☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
I drink in the air like holy wine, like my last salvation
tomorrow may burn, but I'll be ready for it
When he looks at her, his gaze is warm; warm enough to make her freeze, chiefly because she doesn’t know what to do with it.
My people, rings in her head. My people.
Seraphina is the Sovereign Queen of Solterra, the Sun Queen – no gilded crown adorns her, but she wears her nation as her mantle. (Her title is something that she has had to grow into, and growing pains are something inevitable. It no longer feels wrong.) Before his attention is distracted by new arrivals, she locks her gaze with his, half-golden and inflamed. Her eyes do not burn like his, but they are no longer so empty, either. She is the queen of day, and he is the god of day; he is the god of the sun, and she is the sun queen. She tried to spurn the title, once, but titles were not something that their bearers decided.
He is still talking, but not to her, and so his words barely register – his voice, however, lingers. She is still trying to come to terms with the sound of it.
Could she be a sun queen if she was abandoned by the sun? Had he been the one to abandon her, or had she abandoned him? (Had it ever even worked? This was the first time he had manifest himself before her – it wasn’t as though they’d ever spoken. She thought it unnatural that they would ever have to.) He knows her name (and she imagines he knows the names of all of those that walk his sands), but, in spite of her status, she wonders if anything that’s plagued her is of any concern to an immortal, divine being. Probably not. She watches the way he stares at his reflection play against his own skin, distant from Bexley’s fury and the queries imposed upon him by the gathering strangers, and she finds herself wondering again if the gods could ever comprehend what it meant to be mortal. Immortal, with a divinity to shift the sky – and everything beneath it. What could they understand of the mortal condition, of what it meant to be powerless? He has always been a million miles away from her, a distant entity on high, but, in all of the time that she has known of him, she doesn’t think that she has felt quite so far apart from him as she does now, though only marble steps serve to separate her from all of his gilded glory.
It wasn’t his job to understand, she thinks. It isn’t really his job to intervene, either – it’s hers.
Again, his words roll through her mind; as the crowd burns brighter, swallowed by a sea of sparks, his words run rampant through her head again. She cannot help but think of Viceroy, and the snarling of his lips as they ran over her name. My Seraphina. My apprentice. Mine, all mine. Possessions, she thinks – were they possessions to him? (But, when she calls the Solterrans her people, she never thinks of them as objects.) My people. His people. Her people. Their people. He is no mere person, but they are both of the same people. Where she looks at him and sees blinding gold, she is only dusky silver; fire and smoke. Where she is powerless, unblessed, so utterly mortal, he is divine – but they are both woven from sand and sun, and she knows that, regardless of what the world rips away from her, it will never take that.
How could she ever really leave him, without leaving a piece of herself behind with him?
There were some things that you could never shed, no matter how much you tried to get rid of them. Little nicks and scars that lingered, even beneath the skin. As he continues to speak, her eyes light again on the sun medallion on the steps of his shrine, and she thinks that god might be a little bit like a scar; the harder that she tries to push him aside, the more he seems to command her attention. But I am no longer yours. Her own words resound in her head, sharp and quick as a thunderclap or a slap to the face. It occurs to her that she doesn’t know what he wants from her – she never has.
She still remembers standing on this peak, not too long ago, her lungs consumed by smoke and her thoughts consumed by fire. She thinks of Avdotya with a sharp pang; the sun god’s chosen one, with her strange vitality and her earth-twisting magic and the hound that yapped at her heels. She remembers her dead, and she remembers who killed them. She never blamed him – the actions of mortals were not the fault of gods. What happened was her fault, her miscalculation, her misplay…and she had never denied that.
But he’d chosen someone in that fight, and it hadn’t been her, and rejection hurt like hell, and she is tired of devoting herself to people – to things - that would never return her devotion. How many years had she spent worshipping him? How many times had she whispered prayers to him? How many times had she come to pray at his shrine, left offerings at his altar? (And if it was a matter of devotion, rather than time – hadn’t she loved him like she had loved nothing else, more than anything else, or anyone else? Solis is a jealous god. If there were no other consolation for her abandonment than this, it was that she had never loved like she had loved him – no god, no mortal, nothing. Her love was mostly a cold, impassive thing, bred of necessity and force-feeding; but she had loved him as a girl, long before all that. It was no romantic love, nor a familial love, nor a love of nation, and now she thinks it was a foolish, naïve, childish thing. But it had been something, and that was more than she could say about most anything else.)
(He was not a loving god.)
Maybe, she thinks, she needed to get away from him then – she needed to get away from everything. Seraphina had spent her entire life playing the puppet, tugged around on strings. Viceroy’s. Zolin’s. Solis’s. Hell, even Avdotya’s. She’d never had to make choices, and she’d never been the one to bear the brunt of the consequences. She’d never even been a person; just a tool, a living, breathing weapon, a collared beast. She wanted to run. She wanted to run and run and run until she figured out what she was, or who she was supposed to be, or, for the love of god, at the very least until she wasn’t tangled up in someone else’s strings.
She wanted to be free.
(But that collar still rests around her neck.)
They were still the same people; she couldn’t truly abandon him any more than she could abandon Day, any more than she could abandon the collar around her neck, any more than she could abandon herself. (And she had tried.) My people. Well, if she was one of his people, he was also one of hers – he was her god, the god of her court, one of her brothers and sisters in her arid desert kingdom, and no severance could break bonds that were forged in blood.
She is not the same girl that she was when she ran with her mother, nor the same girl that Viceroy picked up in the wilds of the Mors; she is not the same girl she was when Zolin died, nor the same girl that Maxence appointed his Emissary; she is not the same girl who took the crown, nor the same girl who weathered the Davke attack and saw her nation burn twice over; she is not even the same girl who stepped into Tempus’s Summit.
Burning one - well, she is white-hot now.
Seraphina stands stock-steady, even as sparks fly rampant around the peak, even as Solis’s voice curls into a sneer, even as the familiar figure of Moira and a less familiar, dark pegasus – foolishly – approach the sun god, even as two strangers appear seeking Vespera, even as an array of other faces materialize at the edges of the gathering, even as Solis strips Bexley Briar of her magic. She does not move. She is as stiff as the statue that Solis was only moments before, eyes distant and contemplative.
Solis turns to leave, a trail of molten prints in his wake – like small, gleaming mirrors. She drags her tongue along her lips, brow drawing into a firm line.
He offers what she has been begging for: answers. Well, at least one of the gods is willing to offer an explanation for the events that had just transpired; at least one of them is willing to face their people and offer some degree of accountability, even if it came at the price of their devotion. (Solis, she thought, might be a little bit more mortal than the other gods, even though the ambrosia that ran through his veins – and the brilliant gold of his skin, a sheen that put the sun to shame - was all divine. The others kept their distance, but he was fire and rage, arrogant humor, pride. And, as she thinks of what little she caught of his argument at the Summit, perhaps he trusted his mortal children bit more, too…if nothing else, to hold them to task for their actions.) Pathetic as it is, she thinks, she still wants to trust him.
She steps forward without hesitation, striding past fleeing bodies and still figures; Seraphina only pauses at the side of her Regent. Flame met flame, hellfire and brimstone – they are too alike, she thinks, her gaze still trained on the sun god. She presses her muzzle against Bexley’s shoulder. Tentative. Gentler than usual. “I have to go,” Seraphina whispers, her gaze following the golden god as he begins his descent down the cliff’s-edge. “For Solterra.” Gods only know what he’d do if his Court’s own Sovereign scorned him; she isn’t even sure that Solterra would survive the day.
With that, she brushes past her golden girl, quickening her pace until she lingers near the heels of the sun god. He’s blinding, brilliant, beautiful – more beautiful than anything she has ever seen. Oh, she had seen lovely things before, but his radiance eclipses them all; the wild tangles of his hair, the metallic sheen of his coat, the glowing embers of his eyes, even the vicious sneer of his lips. She thinks, with something that is both a pang and comfort, that of course he is the day. In him, she sees every rolling dune of the Mors, the gleam of the mid-afternoon sun on the Vitae Oasis, the swirling reds that paint the canyon walls of the Elatus, the first and last light that touched the sandstone walls of the capitol. In him, she sees the faces of all of the creatures that called Solterra home, from the teryrs and the sandwyrms to the desert-wind silhouettes of Davke to her own people. It strikes her then that he is her people’s god, that he is really a god, that she stands by something inconceivably ancient, something that created everything she knows.
And, to that revelation, she can’t seem to find the right words to say. As usual.
In For a moment, she allows a silence to linger, contemplating her own words. “Welcome back,” She says, finally, still with the uncertain familiarity present in the cadence of an old friend – but this time, not quite so cold, or so detached, “though I doubt you ever truly left.” Of that much she is certain. She sees him in everything, after all; the change of seasons, and each passing day. In any case, she is not a woman of much embellishment, but, if nothing else, her words are sincere.
Questions swirl her mind in a disorganized mass, but, for the moment, she pushes them aside, opting instead to wait for him to speak.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Random Events
notes | hi staff I'm sorry for the novel.Sera why did it take you 2000 words of rambling to say "welcome home buddy." anyways, girlfriend's sticking around to see what Solis has to say, feel free to judge her for it.
I drink in the air like holy wine, like my last salvation
tomorrow may burn, but I'll be ready for it
When he looks at her, his gaze is warm; warm enough to make her freeze, chiefly because she doesn’t know what to do with it.
My people, rings in her head. My people.
Seraphina is the Sovereign Queen of Solterra, the Sun Queen – no gilded crown adorns her, but she wears her nation as her mantle. (Her title is something that she has had to grow into, and growing pains are something inevitable. It no longer feels wrong.) Before his attention is distracted by new arrivals, she locks her gaze with his, half-golden and inflamed. Her eyes do not burn like his, but they are no longer so empty, either. She is the queen of day, and he is the god of day; he is the god of the sun, and she is the sun queen. She tried to spurn the title, once, but titles were not something that their bearers decided.
He is still talking, but not to her, and so his words barely register – his voice, however, lingers. She is still trying to come to terms with the sound of it.
Could she be a sun queen if she was abandoned by the sun? Had he been the one to abandon her, or had she abandoned him? (Had it ever even worked? This was the first time he had manifest himself before her – it wasn’t as though they’d ever spoken. She thought it unnatural that they would ever have to.) He knows her name (and she imagines he knows the names of all of those that walk his sands), but, in spite of her status, she wonders if anything that’s plagued her is of any concern to an immortal, divine being. Probably not. She watches the way he stares at his reflection play against his own skin, distant from Bexley’s fury and the queries imposed upon him by the gathering strangers, and she finds herself wondering again if the gods could ever comprehend what it meant to be mortal. Immortal, with a divinity to shift the sky – and everything beneath it. What could they understand of the mortal condition, of what it meant to be powerless? He has always been a million miles away from her, a distant entity on high, but, in all of the time that she has known of him, she doesn’t think that she has felt quite so far apart from him as she does now, though only marble steps serve to separate her from all of his gilded glory.
It wasn’t his job to understand, she thinks. It isn’t really his job to intervene, either – it’s hers.
Again, his words roll through her mind; as the crowd burns brighter, swallowed by a sea of sparks, his words run rampant through her head again. She cannot help but think of Viceroy, and the snarling of his lips as they ran over her name. My Seraphina. My apprentice. Mine, all mine. Possessions, she thinks – were they possessions to him? (But, when she calls the Solterrans her people, she never thinks of them as objects.) My people. His people. Her people. Their people. He is no mere person, but they are both of the same people. Where she looks at him and sees blinding gold, she is only dusky silver; fire and smoke. Where she is powerless, unblessed, so utterly mortal, he is divine – but they are both woven from sand and sun, and she knows that, regardless of what the world rips away from her, it will never take that.
How could she ever really leave him, without leaving a piece of herself behind with him?
There were some things that you could never shed, no matter how much you tried to get rid of them. Little nicks and scars that lingered, even beneath the skin. As he continues to speak, her eyes light again on the sun medallion on the steps of his shrine, and she thinks that god might be a little bit like a scar; the harder that she tries to push him aside, the more he seems to command her attention. But I am no longer yours. Her own words resound in her head, sharp and quick as a thunderclap or a slap to the face. It occurs to her that she doesn’t know what he wants from her – she never has.
She still remembers standing on this peak, not too long ago, her lungs consumed by smoke and her thoughts consumed by fire. She thinks of Avdotya with a sharp pang; the sun god’s chosen one, with her strange vitality and her earth-twisting magic and the hound that yapped at her heels. She remembers her dead, and she remembers who killed them. She never blamed him – the actions of mortals were not the fault of gods. What happened was her fault, her miscalculation, her misplay…and she had never denied that.
But he’d chosen someone in that fight, and it hadn’t been her, and rejection hurt like hell, and she is tired of devoting herself to people – to things - that would never return her devotion. How many years had she spent worshipping him? How many times had she whispered prayers to him? How many times had she come to pray at his shrine, left offerings at his altar? (And if it was a matter of devotion, rather than time – hadn’t she loved him like she had loved nothing else, more than anything else, or anyone else? Solis is a jealous god. If there were no other consolation for her abandonment than this, it was that she had never loved like she had loved him – no god, no mortal, nothing. Her love was mostly a cold, impassive thing, bred of necessity and force-feeding; but she had loved him as a girl, long before all that. It was no romantic love, nor a familial love, nor a love of nation, and now she thinks it was a foolish, naïve, childish thing. But it had been something, and that was more than she could say about most anything else.)
(He was not a loving god.)
Maybe, she thinks, she needed to get away from him then – she needed to get away from everything. Seraphina had spent her entire life playing the puppet, tugged around on strings. Viceroy’s. Zolin’s. Solis’s. Hell, even Avdotya’s. She’d never had to make choices, and she’d never been the one to bear the brunt of the consequences. She’d never even been a person; just a tool, a living, breathing weapon, a collared beast. She wanted to run. She wanted to run and run and run until she figured out what she was, or who she was supposed to be, or, for the love of god, at the very least until she wasn’t tangled up in someone else’s strings.
She wanted to be free.
(But that collar still rests around her neck.)
They were still the same people; she couldn’t truly abandon him any more than she could abandon Day, any more than she could abandon the collar around her neck, any more than she could abandon herself. (And she had tried.) My people. Well, if she was one of his people, he was also one of hers – he was her god, the god of her court, one of her brothers and sisters in her arid desert kingdom, and no severance could break bonds that were forged in blood.
She is not the same girl that she was when she ran with her mother, nor the same girl that Viceroy picked up in the wilds of the Mors; she is not the same girl she was when Zolin died, nor the same girl that Maxence appointed his Emissary; she is not the same girl who took the crown, nor the same girl who weathered the Davke attack and saw her nation burn twice over; she is not even the same girl who stepped into Tempus’s Summit.
Burning one - well, she is white-hot now.
Seraphina stands stock-steady, even as sparks fly rampant around the peak, even as Solis’s voice curls into a sneer, even as the familiar figure of Moira and a less familiar, dark pegasus – foolishly – approach the sun god, even as two strangers appear seeking Vespera, even as an array of other faces materialize at the edges of the gathering, even as Solis strips Bexley Briar of her magic. She does not move. She is as stiff as the statue that Solis was only moments before, eyes distant and contemplative.
Solis turns to leave, a trail of molten prints in his wake – like small, gleaming mirrors. She drags her tongue along her lips, brow drawing into a firm line.
He offers what she has been begging for: answers. Well, at least one of the gods is willing to offer an explanation for the events that had just transpired; at least one of them is willing to face their people and offer some degree of accountability, even if it came at the price of their devotion. (Solis, she thought, might be a little bit more mortal than the other gods, even though the ambrosia that ran through his veins – and the brilliant gold of his skin, a sheen that put the sun to shame - was all divine. The others kept their distance, but he was fire and rage, arrogant humor, pride. And, as she thinks of what little she caught of his argument at the Summit, perhaps he trusted his mortal children bit more, too…if nothing else, to hold them to task for their actions.) Pathetic as it is, she thinks, she still wants to trust him.
She steps forward without hesitation, striding past fleeing bodies and still figures; Seraphina only pauses at the side of her Regent. Flame met flame, hellfire and brimstone – they are too alike, she thinks, her gaze still trained on the sun god. She presses her muzzle against Bexley’s shoulder. Tentative. Gentler than usual. “I have to go,” Seraphina whispers, her gaze following the golden god as he begins his descent down the cliff’s-edge. “For Solterra.” Gods only know what he’d do if his Court’s own Sovereign scorned him; she isn’t even sure that Solterra would survive the day.
With that, she brushes past her golden girl, quickening her pace until she lingers near the heels of the sun god. He’s blinding, brilliant, beautiful – more beautiful than anything she has ever seen. Oh, she had seen lovely things before, but his radiance eclipses them all; the wild tangles of his hair, the metallic sheen of his coat, the glowing embers of his eyes, even the vicious sneer of his lips. She thinks, with something that is both a pang and comfort, that of course he is the day. In him, she sees every rolling dune of the Mors, the gleam of the mid-afternoon sun on the Vitae Oasis, the swirling reds that paint the canyon walls of the Elatus, the first and last light that touched the sandstone walls of the capitol. In him, she sees the faces of all of the creatures that called Solterra home, from the teryrs and the sandwyrms to the desert-wind silhouettes of Davke to her own people. It strikes her then that he is her people’s god, that he is really a god, that she stands by something inconceivably ancient, something that created everything she knows.
And, to that revelation, she can’t seem to find the right words to say. As usual.
In For a moment, she allows a silence to linger, contemplating her own words. “Welcome back,” She says, finally, still with the uncertain familiarity present in the cadence of an old friend – but this time, not quite so cold, or so detached, “though I doubt you ever truly left.” Of that much she is certain. She sees him in everything, after all; the change of seasons, and each passing day. In any case, she is not a woman of much embellishment, but, if nothing else, her words are sincere.
Questions swirl her mind in a disorganized mass, but, for the moment, she pushes them aside, opting instead to wait for him to speak.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Random Events
notes | hi staff I'm sorry for the novel.
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
