☼ fia the crownless ☼
and then it's just too much
the streets, they still run with blood
He mirrors her casual posture, leans closer – she thinks that she sees the hint of something like amusement in his silver stare, and she matches it with a certain, bitter amusement of her own. She is used to being tragic, or imposing, or some mixture thereof. Attempting to be approachable, even likable - because Solis knows that the leader of a rebellion needs something reminiscent of charisma - is…new.
“Fia.” A ghostly, but genuine, smile. At the moment, she has a certain, desperate appreciation for the simple gesture; at the moment, she can appreciate any semblance of kindness. “My name is Caine.”
She remains nothing if not polite, and dips her head in something that almost resembles an informal bow; peeking out from beneath the golden fabric of her hood, her lips hint at a smile of her own. “A pleasure to meet you, Caine.” She hopes that it will remain one.
He is quiet, for a moment, after she admits to her ambitions. Her mind, drawn tense as the string of a bow, clamps around the arrow at her side, obscured beneath rolls of fabric.
“Bold intentions.”
She loosens her grip around the arrow.
A hint of a smirk curls across her lips. “Perhaps so, though, in hindsight, I don’t think they’re my boldest.” Those would be her childish desire to make Solterra into the Day Court of fable; killing a mortal man meant little, by comparison; even regicide was a somewhat minor ambition, by Solterran standards. How many of those who’d worn the crown had gained it by blood? Well, he’d certainly taken it with hers - and violence, she’d learned, must be met with violence in turn.
“Tell me, then – why do you think he deserves it?”
She is quiet for a moment. Considering.
In her nightmares, she is haunted. She is caught in the flames of a burning court, or she is bleeding out on the Steppe, or perhaps she is in both places at once. Raum vacillates between himself – quicksilver smooth, eyes of the purest blue – and the bulbous figure of Zolin, draped in gold. She can hear him laughing, but she is not sure where one of them ends and the other begins. She does know that she smells the unmistakable stench of the burning dead, of the rotting dead, of blood, and, everywhere that she looks, she is surrounded by glassy eyes and broken corpses-
Finally, she speaks, with a voice that is quiet and dull and caught somewhere far away, in a very different time. “You know, I remember Zolin.”
She looks at him, and then she looks away. She doesn’t know those silver eyes, but this is not a story that she can tell while staring into them.
“I do not know if you do – I do not know how long that you’ve spent in these lands, only that you are not a native Solterran. I am sure that my accent has given me away by now; I have spent my entire life among these sands.” Her words roll off her tongue easily enough, at first – this admission is no secret. She knows the way that her voice lulls and rises like the dunes, and she would never so much as attempt to obscure it. For all of her nation’s violence and cruelty, she holds nothing but pride for her lineage. “I won’t bother to tell you the full story of how Zolin came to be ruler of Solterra – a summary is enough. For a hundred years, we were ruled by a class of nobility that claimed descent from our first queen. The first ones…they were good. Powerful. Wise and warlike, and loyal to their kingdoms. That was not to last.” Her tone should hold a storyteller’s cadence, but there is something in it that is strangely clipped, as though she has to force the words out of her throat. “Solterra’s rulers grew increasingly despotic and tyrannical. Their final incarnation was the boy-king, and I was born in the final years of his rule.” A long, slow sigh escapes her lips. “The word monstrous does not do Zolin justice. He threw lavish parties and grew fat on wine and sweets while his people starved in the streets. He and his nobility took slaves-“ Her voice shudders with white, white rage – it burns in her throat. “-wherever they could find them: for labor, for fighting, for…pleasure.” Disgust pulses in her stomach like a flickering ember, and, though she lingers on the raw brutality of the statement for a moment, she is quick enough to continue. “His people scoured the streets for any sign of rebellion, and they crushed it systematically. Sometimes, they would slaughter people who’d committed no crime, just to make sure that we would remain compliant and fearful.” There was no room for organized rebellion – it was too late, too far gone. “And, because Zolin was so hungry for power and destruction, he set his sights on Denocte. We have a reputation for the strongest warriors in Novus, but he was unwilling to expend the supplies that a war requires. We died by the masses, and…” She trails off, her own heart jumping to her throat and clenching with a truth that she does not want to tell, a truth that she has never willingly told – anyone. “…when he began to run out of soldiers, he took the advice of Viceroy, his Warden, and he began to send our children to war. Between the starvation, the slaughter, and the child soldiers, we lost…” She sounds dreamlike, distant, drifting through water. “…we lost a generation to Zolin.”
She lets her words hang in the space between them, thick as spilt blood.
Finally, she speaks again.
“I was one of his child soldiers, though I am…something of a strange case. I do not want to speak of what I saw in my time under his command-“ And she doesn’t. Every bit of her begs to stop, while she can, but she needs the vicious bite of her history. “-or what they did to me, but I will. If we do not tell our stories, if we forget what we can become, it will happen again.” She wants to forget. She wants it to all be forgotten, swept away like a layer of sand in the desert wind, but she knows that forgetting – that silence - is the greater crime. She is quiet, for a moment, trying to summon forth the right words; this is a story that she has never told in its entirety, and, for all the dead that it has collected, she wants to tell it right.
“Viceroy was a powerful mage, and his magic allowed him to manipulate minds. He could…rearrange your memories, or destroy them altogether, and, if he sensed that something inside of you that he disliked, he would rip it out of you, or torture you until you…bent to his will. He used poisons, drugs, pain - whatever he needed to, if it would make you obedient. And we were children. Orphans, usually, but some of us were simply stolen from our parents. The distinction mattered little; he would make you forget them, if you knew them. He would put a collar around your throat, and it would itch and sear, but if you so much as tried to adjust it, he would make sure that you felt your disobedience for days. He renamed us. Remade us. He took everything that we were, and he left us…left us empty.” Empty, empty, empty - a hollow little shell. She remembers her earliest days of queen, and they way that those subjects that knew would look at her. Like a doll, or a puppet, an automaton. Not a queen. Pitiable, fearful, or something in-between. “I daresay that we were better killers than most children should ever have to be, but we were still children, pitted against Denoctian knights and battlemages; I watched them die in droves alongside me. Sometimes the healers would pull us back from the brink…sometimes we would bleed out on the sands, and maybe that was a mercy.” She doesn’t know. She still doesn’t know – was it better to have lived or bled out on that battlefield? She is finally starting to feel like something solid again, but she knows the others, she sees the others, and she wonders. “Viceroy had a certain…fondness for me.” The bitterness in her voice makes it evident that this fondess was no blessing. “I was his favorite example. He brought me before Zolin, once. I have never forgotten the sight of him, sprawled out on his throne…” Under her hood, her eyes narrow to slits, and her charcoal lips twist into a snarl. “…dripping golden silk and jewels.”
“…I was near my third year when Zolin was assassinated. I was in the capitol, with Viceroy – the response was volcanic. The palace was set ablaze, and people fought in the streets, stormed the noble houses, and slaughtered most of the old families, robbed their gilded vaults…” She trails off. The images flash, behind her eyes; the dead in the streets, staring blankly at the sky, and fire, fire, fire. “Viceroy was killed, but I escaped the madness. We scattered, or went into hiding, and, in a few months, Maxence rose as our new sovereign…with the Davke queen as his Regent and Seraphina as his Emissary. She was…like me. I caught sight of her, a time or two, when I was still a soldier.” An addendum, but not an unnatural one. It was fortunate that she was nothing special; it meant that there was little reason to obscure her history. There were many with the same claim to it as she. “And then a Teryr slaughtered Maxence, and she was our queen. We wondered, at the time, why Avdotya had spurned the throne…when our kingdom lay in ashes several months later, when it had barely even begun to rebuild, we wondered no longer. Seraphina was little more than a girl, barely into her third year, and colder than ice; she had no place in the realm of politics. But she believed in the Solterra of old, the Solterra of…noble warriors, a Solterra where each child grew up proud of their bloodline, a Solterra that was…violent, certainly, but not brutal. Certainly not barbaric. She tried. She tried, and, for her efforts, we began to creep towards something resembling stability…but trying to rebuild the Day Court of old was a slow, painful process, with more setbacks than successes.” A simple admission, tinted with an icy bitterness. The silver queen had been foolish, naïve, and now she was paying the price – she had always been paying the price, for her crimes or the crimes of someone else entirely, and she had begun to wonder if there was any difference. “And now she is dead, and a man who would love to see us reduced to nothing more than ashes all over again has risen to take her place. If you want to know the truth, I know Raum. I remember when he was a spy within Solterra; he nearly killed a friend of mine, back then…” She thinks of Bexley Briar, trapped in a prison of fallen rocks, the thick rivers of blood trailing down her beautiful face. “…and he has killed a…friend now.” Can she call Acton that? She is certain that, if his ghost is listening, he’s probably laughing at the admission. For the way that she clashed with the Crow, she’d held a certain respect for him, and perhaps she’d given him more of her mind than she was apt to offer freely. She didn’t know. All she knew was that his death felt like the echo of a knife to the ribs.
She turns back to him, finally, and stares directly into those gleaming quicksilver eyes. She is burning, burning, burning - her magic crawls beneath her skin, and Alshamtueur hums for blood and blaze at her side. She keeps them still, but she knows that they will not rest until they have had their fill of vengeance.
She stares at him, and, with little more than a brush of her magic, she pulls down her hood just enough to reveal her features. A tangle of scars, filled with gleaming, metallic gold, wind across the right side of her face, barely missing her golden eye; their age is indeterminate, newness tempered by Isra's magic, age tempered by the reddish sheen of the skin around them, as though they remain irritated. There is something grotesque about them, an afterthought of the violence that must have created them, but, at the same time, there is something hauntingly beautiful about the way that they are stitched together. Her white hair, torn from her braids, hangs loose around her face, dripping moonlight. She watches him with an intensity that borders on predatory, tempered with a certain bitterness, and, as she speaks, she never allows her eyes to leave his own.
“I will not stand idly by and allow him to destroy us. I have bowed to a tyrannical madman before – I will never do it again.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Caine
notes | caine is my muse. she's wearing her hood about like this, for reference.there's a reason, but I've gotta get there first.
and then it's just too much
the streets, they still run with blood
He mirrors her casual posture, leans closer – she thinks that she sees the hint of something like amusement in his silver stare, and she matches it with a certain, bitter amusement of her own. She is used to being tragic, or imposing, or some mixture thereof. Attempting to be approachable, even likable - because Solis knows that the leader of a rebellion needs something reminiscent of charisma - is…new.
“Fia.” A ghostly, but genuine, smile. At the moment, she has a certain, desperate appreciation for the simple gesture; at the moment, she can appreciate any semblance of kindness. “My name is Caine.”
She remains nothing if not polite, and dips her head in something that almost resembles an informal bow; peeking out from beneath the golden fabric of her hood, her lips hint at a smile of her own. “A pleasure to meet you, Caine.” She hopes that it will remain one.
He is quiet, for a moment, after she admits to her ambitions. Her mind, drawn tense as the string of a bow, clamps around the arrow at her side, obscured beneath rolls of fabric.
“Bold intentions.”
She loosens her grip around the arrow.
A hint of a smirk curls across her lips. “Perhaps so, though, in hindsight, I don’t think they’re my boldest.” Those would be her childish desire to make Solterra into the Day Court of fable; killing a mortal man meant little, by comparison; even regicide was a somewhat minor ambition, by Solterran standards. How many of those who’d worn the crown had gained it by blood? Well, he’d certainly taken it with hers - and violence, she’d learned, must be met with violence in turn.
“Tell me, then – why do you think he deserves it?”
She is quiet for a moment. Considering.
In her nightmares, she is haunted. She is caught in the flames of a burning court, or she is bleeding out on the Steppe, or perhaps she is in both places at once. Raum vacillates between himself – quicksilver smooth, eyes of the purest blue – and the bulbous figure of Zolin, draped in gold. She can hear him laughing, but she is not sure where one of them ends and the other begins. She does know that she smells the unmistakable stench of the burning dead, of the rotting dead, of blood, and, everywhere that she looks, she is surrounded by glassy eyes and broken corpses-
Finally, she speaks, with a voice that is quiet and dull and caught somewhere far away, in a very different time. “You know, I remember Zolin.”
She looks at him, and then she looks away. She doesn’t know those silver eyes, but this is not a story that she can tell while staring into them.
“I do not know if you do – I do not know how long that you’ve spent in these lands, only that you are not a native Solterran. I am sure that my accent has given me away by now; I have spent my entire life among these sands.” Her words roll off her tongue easily enough, at first – this admission is no secret. She knows the way that her voice lulls and rises like the dunes, and she would never so much as attempt to obscure it. For all of her nation’s violence and cruelty, she holds nothing but pride for her lineage. “I won’t bother to tell you the full story of how Zolin came to be ruler of Solterra – a summary is enough. For a hundred years, we were ruled by a class of nobility that claimed descent from our first queen. The first ones…they were good. Powerful. Wise and warlike, and loyal to their kingdoms. That was not to last.” Her tone should hold a storyteller’s cadence, but there is something in it that is strangely clipped, as though she has to force the words out of her throat. “Solterra’s rulers grew increasingly despotic and tyrannical. Their final incarnation was the boy-king, and I was born in the final years of his rule.” A long, slow sigh escapes her lips. “The word monstrous does not do Zolin justice. He threw lavish parties and grew fat on wine and sweets while his people starved in the streets. He and his nobility took slaves-“ Her voice shudders with white, white rage – it burns in her throat. “-wherever they could find them: for labor, for fighting, for…pleasure.” Disgust pulses in her stomach like a flickering ember, and, though she lingers on the raw brutality of the statement for a moment, she is quick enough to continue. “His people scoured the streets for any sign of rebellion, and they crushed it systematically. Sometimes, they would slaughter people who’d committed no crime, just to make sure that we would remain compliant and fearful.” There was no room for organized rebellion – it was too late, too far gone. “And, because Zolin was so hungry for power and destruction, he set his sights on Denocte. We have a reputation for the strongest warriors in Novus, but he was unwilling to expend the supplies that a war requires. We died by the masses, and…” She trails off, her own heart jumping to her throat and clenching with a truth that she does not want to tell, a truth that she has never willingly told – anyone. “…when he began to run out of soldiers, he took the advice of Viceroy, his Warden, and he began to send our children to war. Between the starvation, the slaughter, and the child soldiers, we lost…” She sounds dreamlike, distant, drifting through water. “…we lost a generation to Zolin.”
She lets her words hang in the space between them, thick as spilt blood.
Finally, she speaks again.
“I was one of his child soldiers, though I am…something of a strange case. I do not want to speak of what I saw in my time under his command-“ And she doesn’t. Every bit of her begs to stop, while she can, but she needs the vicious bite of her history. “-or what they did to me, but I will. If we do not tell our stories, if we forget what we can become, it will happen again.” She wants to forget. She wants it to all be forgotten, swept away like a layer of sand in the desert wind, but she knows that forgetting – that silence - is the greater crime. She is quiet, for a moment, trying to summon forth the right words; this is a story that she has never told in its entirety, and, for all the dead that it has collected, she wants to tell it right.
“Viceroy was a powerful mage, and his magic allowed him to manipulate minds. He could…rearrange your memories, or destroy them altogether, and, if he sensed that something inside of you that he disliked, he would rip it out of you, or torture you until you…bent to his will. He used poisons, drugs, pain - whatever he needed to, if it would make you obedient. And we were children. Orphans, usually, but some of us were simply stolen from our parents. The distinction mattered little; he would make you forget them, if you knew them. He would put a collar around your throat, and it would itch and sear, but if you so much as tried to adjust it, he would make sure that you felt your disobedience for days. He renamed us. Remade us. He took everything that we were, and he left us…left us empty.” Empty, empty, empty - a hollow little shell. She remembers her earliest days of queen, and they way that those subjects that knew would look at her. Like a doll, or a puppet, an automaton. Not a queen. Pitiable, fearful, or something in-between. “I daresay that we were better killers than most children should ever have to be, but we were still children, pitted against Denoctian knights and battlemages; I watched them die in droves alongside me. Sometimes the healers would pull us back from the brink…sometimes we would bleed out on the sands, and maybe that was a mercy.” She doesn’t know. She still doesn’t know – was it better to have lived or bled out on that battlefield? She is finally starting to feel like something solid again, but she knows the others, she sees the others, and she wonders. “Viceroy had a certain…fondness for me.” The bitterness in her voice makes it evident that this fondess was no blessing. “I was his favorite example. He brought me before Zolin, once. I have never forgotten the sight of him, sprawled out on his throne…” Under her hood, her eyes narrow to slits, and her charcoal lips twist into a snarl. “…dripping golden silk and jewels.”
“…I was near my third year when Zolin was assassinated. I was in the capitol, with Viceroy – the response was volcanic. The palace was set ablaze, and people fought in the streets, stormed the noble houses, and slaughtered most of the old families, robbed their gilded vaults…” She trails off. The images flash, behind her eyes; the dead in the streets, staring blankly at the sky, and fire, fire, fire. “Viceroy was killed, but I escaped the madness. We scattered, or went into hiding, and, in a few months, Maxence rose as our new sovereign…with the Davke queen as his Regent and Seraphina as his Emissary. She was…like me. I caught sight of her, a time or two, when I was still a soldier.” An addendum, but not an unnatural one. It was fortunate that she was nothing special; it meant that there was little reason to obscure her history. There were many with the same claim to it as she. “And then a Teryr slaughtered Maxence, and she was our queen. We wondered, at the time, why Avdotya had spurned the throne…when our kingdom lay in ashes several months later, when it had barely even begun to rebuild, we wondered no longer. Seraphina was little more than a girl, barely into her third year, and colder than ice; she had no place in the realm of politics. But she believed in the Solterra of old, the Solterra of…noble warriors, a Solterra where each child grew up proud of their bloodline, a Solterra that was…violent, certainly, but not brutal. Certainly not barbaric. She tried. She tried, and, for her efforts, we began to creep towards something resembling stability…but trying to rebuild the Day Court of old was a slow, painful process, with more setbacks than successes.” A simple admission, tinted with an icy bitterness. The silver queen had been foolish, naïve, and now she was paying the price – she had always been paying the price, for her crimes or the crimes of someone else entirely, and she had begun to wonder if there was any difference. “And now she is dead, and a man who would love to see us reduced to nothing more than ashes all over again has risen to take her place. If you want to know the truth, I know Raum. I remember when he was a spy within Solterra; he nearly killed a friend of mine, back then…” She thinks of Bexley Briar, trapped in a prison of fallen rocks, the thick rivers of blood trailing down her beautiful face. “…and he has killed a…friend now.” Can she call Acton that? She is certain that, if his ghost is listening, he’s probably laughing at the admission. For the way that she clashed with the Crow, she’d held a certain respect for him, and perhaps she’d given him more of her mind than she was apt to offer freely. She didn’t know. All she knew was that his death felt like the echo of a knife to the ribs.
She turns back to him, finally, and stares directly into those gleaming quicksilver eyes. She is burning, burning, burning - her magic crawls beneath her skin, and Alshamtueur hums for blood and blaze at her side. She keeps them still, but she knows that they will not rest until they have had their fill of vengeance.
She stares at him, and, with little more than a brush of her magic, she pulls down her hood just enough to reveal her features. A tangle of scars, filled with gleaming, metallic gold, wind across the right side of her face, barely missing her golden eye; their age is indeterminate, newness tempered by Isra's magic, age tempered by the reddish sheen of the skin around them, as though they remain irritated. There is something grotesque about them, an afterthought of the violence that must have created them, but, at the same time, there is something hauntingly beautiful about the way that they are stitched together. Her white hair, torn from her braids, hangs loose around her face, dripping moonlight. She watches him with an intensity that borders on predatory, tempered with a certain bitterness, and, as she speaks, she never allows her eyes to leave his own.
“I will not stand idly by and allow him to destroy us. I have bowed to a tyrannical madman before – I will never do it again.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Caine
notes | caine is my muse. she's wearing her hood about like this, for reference.
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
