DEATH ON ALL FOURS.
TURN YOUR RABID INTO RUSH -
TURN YOUR RABID INTO RUSH -
Light glimmers wetly overhead, and Bex squints against it as she traverses a winding set of circular stairs, hoofsteps echoing at an ear-shattering volume against the walls of cool sandstone.
Today she is a ghost.
All gild and snow. All white-hot and white-angry. She feels her own mortality, a stone in the throat, and swallows it as best she can. The broken skylight ripped in this tower’s ceiling sheds bright-yellow light, drips it like gold everywhere, hot and deep and choking, strangling: she should be used it to by now, shouldn’t she, Solterra’s golden girl, but somehow it never gets easier (the oppressive heat, the blinding light) on days like these, when Bexley wakes up and hates herself with stunning immediacy. It is a wardrum in the deep of her skull. It is a record put on repeat.
Keep it together. Keep it together.
Today she is a ghost, and yet too solid to be real. The Day Court is drowned in sunlight, and Bexley mutters something savage under her breath as she emerged into the heat of it, head tucked to her chest and strides extended. The early morning has come and gone, and at the least, it’s given Bex time to prepared to be seen: traversing the more populated streets, she is sleek and collected, long white mane wound into loose buns, collar glinting at her throat, gaze dead but calm as she looks out over the near-crowded square. A crowd has collected, she realizes dully. But for what?
Excuse me, Bexley calls as she starts to shoulder her way through the crowd, slinking between close-pressed bodies, butting her way through pockets of people. Excuse me. Baring her teeth sort of does the trick. The scar on her face, the snarl on her lips, the title of regent stapled to her skin all manage to split the crowd around her. After a moment she’s emerged into the center of the gathering, and of course Seraphina is the attraction in the middle, as stoic and stony as ever, but something has changed, something is different.
The falcon.
Gold-eyed, wild. Bexley has just missed its godly voice, but merely looking at the thing sends her stomach plummeting to deep earth. Her pulse beats rapid-fire under her tongue. The bird stares back at her, and she knows that it knows her, that it sees deep, that it can smell her distrust, her confusion, her fear. What is this - she can't help the question as she turns to her Sovereign, suspicion rampant in that ice-blue gaze, although she already knows the answer - something dangerous, and important, and divine.
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