I SEE YOUR RED DOOR, I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK
no colors anymore i want them to turn black
Teiran is not a creature that breathes with a heart that beats when she walks the streets of Solterra. She is a thing not a who. Not a who that feels the cutting sting of pain or anger, fear or loss. She is a predator made of steel, a soldier born of tormet and poisons and magic binding everything inside her to loyalty. Teiran is a creation, made for war. Made for spilling blood and taking life and protecting the things she is told to protect and nothing more.no colors anymore i want them to turn black
So when a mercury man with a beast on his heels enters her court she knows it, oh she knows it like she knows which alleyways the snakes on the blackmarket favor and which direction the winds will shift the sands before they do. He comes to claim Solterra and she knows, she can feel it in the air. It touches her with electricity, dancing up and down her skin like a charge. Teiran goes, and her sage green eyes are sharper than a blade and colder than the metal collar high about her neck. She goes and she sees him climbing the steps of the citadel and something inside her says that this is wrong, wrong, wrong because he is silver but he is not the right kind of silver.
He is not a silver that bears carving stripes and eyes like the sky above and the sand below.
She stands at the bottom and looks upon this man and his beast and she knows, oh she knows, that her court is in danger. And he speaks and his words fall from his lips like the blood staining his chest. ’Your queen is dead,’ and the image of Seraphina blinks in and out of Teiran’s line of sight, standing just off to the side, brave and strong and proud, but when Teiran looks at her she is gone. Again and again and again. Seraphina, who bore the same mark as she. Seraphina, who, for all of Solterra’s faults, believed.
Seraphina.
Teiran feels something inside her tremble. The rumble of a lion, louder and louder. It cries, it sings, it bares its teeth and roars. Teiran does not move. She stands and looks upon the man who calls himself a king, their king and everything inside her fights for purchase on the rolling dunes of the Mors, on the crumbling, pitched walls of Elatus, on the green banks of Vitae. Everything inside her screams, but she stands still as a statue—rigid as stone, beneath the glaring eye of the sun and the freezing eyes of blue.
When she opens her mouth, there are no screams. There is no fighting, no clawing, no roaring. When she opens her mouth, there is only the steel of her eyes and the light on the collar she wears and a promise. A promise to the court of sun and sand. “How will you make Solterra powerful,” and if there is an inflection of in ways that she has not already there is no indication of it in the way she stands or the flicker of her eyes. She doesn’t think of queens and orphaned children and monsters in the skin of men. She thinks of a people that have been battered again, again, again, and wonders how long it will take before the sands have buried him, too.
