[P] take your silver spoon & dig your grave

[Seraphina]

☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼

And is it over now do you know how
pick up the pieces and go home

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She has to wait until night has fallen to avoid the guards.

Seraphina has always been like night – like smoke. There is no fire written across the metallic silver of her coat, just a patchwork of shadow and steel. A snide person might say that she is better crafted for the Night Kingdom than the bright light of Day, an assumption she would likely silence with a sharp, offended glare; she might not be flame, but she is its aftermath or its harbinger, trailing ominously on the horizon for miles to see. It is, then, not too difficult to sneak past them and into the Oasis; it is a large space, and Raum hasn’t managed to afford many guards to patrol it. Yet. But she will still have to be quiet, and cautious, if she wants to avoid trouble; this is not like the night she met with Caine, where the barely-instated Sovereign was still struggling to gain any foothold in the rebellious golden kingdom. It was comfortable, then, even pleasant. Now, her movements are dogged with tension, and she keeps glancing over her shoulder. She could kill the guards – there are only two of them – if she had to. She knows that she could.

But – but they are her people, likely drafted into the new Sovereign’s forces by necessity, and it would break her heart to have to kill her citizens if she could avoid it.

Her mind still grasps at the steel arrow attached to her armor as she creeps along the bank, sheltered by the embrace of massive palm trees and emerald-green shrubs. She is quiet as a ghost; she might as well be a ghost, with her bloodshot eyes and dark circles, with the way that she has waned – no less muscular, but bonier and thinner, and she was a lean woman to begin with – in the wake of her death on the Steppe. Nevertheless, her mismatched stare is fire-bright and alert, and her stride, though wary, is smooth and comfortable, even as her hooves hover several inches over the sand. The silence is a relief; the levitation was an annoyance, at first, and she struggled to control it, but she has come to appreciate its stealth. (She was unaccustomed to sneaking, largely because she was unaccustomed to needing to and had therefore never had to hone her skills, save for on the battlefield. It made her a bit envious of the spies she’d managed to collect so far – she wouldn’t avoid the task, because the numbers of her fledgling rebellion were still so small, but she couldn’t match, say, Caine and his cloak of shadows for evasiveness. But, even if numbers weren’t so low, she likes to find people herself; she knows that she is walking into a war, and maybe it is because she wants to punish herself if – when – something happens to them or maybe it is because she feels like she needs to know every face that she recruits, but, in any case, it pulls at her sentiments. She needs to ask them herself.)

She’d heard rumors that Raum intended to wall up the oasis, and it was this that drove her to find Jaylin with a new urgency; she needed to warn her, and, well, perhaps Isra could help to free her from her palm-bound prison, but only, of course, if she wanted it. (But, she thinks, it might not be safe to stay – no matter how deep the oasis’s waters ran.) Shielded by the waterfall, she draws out from the cover of the trees, shooting an anxious look towards the guards; they are on the far side of the pool, barely silhouettes against the moonlight. They won’t hear her, unless she is – too – loud. A grimace curls across her charcoal lips as she draws the steel arrow free from the thick wraps of her scarf, allowing it to hover in the air beside of her withers; and then, abruptly, she shoots it out across the water, carving up spray. It only just breaks the surface, then hooks, flying back to her side. Seraphina eyes the water.

“Jaylin,” she murmurs, lowly, and hopes that the hippocampus will come to investigate the disturbance.



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tag | @Jaylin
notes | <3

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