inter had her bony fingers wrapped tightly around the lands of Novus. Although I had been referring to this land of many wonders as my home for such a short while, I could tell that this was only the start of the peak of this frozen season. It would be a few months at least until the thick coat covering my body could be shed and the world could begin it's rebirth.
I had left my place of birth to search for a land that would be able to educate me further in the arts of medicine. Although I was considered quite talented in my homeland, even I wasn't too proud to admit that the skills learned from the elder medics there were primitive at best. I could easily inform you which herb could solve ailments, and I could stop you from bleeding out on my floor if that were the case. But I feared my skills reached a fairly abrupt end after that. This was made quite clear as I watched my father slowly and painfully die from the wound festering in his shoulder. A brisk breeze wove it's way through my heavy winter coat, shaking me free of the memories of the past.
While I used the memories in order to remind myself why I was subjecting myself to living in a place crawling with other beings rather than happily living alongside my mother and younger siblings, I still disliked dwelling on the thoughts when there was so much to learn still. Though I had found myself in the lands of Novus roughly a week ago, I still hadn't ran into any of the natives here. I still hadn't braved traveling any closer to the different "courts" of these lands. The solitude was nice in my snow blanketed plain land, but I knew that the time was growing closer that I should venture out of my self-isolation and seek out those who I could benefit from.
A cloud of steam billowed before me as I sighed and shook the snow from my coat. Long, lean limbs stretched before stepping out from under the small cove of trees I had been standing under. Perhaps if I attempted to make myself more...noticeable, rather than clearly separating myself from the world, someone from these lands would come along and teach me the ropes with these different courts. Then I could make a decision to immerse myself into this strange population. speech
« r » | « image » | tag; @Aghavni & @Seraphina | words;411 | notes:I am sorry, I am so rusty. It'll get better I promise
PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
Ereshkigal is like a stain of ash against the snow.
She watches her from a distance, dismal and listless. It isn’t late enough in the day, she thinks, to know if this will be a good one or a bad one. Lately, they have all been bad, pointless cycles of waxing and waning; and always waxing at the sides and waning somewhere inside. She gnaws at herself. She eats herself alive. She feels like she is always hungry, lately – and sometimes she isn’t sure that it is just the result of the twin pair of lives growing inside of her.
(She is too afraid to admit to being hungry to think too deeply about what that means.)
The vulture-demon is hunting something in the snow. White rabbits, she thinks, or a fox. Her laughter resounds in the back of her mind like the echo of thunder, and, when she hears it, she knows that she has found her query. She turns away before the great, dark bird swoops down and catches the unfortunate creature in her talons, though she knows what comes next; a stain of red on white, and a horrible crunching. Seraphina is familiar with violence, though she has never been comfortable with it. Lately, even Ereshkigal’s simple act of devouring has been enough to twist her stomach into knots.
(“You’re softening,” the demon hisses, her voice high-pitched with disapproval. “It will be no good for them.” But she doesn’t feel soft – she feels harder than usual, and colder, and more distant, like she is stumbling further out of reach each passing day. Maybe she is softening; maybe all of the things that could not matter to her before are now bearing down on her shoulders like an impossible load, and she is crumbling like a pillar of salt beneath their terrible weight.)
She does not want to be seen, lately. Every set of eyes that see her feel like they are taking her apart, make her skin burn with shame; and she knows that no stranger on the street would care, but she always wants to explain. (Perhaps it is because she can barely understand what is happening to her herself, beyond that – she thinks that she is falling apart or collapsing in on herself, and she isn’t sure which.) When her eyes catch on the dark form of a young stranger in the snow, she nearly turns back the way that she came and avoids him entirely. She nearly subjects herself to the sight of Ereshkigal pulling some poor thing’s corpse apart, rather than subjecting herself to any interaction with a stranger.
But, instead – she moves forward like a shadow, half-braided white hair trailing after her like the snow. Perhaps it is because there is a certain melancholy to him, a placelessness about the way that he pulls himself from the grove of trees, the way his breath trails in the air, the way he shakes the snow from his coat almost-tiredly. She can’t say for sure, but, though she keeps her distance from him, she calls out with a soft, “Hello.”
(There is more that she should say, she is sure - are you out here alone? or are you lost? But she cannot decide what to say, of course, so she says nothing at all. She is sure that she used to have – some scraps of eloquence, at least in public. Nowadays she feels like she trembles whenever she opens her mouth.)
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
t wasn't long that I was alone in this wintery land of wonder before another being found it's way into my presence. I wasn't overly surprised, places like the one I had found myself always seemed to have some kind of visitor resting in the shadows for unexpecting victims. Flame tinged eyes turned as her greeting reached out over the snowy silence, a billow of steam rose from her mouth and her silvery appearance was almost enough to make one think that this creature had some sort of affiliation with dragons. "Hello." Although the greeting didn't give me much to go off of in terms of conversation, I was almost thankful for the simplicity of it. No questioning if I was lost, or looking for someone.
Just merely a greeting.
A curt nod bobbed my tarnished crown as I turned ever so slightly in the direction of the mare so it wouldn't appear that I was planning my escape so readily...even though I already had various different escape routes ready in case this silvery creature turned out to be a nightmare. I cleared my throat and allowed a smile to force it's way across my inky features before speaking my own greeting into the world. "Hello." The word hung in the cool air for a moment, I took in my newest acquaintance and noticed that the dragon-mare before me seemed to be carrying a child. Nothing more than a fetus at this point, but a child sooner rather than later. Her sides swelled with life, I had assisted in the birth of many a child, none of which had been mine own. That time was yet to come, there was much to learn before I thought about setting down with another and creating life. I blinked, pushing back the momentary thought of a family as my vocal chords began their dance once again.
"I am Torin. Are you from these parts?" I honestly wasn't quite sure if I meant the snowy wasteland we stood in now, which during my time here hadn't appeared to be a land owned by anyone. Or if I meant these strange lands I found myself in, the tall city walls and well established buildings that were so different from the modest home I had been raised in. I cleared my throat once again, finally allowing my eyes to drift to her sides momentarily, "Oh, and congratulations by the way."
PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
He returns her greeting, and he introduces himself as Torin; he asks her, then, if she is “from these parts.” She isn’t, though there is a part to her that wants to admit to the nature of her own homeland – she doesn’t want to think of the desert, or the sun kingdom, or, worst of all, of the sun god. She doesn’t want to think of anything at all.
(Trying not to think about things has almost never worked for her before. It isn’t working now – and what she tastes on her lips, more than winter wind or the hot sting of her breath against her lips, which threaten to crack in the cold, is regret, regret, regret, like poison down her throat.)
When she responds, her voice feels rough with disuse, and it seems to stick to her throat in a way that it never did when she was queen or emissary. She has always been rather introverted, but she is sure that she used to give competent speeches, which continued into the days of her rebellion – but surely that was some time ago, and now she is unpracticed. “I’m Sera,” she says, because it slips off her tongue easier than the rest of her name nowadays, “and I’m not quite – from here, no. There is a desert kingdom to the east of these plains called Solterra; that is my homeland. Are you familiar with it?” She wonders if he is new to these lands; if he isn’t, she supposes that it is quite useless to describe Solterra to him.
Perhaps she has been greeting too many lost strangers, recently. She is beginning to anticipate them when she sees an unfamiliar face.
When he offers his congratulations, she freezes like ice. At the last, lowest loop of her braids, her white hair begins to pluck at its tight bounds, threatening to unravel itself at the ends; her sudden, rampant burst of magic threatens to lift her hooves from the snowy ground, to suspend her above it like some kind of passing, white-breathed ghost, but she manages to quell its urges, press it down near her breast.
She has to ask herself what the ordinary, polite response would be. (She hates the feeling of his eyes on her sides; she hates that he sees her like this at all, that anyone does, and that she will never, ever be able to escape this or go back to her life before it again.) It does not come immediately, but, after a moment of uncomfortable silence, at least it comes. “Thank you.” Her voice comes out quiet; nearly reluctant and certainly uncomfortable. She thinks that this is the first time that anyone has congratulated her on her…situation, and she isn’t quite sure what to do with it. She supposes that it is normal, when one encounters a stranger with child, to offer their congratulations, and for a moment, it nearly makes her feel normal. Like a woman with a lover, or a woman who chose this, or a woman who at least understood what was happening to her own body.
The illusion crumbles almost immediately. Sure as the sun in the sky, it cannot hold.
She blinks at him through lashes as white as the new-fallen snow, her odd eyes lingering on his face with all the wariness of a trained soldier.
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
couldn't lie and say that there wasn't a bit of concern for the dragon mare who stood before me, her sides swollen with child, her voice seemed hard almost as she spoke out. But I couldn't place if the gruffness to her voice was just the way she spoke, like a singer in an old school bar that still allowed smoking within the four walls, or if it was due to the lack of use. Regardless, it was not my place, nor was it the correct time to speak up regarding my concerns, all I could do at this time was hope that we ran into each other again and my concerns would be quelled. My thoughts were shoved quickly into the recess of my mind as she introduced herself. "I'm Sera." A name that would be tucked away into my dusty and underused filing cabinet along with a mental image of her features, so hopefully the next time our paths crossed I would recall her face rather than having to ask her to remind me of her name like some fool. “and I’m not quite – from here, no. There is a desert kingdom to the east of these plains called Solterra; that is my homeland. Are you familiar with it?” I shook my head, a soft smirk tugging at the corners of my lips as I pondered momentarily over Sera's questioning on if I was familiar with her home.
"I'm almost embarrassed to say that I haven't quite left these plains." I cleared my throat before attempting to make eye contact with the dragon-like creature before me. "I uh, traveled a fair distance from the lands I called home in search of an opportunity to learn more about the less primative means of medicine." I allowed the words to hang there momentarily, wondering if my new acquaintance would know anything about where I could go about achieving my sole goal of residing in these parts. Something about her, maybe the hesitation in her "thank you" in response to my congratulations, led me to believe that this silver being had once been something much greater than someone's broodmare.
Brushing over her obvious discomfort over my congratulations I spoke up once more, keeping the topic neutral and on track of what it was that I wanted in these parts. "Does this...Solterra, have a doctor?"
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« r » | « image » | tag; @Seraphina | words;395 | notes: posting sucks when you're distracted by growling stomach
PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
When she asks him if he’s heard of Solterra, the dark corners of his lips shift into something of a smirk. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I haven't quite left these plains. He clears his throat, and the sound of it makes him seem the part; but her stare on his face is not judgmental. (It is probably more accurate to say that her mismatched stare reveals nothing at all.) I uh, traveled a fair distance from the lands I called home in search of an opportunity to learn more about the less primitive means of medicine. So he is a doctor, of some sort or another. She wouldn’t have guessed it – but, then, Solterra does not have many doctors in the first place, and she has known even fewer personally.
(She supposes that it would explain the persistent way that his eyes seem to twitch to her sides. It almost makes her feel like she should apologize, or insist that she is doing her best; but she knows better, and she is tired of defending herself besides.)
She nods, half-thoughtfully. She does not know much of medicine, beyond the rudimentary sort that she picked up through necessity on the battlefield and in the desert, which is nearly as dangerous regardless, but she has heard many things from strangers that came from lands that were unlike Novus; it does not surprise her that he might have come looking. (For a moment, she thinks of herself years ago, in the library with Eik.)
As she stumbles over her stilted response to his congratulations, he manages to change the subject, to her silent relief. She does not want to think about her children; she wants to think of them even less in front of a perfect stranger. Does this...Solterra, have a doctor? She only knows the political state of her country vaguely, and its inhabitants have grown even more mysterious to her; most of the ones that she knew and – and loved had long disappeared into the dunes, or for distant lands. She knows that there are doctors in the court, however, and so she nods. (The Ieshan daughter, if no others, but she knows that they do have a hospital in the court. What she is not so sure of is the skill of its practitioners.)
(In the back of her mind, Ereshkigal grins, and she prods at the way that she still finds herself guiding strangers across the dunes. Seraphina ignores her.) “There are a few,” she says, carefully, “but there is always a need for more – the desert is dangerous.” She doesn’t make the offer explicitly, but she does leave it hanging in the air between them, unspoken: if you want to go there, I can guide 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
er mismatched gaze settled on the fire-y gaze of the black stallion as he spoke of his newness to these parts, a gaze that in a lesser being would have surely caused some discomfort as it appeared the silver mare was better at keeping her emotions off of her face than most others. Torin was less than bothered by it though, he was almost thankful for the lack of judgement that he had decided to hide and wait like a mare on a claiming ground rather than venturing out on his own to find his way. Rather he spoke up once again when the silver nodded her head, as if thinking over the last words that had fallen from his mouth. "My homeland is more like a nomadic village in comparison to the tall walls and storybook castles that seem to litter these parts." A chuckle worked it's way out of the black as his mind drifted back to his home, their shelters were rudimentary at best in comparison to the palaces and buildings that seemed to glitter in the sunlight that sprouted up from the ground in these lands, he imagined that his younger sister would love to see the region as it would fill her head with fairytales.
He couldn't help but notice the slight hesitation when she replied regarding the status of their doctors in this land she calls Solterra, and again he found himself wondering what the history on this mare was who stood before him. Torin wondered if she had been a great warrior before being given the burden and responsibility of creating life, or if she was a sheltered wife who had gotten the chance to go out for a wandering walk when she bumped into him. Something about her stoic-ness made the new comer believe that the warrior option was more likely, but the obvious discomfort in her response to congratulations, and the fact that they hardly knew each other's names prevented him from diving any further into the mare's life story. "There are a few. But there is always a need for more - the desert is dangerous." Fire-y eyes shifted away from the mare, looking out over the wintery wasteland he had been lurking about, Torin pondered the thought of a desert. The warmth would be welcomed, and it would be quite different from the lush green hills that he had been raised on but as of yet it appeared that this would be his best bet to continue learning more about these strange lands. "Solterra sounds like an interesting place, and it would remove me from these flat lands for a while at least..." he laughed before continuing with his thought. "Unless you have other business to attend to...would you be opposed to showing me the way? I fear my knowledge of these parts is severely lacking."
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« r » | « image » | tag; @Seraphina | words;483 | notes: woo sorry for the sudden change in writing style, trying to see if this works better for me, it at least helps bump that word count up some xD
PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
She can’t quite understand him, because she has never had the courage to leave anything, however much she might like to. Whenever she thinks that she will be finally free of the desert, when she is almost brave enough to break free of the chains which have bound her, she finds herself again crawling back to Solterra. And now-
Now, with the sun god’s touch in her womb, she does not think that she will ever be free of it.
When he speaks of his homeland, Seraphina cannot help but think of Eik again, her mind stumbling again to the grey stallion. He never spoke much of his homeland, but in bits and pieces; she finds herself wishing that she asked about it more often, but she supposes that it is useless to think about all the ways that she didn’t let herself get to know her – friends now. (She wonders, too, if she lingers in the peripheral vision of the minds of the people she used to know in the same way that they linger in hers.) “It seems,” she says, with a nod of her head, “that you’ll have quite a bit of adjusting to do, then.” He’ll be fine, though. Surely. If he had ambition enough to leave, she’s sure that he can handle whatever Solterra throws his way, cruel as the desert can be.
Or, rather – he’ll handle it or he won’t. There is no other truth but that.
She watches the contemplative glint of his expression in patient silence, waiting to see if he would take her implied offer. (Solterra is not for everyone, after all; it is not a kind landscape, and it is only beautiful to those who know how to look at it in the right way.) His stare is still on the snow-covered plains when he concedes that Solterra sounds interesting, and he asks her, if she is not busy with anything else, if she would show him the way. She does not tell him that she has been aimless since Raum’s death. She does not tell him that a quiet dread curls like a vine in her throat when she thinks of returning, too. “I’ll show you the way,” she says, with a dip of her head, and she reaches the thorny tendrils of her mind out to Ereshkigal, where she is crunching on a bone in the bloodied snow; yards away, the vulture shakes her feathers and stretches out into flight, her beak still dripping with blood. “Follow me. I’ll answer any questions that you have as we go.”
She turns, then, and strides across the snow, ignoring the way that her steps feel too-heavy with the added weight of her growing twins; and, if he follows behind her, she does not look back his way.
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
