i've lost the parts of me that make me whole
Teiran watches Jahin inspect—admire?—the dagger and she thinks of the one that she hadn't tossed. He doesn't say it, but if he thinks that knife is lightweight then he would be surprised by its apparent double sheathed on her ride side. It is heavier. Strangely, to anyone who might hold them both, without reason. But the heavier has a secret imbedded in its makeup: an enchantment. Any weapon is dangerous, whether in the hands of someone who knows how to use it or not. Perhaps more so in the case of the latter. But a weapon with magic in its being can make it only that much more powerful. Especially in the hands of one privy to that secret who can wield it to the full spectrum of its ability. Of her dagger, Teiran is the only one who knows. The only one who can command it.
‘It's beautiful,’, he says. And, ‘it suits you.’ And the soldier snags on it, for some reason. The words get twisted up in the hairline fractures of her facade. Jahin tosses the dagger back and she barely catches it, if not for years of conditioning and her own instincts. It suits you. Teiran looks at the dagger clutched tightly now in her grip and wonders what he means by that.
That it is deadly? Serpentine? Crafted by another's hand?
That it is beautiful?
She puts the dagger away from her sight and her sage green eyes, strangely bright in the moonlight, make their way back to the unicorn's face. He is watching her and suddenly she thinks that he can see all of the missing pieces in her on this night, where the ghostly parts of her past slink through like wildcats in a jungle. They hunt, but they only prey and feast upon her mind. They toy at the edges of the memories that aren't quite memories because she can't quite remember them.
He speaks again and it is all wrong, wrong, wrong. It is wrong because he should have said worked but he shouldn't have had to. Because Seraphina should not be dead. There should not be a monster with black—no, blue—eyes controlling everything that they do, imprisoning them. Oh, but what is another cell to the one of her body to the one of her mind.
What does she say? How can she possibly answer that question? Yes, no, not anymore? Teiran can't say that she ever worked for Seraphina, rather than alongside her, doing what they both were made to do just in different ways. She wonders if she can work for Seraphina, even in death, whether or not she had in life. She thinks of that snake in the citadel and his pet and then she thinks of the rest of Solterra.
Her people, they have died on those streets and they will die again, but this adversary is not one she can easily put a spear through. Perhaps she should be trying to, regardless. Is her purpose not to protect Solterra? Or perhaps Teiran's purpose is just to be loyal to her, regardless of who rules her. But all she sees are black, black eyes and all she remembers are the pangs of dying breaths. Something inside her, some pillar, it crumbles.
“I don't know.”
Is this what uncertainty feels like? Like grasping at some unsteady thing as though it might give you purchase against the even more unsteady ground beneath your feet. The creature inside Teiran is desperately trying to fill all the cracks and holes in her. Trying to stop the onslaught of these things that she is not prepared for. She can never be prepared for them, not truly, but she has still fallen into a deep darkness of self-preservation.
Seraphina is dead and the throne is black and blacker still and there is fire in the capital and the screams of the dying are in her ears and Jahin's eyes are purple, then blue. Gold and then black. And Teiran is back on that street with impossibly high buildings when she puts a name to the wave building inside her. “I don't know,” she says again, quieter, hushed. Child-like.
She is lost.
@Jahin
