his death worse than the healthy man. I have tried to outrun this fear yet when it is spoken of so lovingly—so eagerly awaited—I cannot keep the pain from leaking into my voice. “Will you be the one to see me into death?” I say to the vulture. I do not look at it. My eyes of bruising ink are trained hollowly on Seraphina's blue one. She has yet to turn; I have yet to see her scars.

I know that I will die. 

But I do not want to die.

« r » | @Seraphina

[Seraphina]

I CAN'T TELL IF IT'S WORSE TO WALK THROUGH
a forest with a path or without (a path). / damage done and damage made. / can I be gentle? / I mean / can I be gentle

☼

There is something disquieting to the way that he is kneeled before her. Disquieting like her scar, like something that couldn’t quite be forgotten, no matter how much she would rather it was. It felt like a bone caught in her throat, something that couldn’t quite be coughed up. Still, who would tell a sick man to rise? She simply averts her gaze.

Seraphina is not entirely prepared for the chiding tone he takes with her. It makes her stiffen by fractions, rolling her tongue in her mouth, and what strikes her most about it is that it implies some degree of concern. (She has never been well-accustomed to it.) She is quiet, visibly uncomfortable, but finally she breathes out a long, white sigh, and she speaks.

“It was always,” she says, and there is a way that she is speaking of much more than just her time as a monarch, “the least important thing.” It was the least important thing when she was a child, a soldier shackled with a collar around her throat; it was the least important thing when she was an Emissary, meant to keep her people from war. It was the least important thing as a monarch, pouring over book after book after book as she struggled to find ways to pull her nation from the ashes, to make it the Solterra that she knew might exist, not the one that did. In fact – and here is the crooked, terrible amusement of it -, her own health only became an important thing, and the most important thing, when Raum struck her down. Before then, it hadn’t mattered. It hadn’t mattered if she lived or died, and, even as a queen, if she had died any other way-

(if only she had died any other way.)

He doesn’t seem surprised by her next remark, exactly. Yet you outdo me, my queen. Close as I have come to death, I am not yet a ghost. His smile is thin. When her lips turn up at the end of his sentence, her smile is wry – and morbid, run-through with a bitter aftertaste that might have come from the grave. What she wants to say is yes, I am a ghost. What she wants to do is allow her telekinesis to buoy her, just as it is begging to, to run rivers through the snow-white of her hair and suspend her above the dry, half-frozen ground like the specter that she should be. (That she is. That Ereshkigal insists that she is meant to be; because she was meant to die, supposed to die, but she didn’t, and every moment after that has been some quiet defiance of fate and god and the natural order entire.) But she does not move. She stands perfectly still, but for that upward twitch of her lips, and, much as she wants to be a ghost, she reminds herself that she no longer has the option.

“I haven’t stopped listening, in my absence,” Seraphina says, her voice a half-murmur, and turns her head so that he can see the gold glint of the scar that runs her cheek like sheet metal, or a fire, or something more fitting on the face of a burning woman, “and I’ve only ever been a ghost to some.” There were certainly people who knew that she didn’t die (though whether they thought she still lived now was an entirely different matter), though she did not count the Solterran nobility among them. Better, she thought, to stay dead to them – most of them couldn’t roll over for Raum quickly enough regardless.

And then there is Ereshkigal. And then there is Ereshkigal, harassing a dying man, some sick amusement burning in her bloodred eyes at the stumble in Adonai’s tone. Seraphina’s own roll with frustration, even as the bird clicks her tongue and laughs again, shorter this time, more predatory. A deerlike huff. “Even if I tell you, little bird,” Ereshkigal says, her voice an airy sing-song, “it wouldn’t change a single thing.”

(If she were close enough to bite her, she might. Lately, offenses that she would have simply taken when she were younger had a way of tugging at her impulses, begging at her inclination to do something that didn’t feel quite like herself.)

“Don’t listen to her,” Seraphina says, her neck arching as she gazes up at the branches at the vulture, glaring viciously. “She doesn’t see time in the same way that we do – soon could be tomorrow or a thousand years from now. All she wishes to do is lead you astray.” What she means is all she wishes to do is make you miserable.

There is the slow outstretch of his wing, not quite towards the bird, and then, when he speaks, it is with quiet and nearly disbelieving horror. His question only seems to further amuse the vulture. She tilts her head, skipping forward down the branch, and she leans down towards him, her razor-like talons leaving long gashes in the bare branch. “I’ll see-e-e-e-e you…” She drags out each syllable, croaks over them, speaks with the ugly undertone of mocking laughter, “…if you want.”

Seraphina swallows another sigh, lingering on her own phrasing. Companion. The bird is less of companion than she is a curse, though they’ve settled, most often, into something of an uneasy truce. “She claims to judge the worth of souls – to condemn them or…send them elsewhere. I can’t be rid of her.” She shakes her head, frowning. “But she could always be lying.”

It is here where the bird seems to take offense, her toothy maw splitting open in a vicious snarl. “I never lie.” Her voice is a knife-edge; a threat.

Seraphina doesn’t even look at her.

Here is where she makes a decision. There is something that she knows, and she has never told it to anyone. It might mean – something here, but she doesn’t want to say it. Saying it is as good as admitting that she is a ghost, something she already believes but still wishes to deny. Saying it means speaking of that cold and dark night – actually, she doesn’t remember the weather, but that the clouds were not thick enough to cover the moon, and all that cold could have come from blood loss -, of the gashes on her cheek, of those horrible, blood-sucking moonflowers.

She speaks.

“She says that I should have died,” she continues, softly – it is a reassurance (if a cold one), but she has always been bad at those, “but I didn’t, and now she won’t leave until she’s taken my soul.”

In the branches above her head, Ereshkigal smiles, and her white teeth are like a crescent moon.

---

@Adonai || ilu (& him) <3 || lily wang, "prayer" 
Sera || Eresh

@