☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
and you run from it then
now you can't escape
For a moment, something dark and snarling rears its head. There’s something venomously honest in his tone, a fury that is somehow more correct than anything else in this conversation and somehow even more confusing, because Acton is a Crow, and there are none who are more loyal to the Night Kingdom’s Sovereign than his crows. The gates. A silenced people. Dragonfire. For a moment, the world around them seems to burn; she swears she can feel the heat licking at her heels.
“And that’s why you left Denocte?” There’s a note of something like incredulity in her tone. His home, his people – all left behind. Seraphina’s unwavering devotion to Solterra is practically hardwired into her, and she can’t quite comprehend leaving one’s nation behind, no matter how monstrous. (And the razing of the valley is a miniscule horror, compared to the terrors of Zolin.) But, she supposes, that’s irrelevant – of course that’s why he left Denocte. In her mind’s eye, she sees Isorath and his dragon, perched on the ramparts; she remembers the uncertain, if not outright fearful, stares of her citizens. In her mind’s eye, she sees Reichenbach in the one time she had ever met him, an easy smile and a string of coins that caught in the sunlight; he had been strange, the kind of person that she could never quite wrap her mind around. In her mind’s eye, she sees the Stormsinger, her silhouette illuminated by a flash of lightning; her cheek burns.
She can’t possibly fathom their motivations, but the anger that their decisions have caused has been palpable. In spite of it all, she thinks that she feels something like disappointment towards those that have run from the Night Kingdom. (Of course, in the time of Zolin, she couldn’t have fled - there was no escape for girls like her.) Where was all of their devotion to the kingdom that they called their home now? No decision of the rulers could make it cease to be what it was.
It makes it a bit easier to interpret his next words, however, and his next confusing – and even more confusingly genuine - compliment. His mind isn’t on her. It’s away in some distant, dark place, smelling of jasmine and woodsmoke and accompanied by the sound of clicking coins. “No. Better… better means a choice. I don’t choose.” The truth of the matter is that, were she anyone else, she didn’t know what she’d do or think in the place of the Night Court’s Regime – if she could feel in the same way that they did, if she hadn’t been beaten into subjugation, if she had ever been allowed anything more than self-sacrifice in the name of her people, then she may well have been selfish or volatile or defensive. There was nothing morally upright about making a decision that had been her only choice.
When he speaks again, his tone is strangely dark, but not in the way that she expects – not a crow’s darkness, or the volatile, burning darkness that almost sent Bexley Briar to her doom. She doesn’t know what it is, only that it is pitiful in the strangest and most uncomfortable way. She’s quiet for a moment, letting the sound of the crowd fill the slowly-growing space in-between them. “…What do you want, Acton?” As she watches him weave through the crowd, a wandering wisp of orange flame amidst a rolling, tumultuous sea of bodies, she thinks that the truth of the matter is that she doesn’t think he’ll have an answer – or, more accurately, not an honest one.
He’s as lost, and he's drunk, and he's impossibly far he is from the free bird she met once in a desert at a time that feels so very long ago.
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tags | @Acton
notes | <3
and you run from it then
now you can't escape
For a moment, something dark and snarling rears its head. There’s something venomously honest in his tone, a fury that is somehow more correct than anything else in this conversation and somehow even more confusing, because Acton is a Crow, and there are none who are more loyal to the Night Kingdom’s Sovereign than his crows. The gates. A silenced people. Dragonfire. For a moment, the world around them seems to burn; she swears she can feel the heat licking at her heels.
“And that’s why you left Denocte?” There’s a note of something like incredulity in her tone. His home, his people – all left behind. Seraphina’s unwavering devotion to Solterra is practically hardwired into her, and she can’t quite comprehend leaving one’s nation behind, no matter how monstrous. (And the razing of the valley is a miniscule horror, compared to the terrors of Zolin.) But, she supposes, that’s irrelevant – of course that’s why he left Denocte. In her mind’s eye, she sees Isorath and his dragon, perched on the ramparts; she remembers the uncertain, if not outright fearful, stares of her citizens. In her mind’s eye, she sees Reichenbach in the one time she had ever met him, an easy smile and a string of coins that caught in the sunlight; he had been strange, the kind of person that she could never quite wrap her mind around. In her mind’s eye, she sees the Stormsinger, her silhouette illuminated by a flash of lightning; her cheek burns.
She can’t possibly fathom their motivations, but the anger that their decisions have caused has been palpable. In spite of it all, she thinks that she feels something like disappointment towards those that have run from the Night Kingdom. (Of course, in the time of Zolin, she couldn’t have fled - there was no escape for girls like her.) Where was all of their devotion to the kingdom that they called their home now? No decision of the rulers could make it cease to be what it was.
It makes it a bit easier to interpret his next words, however, and his next confusing – and even more confusingly genuine - compliment. His mind isn’t on her. It’s away in some distant, dark place, smelling of jasmine and woodsmoke and accompanied by the sound of clicking coins. “No. Better… better means a choice. I don’t choose.” The truth of the matter is that, were she anyone else, she didn’t know what she’d do or think in the place of the Night Court’s Regime – if she could feel in the same way that they did, if she hadn’t been beaten into subjugation, if she had ever been allowed anything more than self-sacrifice in the name of her people, then she may well have been selfish or volatile or defensive. There was nothing morally upright about making a decision that had been her only choice.
When he speaks again, his tone is strangely dark, but not in the way that she expects – not a crow’s darkness, or the volatile, burning darkness that almost sent Bexley Briar to her doom. She doesn’t know what it is, only that it is pitiful in the strangest and most uncomfortable way. She’s quiet for a moment, letting the sound of the crowd fill the slowly-growing space in-between them. “…What do you want, Acton?” As she watches him weave through the crowd, a wandering wisp of orange flame amidst a rolling, tumultuous sea of bodies, she thinks that the truth of the matter is that she doesn’t think he’ll have an answer – or, more accurately, not an honest one.
He’s as lost, and he's drunk, and he's impossibly far he is from the free bird she met once in a desert at a time that feels so very long ago.
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tags | @Acton
notes | <3
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
