☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
all you have is your fire
and the place you need to reach
The Day Court burns. The Day Court is reborn.
This is always its cycle.
Has she been reborn with it? Perhaps, she thinks, as she walks sandstone halls with broken-out stained glass windows; the shards still cling to the frames, jagged and sharp like rows of teeth, casting fragments of colorful light on the worn floors. Black scorch marks cling to the ground, and all around her she sees broken beams and heaps of ash. All the grandeur that had rotted within the sandstone walls had burnt with the city, with the corpses, with the window dressings of a hundred year’s history – but the infrastructure was left standing. They build up around it. Simpler, this time. More efficient, and far easier to protect; it is growing into a city that can withstand a siege. As it always should have been. They are left with the ruins. They are left with the bones. They are left godless, discarded by the sun that had once been their patron.
Scraps are enough. She is no beggar – no longer does she bow her head to the divine. No longer does she bow her head to the specter of Viceroy, to the legacy of the old nobility, to those that would see her people reduced to ashes in the wind, to those that see her as nothing more than a shattered remnant of a bloodstained, ugly history, to those that would rather turn their eyes away from the sight. No longer does she bow.
What is she now, with her eyes no longer bloodshot, the white tangles of her hair no longer falling out of the curves of her braids in wisps? What is she now, with the bloody gashes of the Davke’s assault reduced to nothing but scars, invisible beneath the sleek quicksilver of her coat? She stands in the ashes – of her kingdom, of her past, of herself. She has always known herself, or so she has assumed. She has always known who she should be.
She does not know what she is becoming.
A girl rendered hollow and cold is now twisted into something barely contained – there is something savage and white-hot beneath her skin, a ferality that threatens to eat itself out of her even as she tries to extinguish it. Her life is not choice. Her life is not wanting. She was another corpse to the war machine, another body to feed the sea; she has never been troubled by rage before. (But perhaps that was only ever because she pushed it down deep and let it fester. Now it looms, ominous, on the horizon, the murky grey tendrils of a storm that is about to break.) What she is becoming is many things, but it (she cannot yet call it her) is no longer hollow.
Darkness stirs beneath the windowsill – it swallows the sun. She cascades down the stairs of the battlements in a flood of metallic silver, pausing at the base of the steps that lead into the palace.
Seraphina faces the reaper.
Midnight stands at the base of the steps, a gaping darkness carved into the shape of a mare; the horn that sprouts from her forehead is the curve of a scythe. There is something about her – in her stance, in her expression, in her perpetual and consuming darkness – that feels of death and rage. The reaper. Justice unyielding. She does not know what to think of this darkness standing at her doorstep yet; it does not chill her, in the wake of such brutal violence, and she meets it with an unreadable expression, eyes of twin flame and ice thoughtful as they regard the darkness in her path. She descends the sandstone steps, cool and composed as a marble statue, and makes her way down towards the unicorn, pausing a few steps away. The mare smells of sand and sweat, but, beneath it, she catches the wild sweetness of Dusk.
She speaks with a thick accent that rolls like the sand across the dunes. “Greetings, Terrastellan.” She is calm, unreadable – but not unwelcoming. Those who wear Florentine’s colors, after all, are welcome in the desert kingdom. “What brings you to Solterra?” In the wake of the Davke attack, the capitol has been flooded with visitors. She never knows what they hope to find within burnt walls and bloodstained streets, and, as they leave, she always wonders if they have found what they were looking for among the ashes.
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notes | <3
tag | @Calliope
all you have is your fire
and the place you need to reach
The Day Court burns. The Day Court is reborn.
This is always its cycle.
Has she been reborn with it? Perhaps, she thinks, as she walks sandstone halls with broken-out stained glass windows; the shards still cling to the frames, jagged and sharp like rows of teeth, casting fragments of colorful light on the worn floors. Black scorch marks cling to the ground, and all around her she sees broken beams and heaps of ash. All the grandeur that had rotted within the sandstone walls had burnt with the city, with the corpses, with the window dressings of a hundred year’s history – but the infrastructure was left standing. They build up around it. Simpler, this time. More efficient, and far easier to protect; it is growing into a city that can withstand a siege. As it always should have been. They are left with the ruins. They are left with the bones. They are left godless, discarded by the sun that had once been their patron.
Scraps are enough. She is no beggar – no longer does she bow her head to the divine. No longer does she bow her head to the specter of Viceroy, to the legacy of the old nobility, to those that would see her people reduced to ashes in the wind, to those that see her as nothing more than a shattered remnant of a bloodstained, ugly history, to those that would rather turn their eyes away from the sight. No longer does she bow.
What is she now, with her eyes no longer bloodshot, the white tangles of her hair no longer falling out of the curves of her braids in wisps? What is she now, with the bloody gashes of the Davke’s assault reduced to nothing but scars, invisible beneath the sleek quicksilver of her coat? She stands in the ashes – of her kingdom, of her past, of herself. She has always known herself, or so she has assumed. She has always known who she should be.
She does not know what she is becoming.
A girl rendered hollow and cold is now twisted into something barely contained – there is something savage and white-hot beneath her skin, a ferality that threatens to eat itself out of her even as she tries to extinguish it. Her life is not choice. Her life is not wanting. She was another corpse to the war machine, another body to feed the sea; she has never been troubled by rage before. (But perhaps that was only ever because she pushed it down deep and let it fester. Now it looms, ominous, on the horizon, the murky grey tendrils of a storm that is about to break.) What she is becoming is many things, but it (she cannot yet call it her) is no longer hollow.
Darkness stirs beneath the windowsill – it swallows the sun. She cascades down the stairs of the battlements in a flood of metallic silver, pausing at the base of the steps that lead into the palace.
Seraphina faces the reaper.
Midnight stands at the base of the steps, a gaping darkness carved into the shape of a mare; the horn that sprouts from her forehead is the curve of a scythe. There is something about her – in her stance, in her expression, in her perpetual and consuming darkness – that feels of death and rage. The reaper. Justice unyielding. She does not know what to think of this darkness standing at her doorstep yet; it does not chill her, in the wake of such brutal violence, and she meets it with an unreadable expression, eyes of twin flame and ice thoughtful as they regard the darkness in her path. She descends the sandstone steps, cool and composed as a marble statue, and makes her way down towards the unicorn, pausing a few steps away. The mare smells of sand and sweat, but, beneath it, she catches the wild sweetness of Dusk.
She speaks with a thick accent that rolls like the sand across the dunes. “Greetings, Terrastellan.” She is calm, unreadable – but not unwelcoming. Those who wear Florentine’s colors, after all, are welcome in the desert kingdom. “What brings you to Solterra?” In the wake of the Davke attack, the capitol has been flooded with visitors. She never knows what they hope to find within burnt walls and bloodstained streets, and, as they leave, she always wonders if they have found what they were looking for among the ashes.
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notes | <3
tag | @Calliope
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
