☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
all you have is your fire
and the place you need to reach
You are not the first to watch her kingdom burn, the woman tells her, and, for the first time, Seraphina finds herself wondering what lies beyond those wildfire eyes, behind that sharp-toothed smile. The gentle press of her skin against her shoulder leaves a burning sensation in its wake; it is not consolation. Nothing could console her of this - nothing would wash the bloodstains from her coat, and nothing would clear the ash from her throat. The weight of all those corpses would linger until her last breath passed her lungs, and, even if she could shed it, she would not want to. Nevertheless, she recognizes the gesture for what it is - understanding, not some attempt to console the inconsolable, and somehow the understanding comes as a quiet comfort. (Perhaps it is because her life has been spent so, so alone, so incomprehensibly alone; she grasps at any connection like a drowning man after a straw.)
Oh, the white fury that possesses the reaper at her tales of injustice and death should have been horrifying – macabre and untamed, like a war tangled up in the shape of a woman. If Seraphina had been a weaker creature – if she had not stared death down time and time again, if she had not felt the quicksilver plunge of a sword through her gut, if she had not spent hours (days? time meant nothing) bloody and broken among muddied trenches, if she had not seen her kingdom reduced to ashes twice over at the behest of a viper - perhaps she would have turned away, but she meets that burning, pale gaze, unflinching. It entices her to burn, too.
If she could have reached into the unicorn’s skull and riddled out her thoughts, what would Seraphina have thought of them? She would have been insulted, probably. Foreigners. Always so quick to rush headlong into her people’s strife, so sure that things would have gone so differently with their intervention, so quick to assume that they could have saved them with their violence and their fury and their wildness, so quick to assume that they even wanted their saving. (But the Solterrans were a proud people, and she was not exempt from it.) Perhaps she would have laughed – but, of course, she does not know that Calliope has brought gods and dragons and kingdoms alike to her knees.
(But not, she might think, the kingdoms or gods or dragons of Novus.)
In any case, she does not know the thoughts that cross Calliope’s mind, so it’s hardly relevant. The unicorn’s white, righteous rage is infectious, but, if she is fire, then Seraphina is still ice; she walks alongside her, frighteningly expressionless even as the woman fixes her with a vicious, leonine smile. They could hunt, she whispers, and promises destruction – for a moment, Seraphina can smell blood and fire on the dry desert wind, and she could hear screams in its whip against the cobblestone streets.
But Seraphina watches her, and she is patient. Oh-so patient. “Oh, we will hunt,” She says, and, though cold and quiet and constrained, it sounds like a promise that has been long coming; vengeance has been a carefully-contained wildfire within her chest since the night of the attack, and she would have her due for what Avdotya and her Davke had done to her people. “It is only a matter of time - the desert does not forgive impatience.” And the Davke, she thinks, are the desert wind – Avdotya has been a step ahead of her, but, in her vengeance, she had loosed her teeth from the silver’s throat.
She no longer plays by the rules of her game.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
notes |sorry for the lack of dialogue /sobs
tag | @Calliope
all you have is your fire
and the place you need to reach
You are not the first to watch her kingdom burn, the woman tells her, and, for the first time, Seraphina finds herself wondering what lies beyond those wildfire eyes, behind that sharp-toothed smile. The gentle press of her skin against her shoulder leaves a burning sensation in its wake; it is not consolation. Nothing could console her of this - nothing would wash the bloodstains from her coat, and nothing would clear the ash from her throat. The weight of all those corpses would linger until her last breath passed her lungs, and, even if she could shed it, she would not want to. Nevertheless, she recognizes the gesture for what it is - understanding, not some attempt to console the inconsolable, and somehow the understanding comes as a quiet comfort. (Perhaps it is because her life has been spent so, so alone, so incomprehensibly alone; she grasps at any connection like a drowning man after a straw.)
Oh, the white fury that possesses the reaper at her tales of injustice and death should have been horrifying – macabre and untamed, like a war tangled up in the shape of a woman. If Seraphina had been a weaker creature – if she had not stared death down time and time again, if she had not felt the quicksilver plunge of a sword through her gut, if she had not spent hours (days? time meant nothing) bloody and broken among muddied trenches, if she had not seen her kingdom reduced to ashes twice over at the behest of a viper - perhaps she would have turned away, but she meets that burning, pale gaze, unflinching. It entices her to burn, too.
If she could have reached into the unicorn’s skull and riddled out her thoughts, what would Seraphina have thought of them? She would have been insulted, probably. Foreigners. Always so quick to rush headlong into her people’s strife, so sure that things would have gone so differently with their intervention, so quick to assume that they could have saved them with their violence and their fury and their wildness, so quick to assume that they even wanted their saving. (But the Solterrans were a proud people, and she was not exempt from it.) Perhaps she would have laughed – but, of course, she does not know that Calliope has brought gods and dragons and kingdoms alike to her knees.
(But not, she might think, the kingdoms or gods or dragons of Novus.)
In any case, she does not know the thoughts that cross Calliope’s mind, so it’s hardly relevant. The unicorn’s white, righteous rage is infectious, but, if she is fire, then Seraphina is still ice; she walks alongside her, frighteningly expressionless even as the woman fixes her with a vicious, leonine smile. They could hunt, she whispers, and promises destruction – for a moment, Seraphina can smell blood and fire on the dry desert wind, and she could hear screams in its whip against the cobblestone streets.
But Seraphina watches her, and she is patient. Oh-so patient. “Oh, we will hunt,” She says, and, though cold and quiet and constrained, it sounds like a promise that has been long coming; vengeance has been a carefully-contained wildfire within her chest since the night of the attack, and she would have her due for what Avdotya and her Davke had done to her people. “It is only a matter of time - the desert does not forgive impatience.” And the Davke, she thinks, are the desert wind – Avdotya has been a step ahead of her, but, in her vengeance, she had loosed her teeth from the silver’s throat.
She no longer plays by the rules of her game.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
notes |
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
