b e x l e y
oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -
B
exley hates her for being alive.The letter comes like an augury, definite and Delphic. She cannot be sure she was even conscious before it reached her because she cannot remember anything before the moment it comes to hover in front of her chest: not the past few sunrises, not why she is here in the crowded, stifling markets, if she has seen Apolonia since the Incident. Nothing but little snippets of sunlight, sound waves. Misery.
She snatches it and tucks it under her hair, against the line of her shoulder. No one seems to notice. They are too busy with their prophecies and their fear and their sharpening of blades. So it is easy, relatively, for Bexley to slink out of the crowd and down an abandoned alley so dusty and narrow it’s evident nothing but lizards could’ve frequented it for quite a long time. It is oppressively quiet. She can hear only the light song of wind and the far-away chime of voices so faint they’ve become a hum. Dirty sunlight gleams off the sandstone and adobe. She glances over her shoulder just to make sure, but of course there is nothing and no one there; it is only the bright beat of her own heart that could cause any trouble, here.
The letter is unfolded with little fanfare. She reads it once, and then again. Almost she has to smile at the way it has been handled, and how obvious it is that the words were written and then rewritten and then written again, and that they are living in a world so barren and restricted a queen cannot find a second piece of paper to draft a message one.
Please. Sera.
Ah, and here is the hatred setting in, hot like lava, bright like water: until this moment two of the brightest spots of her life had been extinguished, and somehow it made it easier, to know that they were equal in death, and equally untouchable: now Seraphina is alive, and Bexley wonders which god decided to exchange the one life for the other and why.
And what she might offer to reverse it.
Bexley spills a jet of searing light like a fountain onto the note, until it bursts into flame and goes trickling in little pieces of ash to rest on the cobblestone. She watches the flakes drift in the dead breeze like so many butterflies and for a moment merely breathes.
It is in defeat that she turns toward the edge of the city.
From the markets to the mouth of the canyon is it not so long a walk, not when it feels as though walking is the only thing Bexley has been doing recently, walking, and weeping, and cursing; yet as she passes through the desert and past the oasis she is bizarrely silent for the first time in days, smothered by the heat and the wind and the crushing omniscience of danger. The chain around her throat is now a collar. The scar across her cheek pulses and shifts. There is a moment where the light catches it just right and she makes it disappear, just for half a second, and it feels so wrong it makes her chest hurt.
Finally the sand slips into rock. Dull-eyed, Bexley winds down the slope and onto the first lip of the canyon, and around the next corner is her ghost, beautiful as ever.
She draws to an unsure stop near the edge of the ridge. Seraphina is here, alive but all wrong, in an outfit Bexley has never seen before, wearing a new wreath of scars, bruised and a little wasted away, but underneath it is still her: the mismatched eyes, the dark lips, the quicksilver stripes, and even beneath her hatred the regent is so relieved she could almost cry.
Hm, says Bexley. She screws up one eye against the glaring sun. Looks like we're both undead.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3
