Rhoswen ►
It was not dark when Seraphina found her, but neither was it bright. It was instead an eerie half-light that swallowed both women whole, hungry and barren of any remorse as it ran a violent fragmentary tongue over flesh and sinew and bone. An eastern witching hour, that mirrored the very otherworldly events of the recent past. It seemed almost too incidental that the desert queen should appear so soon, without even searching for her of her own accord. Rhoswen shuddered internally at the thought of a higher power watching over them even now - moving their bodies like pieces of a chess board, every act bringing them closer to a zenith they were unable to name. For Seraphina was the very woman she had endured this pilgrimage for: not Solis, not her daughter or brother. Just a child-queen who bore the weight of the world with more grace and fortitude than any creature she'd ever seen. Of all the people Rhoswen had met, Seraphina had always rung the most true, a bell to toll through the night. What did it take to lose yourself to a regime, only to ascend it's tyranny high enough to touch the sky? To say the red woman admired Solterra's sovereign was an understatement of the most painstaking kind.
She owed her the life of her first born child. A chance of freedom, perhaps even redemption. Clarity had come on the one-hundred-and-eighty-second day of her absence, and it pooled like fallen water at her feet, wide enough to peer down at her reflection and see what she had been missing for so long. We are all guilty of mistakes, but it is what you make of that mistake which defines you. Rhoswen knew, at last, what had to be done. There was no turning back now.
Her name sounded alien in Seraphina's voice: abstract and nebulous, but not entirely wrong. Her ashen eyes found their mark on the silver mare's skin, moving briskly over her frame in search of that hard mismatched gaze, wondering if it had changed in all the seasons that had passed. It is impossible for any living being to escape the hands of change, for time is a ruthless beast - unforgiving and uncaring of those it warps, but that is not to say that it's victims are incapable of concealing this very modification. And when Rhoswen, at last, caught those desertborn eyes, she was surprised by what she saw. As surely as the rising sun, Seraphina's hard hailstone wall stood firm, but as they stood there in the moment between sound and it's absence, Rhoswen captured something else behind that mile-high glacier: a window into the deeper caverns of the sovereign's being. Was it anger? Was it frustration? Despair? Perhaps all of those things combined, or indeed none of them at all. Rhoswen could not, would not, say.
"Seraphina." Her voice is gasoline to set fire to the dusk that threatens all around; she would burn the night for this woman, and the moon for good measure. "To ask if you are okay is a foolish question, but I am going to ask you anyway." The pale unkempt braids, the sheen of perspiration on her shoulders, that nameless look in her eyes... when would Sera's troubles end?
She owed her the life of her first born child. A chance of freedom, perhaps even redemption. Clarity had come on the one-hundred-and-eighty-second day of her absence, and it pooled like fallen water at her feet, wide enough to peer down at her reflection and see what she had been missing for so long. We are all guilty of mistakes, but it is what you make of that mistake which defines you. Rhoswen knew, at last, what had to be done. There was no turning back now.
Her name sounded alien in Seraphina's voice: abstract and nebulous, but not entirely wrong. Her ashen eyes found their mark on the silver mare's skin, moving briskly over her frame in search of that hard mismatched gaze, wondering if it had changed in all the seasons that had passed. It is impossible for any living being to escape the hands of change, for time is a ruthless beast - unforgiving and uncaring of those it warps, but that is not to say that it's victims are incapable of concealing this very modification. And when Rhoswen, at last, caught those desertborn eyes, she was surprised by what she saw. As surely as the rising sun, Seraphina's hard hailstone wall stood firm, but as they stood there in the moment between sound and it's absence, Rhoswen captured something else behind that mile-high glacier: a window into the deeper caverns of the sovereign's being. Was it anger? Was it frustration? Despair? Perhaps all of those things combined, or indeed none of them at all. Rhoswen could not, would not, say.
"Seraphina." Her voice is gasoline to set fire to the dusk that threatens all around; she would burn the night for this woman, and the moon for good measure. "To ask if you are okay is a foolish question, but I am going to ask you anyway." The pale unkempt braids, the sheen of perspiration on her shoulders, that nameless look in her eyes... when would Sera's troubles end?
