☼ fia the crownless ☼
if I find your soul do you want it? do you even know?
do you even know what part of you you are?
“A fan of her handiwork, or of her canvas?”
Beneath the somber veneer of queen or rebel or whatever pensive, serious creature she must be in order to do what must be done, there is still the lingering remnant of a girl – or a woman, but she is not sure if she has ever been nurtured enough to grow into one. She is hardly accustomed to compliments; court has taught her how to handle harsh words with a straight face and an impassive gleam in her eyes, but she has never grown used to the alternative. Any praise or flattery directed her way was given for the harsher, colder aspects of her personality, her unyielding resilience and single-minded loyalty to her nation, all things grown from cruelty – and it was always hard to think of those things as part of herself, rather than what she needed to survive, or what she had been carved into. At any rate, they were always as morose as she was; her presence seemed to demand it.
Which is likely why his words make her stop in her tracks.
She freezes, her attention catching on his stare trailing purposefully up her cheek. She fidgets slightly under the weight of his stare, biting back the urge to move; he stops just before he can meet her stare, and, with an ambiguous arch of her brow, leaves her with that. She blinks at him owlishly, her bright, clever eyes wide with shock, completely caught off guard – and completely unsure of what to do with it. She looks younger when she’s startled, surprise somehow softening her gaunt, exhausted features; perhaps it is the presence of that uncertainty that she always tries to hide, that stumbling, sheepish bit of awkwardness that so often runs rampant in the back of her mind. “I…” Her voice comes out softer than usual, accompanied by just a hint of a stammer, and she realizes as soon as the word has left her mouth that she doesn’t know where she’s going with that statement. If she were more eloquent, she might have come up with something charming to say, a wink and a bit of flattery in turn, but she is ill-versed in such affairs; she can’t even manage a proper thank you (and she isn’t even sure that’s what her response should be) before the conversation turns, to something like her relief, and then she is back to herself again, composed and focused and perhaps a bit too intent on grinding up the aspilia.
She gives an understated roll of her eyes at his never, brushes by him; and then they are off, and he is asking a question that she is not quite prepared to answer, but she is answering it regardless, because she feels like she owes some kind of honesty. (Comical, given her alias.) She doesn’t want to look at him, and he doesn’t try to force her to – she can’t stand it when they watch her when she stumbles over herself, when the unpolished, uncontained bits of herself come spilling out in a trailing mass, and here he keeps provoking them to the surface. A Sovereign that so much as appeared weak would fall apart, at least in Solterra; perhaps Delumine was kinder, or Terrastella, or even Denocte, but not Solterra. Her hesitation – her vulnerability – is as good as a death sentence, and the farthest thing she can imagine from a reassuring look on the face of a prospective revolutionary.
He is quiet, for a moment, and she tries to focus on the sound of her hooves crunching in the sand or the soft, distant howl of the desert wind rather than the silence between them. She is honest by nature, in spite of her own paranoia, but this requires a kind of honesty she is not entirely comfortable with; she has only become less comfortable with it the more that she has begun to wade through her own complicated, nauseating emotions. She knows that she absolutely shouldn’t trust him, and she knows that she – should – be playing her strongest hand in front of him precisely because she shouldn’t trust him, but here she is, stammering and stumbling over her words, letting him pick at raw, bloody wounds. He speaks. She glances up. “We should both consider a change in occupation.” His words are so lackadaisical, to fill that space.
This response, unexpected as it is, provokes a ghost of a dry laugh from Seraphina. He isn’t looking at her, she notes; he seems to be looking anywhere but at her. (She wonders if she has hit some kind of nerve.) “Once this is all over, perhaps.” For now – her life is secondary to her cause, and she will not hesitate to risk what she must to see it through. She hasn’t thought much about the future, after Raum is dead; the thought is terrifying. She doesn’t know who she will be when all of this is over, much less who she will become. All she knows is that some vital part of who she was died when Raum killed Seraphina on the Steppe, and she is not sure if what is coming to fill in the space it left behind is kinder or crueler than what she left behind. (She has never really wanted to kill someone, save in hindsight, before this. It has always been an impersonal thing, and she is so used to floating above it all, but now she has been pulled back down to the ground.)
But – the future is the future. She might not even live past tonight; she knows, knows just how easy it is to see absolutely everything collapse in one fragile, insignificant instant.
“The Elatus?” His voice, fortunately, pulls her from the grip of thoughts she does not want to think.
“The Elatus Canyon,” she says, with a nod. Hadn’t spent much time there, by the sound of things. “A bit dangerous – easy to get lost, and full of teryrs.” But everywhere in Solterra was dangerous and full of terrors, particularly now that Raum was the desert kingdom’s sovereign. She glances at him over her shoulder, perhaps to see if he is looking at her again, but he isn’t, though he moves to walk just a hairbreadth from her shoulder. “Fortunately, the more off-putting the location, the more unlikely it is that it will warrant much attention from Raum…and there are some caverns in the canyon walls that will make suitable, defensible shelter.” It is strangely secure, for those who can survive the predators and the scalding, harsh conditions; and there is the colosseum, to train her warriors. (On that note, her eyes dart to scan his frame thoughtfully. Certainly not a strong offensive fighter, she thinks. Too pretty for it; that hair would be impractical in any kind of straightforward fight, and he doesn’t seem to have the nicks and scars that come from a life of fighting besides…but perhaps, she thinks, they are just hidden in the dark of his coat. Either way, he is limber and lithe, quick, built for stealth and speed. If he is as specialized as her preliminary observations suggest, they might have to work on that – he won’t always have the upper hand.)
Her question makes him jerk.
He turns to her, for a moment, then looks away, his expression stiffening. “I wanted to know what it was like.” She tilts her head; his voice seems to harden with each passing word, to grow more impassive and distant. “To be able to choose.”
Her stomach turns. Of course she understands.
She does not try to speak; she does not try to push him, either. She listens, hangs on to each word as it falls from his lips, and she tries to piece together what is behind his statements. Choice is a luxury, so he was in a position where he did not get to choose; she thinks of his earlier comment about occupations. (But that is mere speculation – attaching facts to the scraps that she has.) He can’t control his magic; she has observed that much. Apparently, he could before, back in his homeland, wherever it is. (Then why stay here? Why in Novus, why in Solterra?) And it takes. That lingers for a moment, replaced by an abrupt shudder at his next statement. I was not born with two sets of wings. He wasn’t born with them. He didn’t choose to have them, either – so they were forced onto him, and she feels a sudden, chilling rush of nausea at the thought of how much it must hurt to sprout another pair of appendages. A nuisance. His phrasing is light, and she does not trust it.
He is quiet, for a moment, but she says nothing – it is a silence that comes when someone does not know what to say, not the silence that comes when someone is finished speaking.
“My previous organization is, to my knowledge, no longer in operation.” Her ears twitch up; she does not miss the edge to his voice. (Or the uneasy implication of to my knowledge; what kind of organization did he come from?) What did they do to you, she wants to ask, but she settles for watching him as he speaks – the pensive downward curve of his dark lips, the distant look in his eyes, which are still looking in every direction but at her. They must be nearing the cave, but her stare is trained on him.
“And the thought of going rogue does not seem an appealing one. So, you see, I have decided to make a selfish choice. I have been trained to wield my blade for a purpose.” Something about trained [to wield my blade] for a purpose lingers in her mind; what purpose? She’d assumed he was a freelancer, but that clearly wasn’t the case. (And what purpose would train someone into an assassin and a spy?) “When your letter came, I found one.”
The great maw of the cave rises up in front of them. She narrows her eyes. Does not stop – her stride is fluid, even, deliberate. In fact, she speeds up, edging forward until she can lean ever so slightly into his field of view; it aggravates her that he keeps looking away, guilty as she was of doing it herself, and she’s unwilling to argue with him if he won’t meet her eyes. Selfish? For what? For making a choice? For recklessly agreeing to join a rebellion against a mad dictator, who would certainly kill him – or worse – if he slipped up, in a nation that was not his own, on the words of a woman he had just met? Looking for meaning wasn’t selfish. A choice wasn’t selfish. And, though he was following someone – following her, - hadn’t he chosen to do it? She couldn’t quite believe that, had Raum made the offer instead of her, he would have agreed to it simply to have something to do.
She knew what purpose dictated by apathy and training looked like – she had lived it. She still saw it, when she passed some of those like her on the winding streets of the capitol. It was clearly what he was determined to convey to her, but she couldn’t quite believe it.
“I understand,” she says, stopping in front of him and raising her chin to meet his stare with her jewel-bright eyes, her gaze as even and firm and unwary as it is thoughtful, “but I wouldn’t be so quick to call it selfish. Choosing-“ And her voice is firm, an echo of queenly certainty...or the unyielding knowledge of lived experience. “-isn’t selfish, and, even if it were…we are in Solterra.” A dry, bitter exhalation, almost a laugh but worn-thin and exhausted, passes her lips. A den of snakes, full of terrible people who wanted terrible things; a culture that breeds violence and cruelty and bloodlust. (But she still loves it. But she still believes – so firmly, so devoutly, like one believes in the gods – that it can be better than this.) “You could find far more selfish, profitable causes without so much as looking for them.” But he didn’t; instead, he’d chosen to throw in his lot with her, even though she had offered him nothing. (Seraphina had expected him to ask; you were supposed to pay people in his line of work, or so she’d been told in the past, but he wasn’t at all what she’d anticipated.) Perhaps she should have been skeptical, or suspicious.
She wasn’t, though. There was something to him that was just a bit too earnest (no, that wasn’t really the right word – but, as usual, it was evading her) for it.
With that, she brushes by him, stepping towards the mouth of the cave – into darkness. Alshamtueur drifts casually from its sheath to hang in the air at her side, the product of casual mental manipulation.
“Alshamtueur,” Seraphina murmurs, and the sword sparks to life instantaneously, sizzling. She dips its silver tip to a torch, illuminated against the cavern wall, and, with another whisper of its name, the sword flickers back to silence, flames disappearing as quickly as they materialized. She sheathes it again and reaches out her mind to grasp the torch. It hovers in the air in front of her, bobbing gently; she casts a glance at Caine over her shoulder, the flame suspending a halo of light around her form. “I’m afraid that it isn’t much to look at, now…” The shabby beginnings of a revolution. “…but we’re only just getting started.” She offers him something like a smile, the upward twitch of her dark lips barely perceptible in the shadows. “Come along – I’ll show you around, and we’ll see to that scrape of yours…” Her gaze lingers on the golden scarf, wrapped around his chest. “…and I’ll explain the job I have for you along the way.”
There was only so much time she could spend running from business.
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tags | @Caine
notes | ...this is,,,, how you say,,,, too long
if I find your soul do you want it? do you even know?
do you even know what part of you you are?
“A fan of her handiwork, or of her canvas?”
Beneath the somber veneer of queen or rebel or whatever pensive, serious creature she must be in order to do what must be done, there is still the lingering remnant of a girl – or a woman, but she is not sure if she has ever been nurtured enough to grow into one. She is hardly accustomed to compliments; court has taught her how to handle harsh words with a straight face and an impassive gleam in her eyes, but she has never grown used to the alternative. Any praise or flattery directed her way was given for the harsher, colder aspects of her personality, her unyielding resilience and single-minded loyalty to her nation, all things grown from cruelty – and it was always hard to think of those things as part of herself, rather than what she needed to survive, or what she had been carved into. At any rate, they were always as morose as she was; her presence seemed to demand it.
Which is likely why his words make her stop in her tracks.
She freezes, her attention catching on his stare trailing purposefully up her cheek. She fidgets slightly under the weight of his stare, biting back the urge to move; he stops just before he can meet her stare, and, with an ambiguous arch of her brow, leaves her with that. She blinks at him owlishly, her bright, clever eyes wide with shock, completely caught off guard – and completely unsure of what to do with it. She looks younger when she’s startled, surprise somehow softening her gaunt, exhausted features; perhaps it is the presence of that uncertainty that she always tries to hide, that stumbling, sheepish bit of awkwardness that so often runs rampant in the back of her mind. “I…” Her voice comes out softer than usual, accompanied by just a hint of a stammer, and she realizes as soon as the word has left her mouth that she doesn’t know where she’s going with that statement. If she were more eloquent, she might have come up with something charming to say, a wink and a bit of flattery in turn, but she is ill-versed in such affairs; she can’t even manage a proper thank you (and she isn’t even sure that’s what her response should be) before the conversation turns, to something like her relief, and then she is back to herself again, composed and focused and perhaps a bit too intent on grinding up the aspilia.
She gives an understated roll of her eyes at his never, brushes by him; and then they are off, and he is asking a question that she is not quite prepared to answer, but she is answering it regardless, because she feels like she owes some kind of honesty. (Comical, given her alias.) She doesn’t want to look at him, and he doesn’t try to force her to – she can’t stand it when they watch her when she stumbles over herself, when the unpolished, uncontained bits of herself come spilling out in a trailing mass, and here he keeps provoking them to the surface. A Sovereign that so much as appeared weak would fall apart, at least in Solterra; perhaps Delumine was kinder, or Terrastella, or even Denocte, but not Solterra. Her hesitation – her vulnerability – is as good as a death sentence, and the farthest thing she can imagine from a reassuring look on the face of a prospective revolutionary.
He is quiet, for a moment, and she tries to focus on the sound of her hooves crunching in the sand or the soft, distant howl of the desert wind rather than the silence between them. She is honest by nature, in spite of her own paranoia, but this requires a kind of honesty she is not entirely comfortable with; she has only become less comfortable with it the more that she has begun to wade through her own complicated, nauseating emotions. She knows that she absolutely shouldn’t trust him, and she knows that she – should – be playing her strongest hand in front of him precisely because she shouldn’t trust him, but here she is, stammering and stumbling over her words, letting him pick at raw, bloody wounds. He speaks. She glances up. “We should both consider a change in occupation.” His words are so lackadaisical, to fill that space.
This response, unexpected as it is, provokes a ghost of a dry laugh from Seraphina. He isn’t looking at her, she notes; he seems to be looking anywhere but at her. (She wonders if she has hit some kind of nerve.) “Once this is all over, perhaps.” For now – her life is secondary to her cause, and she will not hesitate to risk what she must to see it through. She hasn’t thought much about the future, after Raum is dead; the thought is terrifying. She doesn’t know who she will be when all of this is over, much less who she will become. All she knows is that some vital part of who she was died when Raum killed Seraphina on the Steppe, and she is not sure if what is coming to fill in the space it left behind is kinder or crueler than what she left behind. (She has never really wanted to kill someone, save in hindsight, before this. It has always been an impersonal thing, and she is so used to floating above it all, but now she has been pulled back down to the ground.)
But – the future is the future. She might not even live past tonight; she knows, knows just how easy it is to see absolutely everything collapse in one fragile, insignificant instant.
“The Elatus?” His voice, fortunately, pulls her from the grip of thoughts she does not want to think.
“The Elatus Canyon,” she says, with a nod. Hadn’t spent much time there, by the sound of things. “A bit dangerous – easy to get lost, and full of teryrs.” But everywhere in Solterra was dangerous and full of terrors, particularly now that Raum was the desert kingdom’s sovereign. She glances at him over her shoulder, perhaps to see if he is looking at her again, but he isn’t, though he moves to walk just a hairbreadth from her shoulder. “Fortunately, the more off-putting the location, the more unlikely it is that it will warrant much attention from Raum…and there are some caverns in the canyon walls that will make suitable, defensible shelter.” It is strangely secure, for those who can survive the predators and the scalding, harsh conditions; and there is the colosseum, to train her warriors. (On that note, her eyes dart to scan his frame thoughtfully. Certainly not a strong offensive fighter, she thinks. Too pretty for it; that hair would be impractical in any kind of straightforward fight, and he doesn’t seem to have the nicks and scars that come from a life of fighting besides…but perhaps, she thinks, they are just hidden in the dark of his coat. Either way, he is limber and lithe, quick, built for stealth and speed. If he is as specialized as her preliminary observations suggest, they might have to work on that – he won’t always have the upper hand.)
Her question makes him jerk.
He turns to her, for a moment, then looks away, his expression stiffening. “I wanted to know what it was like.” She tilts her head; his voice seems to harden with each passing word, to grow more impassive and distant. “To be able to choose.”
Her stomach turns. Of course she understands.
She does not try to speak; she does not try to push him, either. She listens, hangs on to each word as it falls from his lips, and she tries to piece together what is behind his statements. Choice is a luxury, so he was in a position where he did not get to choose; she thinks of his earlier comment about occupations. (But that is mere speculation – attaching facts to the scraps that she has.) He can’t control his magic; she has observed that much. Apparently, he could before, back in his homeland, wherever it is. (Then why stay here? Why in Novus, why in Solterra?) And it takes. That lingers for a moment, replaced by an abrupt shudder at his next statement. I was not born with two sets of wings. He wasn’t born with them. He didn’t choose to have them, either – so they were forced onto him, and she feels a sudden, chilling rush of nausea at the thought of how much it must hurt to sprout another pair of appendages. A nuisance. His phrasing is light, and she does not trust it.
He is quiet, for a moment, but she says nothing – it is a silence that comes when someone does not know what to say, not the silence that comes when someone is finished speaking.
“My previous organization is, to my knowledge, no longer in operation.” Her ears twitch up; she does not miss the edge to his voice. (Or the uneasy implication of to my knowledge; what kind of organization did he come from?) What did they do to you, she wants to ask, but she settles for watching him as he speaks – the pensive downward curve of his dark lips, the distant look in his eyes, which are still looking in every direction but at her. They must be nearing the cave, but her stare is trained on him.
“And the thought of going rogue does not seem an appealing one. So, you see, I have decided to make a selfish choice. I have been trained to wield my blade for a purpose.” Something about trained [to wield my blade] for a purpose lingers in her mind; what purpose? She’d assumed he was a freelancer, but that clearly wasn’t the case. (And what purpose would train someone into an assassin and a spy?) “When your letter came, I found one.”
The great maw of the cave rises up in front of them. She narrows her eyes. Does not stop – her stride is fluid, even, deliberate. In fact, she speeds up, edging forward until she can lean ever so slightly into his field of view; it aggravates her that he keeps looking away, guilty as she was of doing it herself, and she’s unwilling to argue with him if he won’t meet her eyes. Selfish? For what? For making a choice? For recklessly agreeing to join a rebellion against a mad dictator, who would certainly kill him – or worse – if he slipped up, in a nation that was not his own, on the words of a woman he had just met? Looking for meaning wasn’t selfish. A choice wasn’t selfish. And, though he was following someone – following her, - hadn’t he chosen to do it? She couldn’t quite believe that, had Raum made the offer instead of her, he would have agreed to it simply to have something to do.
She knew what purpose dictated by apathy and training looked like – she had lived it. She still saw it, when she passed some of those like her on the winding streets of the capitol. It was clearly what he was determined to convey to her, but she couldn’t quite believe it.
“I understand,” she says, stopping in front of him and raising her chin to meet his stare with her jewel-bright eyes, her gaze as even and firm and unwary as it is thoughtful, “but I wouldn’t be so quick to call it selfish. Choosing-“ And her voice is firm, an echo of queenly certainty...or the unyielding knowledge of lived experience. “-isn’t selfish, and, even if it were…we are in Solterra.” A dry, bitter exhalation, almost a laugh but worn-thin and exhausted, passes her lips. A den of snakes, full of terrible people who wanted terrible things; a culture that breeds violence and cruelty and bloodlust. (But she still loves it. But she still believes – so firmly, so devoutly, like one believes in the gods – that it can be better than this.) “You could find far more selfish, profitable causes without so much as looking for them.” But he didn’t; instead, he’d chosen to throw in his lot with her, even though she had offered him nothing. (Seraphina had expected him to ask; you were supposed to pay people in his line of work, or so she’d been told in the past, but he wasn’t at all what she’d anticipated.) Perhaps she should have been skeptical, or suspicious.
She wasn’t, though. There was something to him that was just a bit too earnest (no, that wasn’t really the right word – but, as usual, it was evading her) for it.
With that, she brushes by him, stepping towards the mouth of the cave – into darkness. Alshamtueur drifts casually from its sheath to hang in the air at her side, the product of casual mental manipulation.
“Alshamtueur,” Seraphina murmurs, and the sword sparks to life instantaneously, sizzling. She dips its silver tip to a torch, illuminated against the cavern wall, and, with another whisper of its name, the sword flickers back to silence, flames disappearing as quickly as they materialized. She sheathes it again and reaches out her mind to grasp the torch. It hovers in the air in front of her, bobbing gently; she casts a glance at Caine over her shoulder, the flame suspending a halo of light around her form. “I’m afraid that it isn’t much to look at, now…” The shabby beginnings of a revolution. “…but we’re only just getting started.” She offers him something like a smile, the upward twitch of her dark lips barely perceptible in the shadows. “Come along – I’ll show you around, and we’ll see to that scrape of yours…” Her gaze lingers on the golden scarf, wrapped around his chest. “…and I’ll explain the job I have for you along the way.”
There was only so much time she could spend running from business.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Caine
notes | ...this is,,,, how you say,,,, too long
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
