[P] take your silver spoon & dig your grave

[Seraphina]

☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼

If I find your soul do you want it?
I see it everywhere, past the death visage.

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As a general rule, Seraphina is not afraid of dying.

Even – or especially – as a child, she was wholly aware of her own mortality. How could it be otherwise? She grew up on the battlefield; rather than fables or flowers, she was raised on blood, on the crushing inevitability and constant fear of death. The inevitability had never gone, but, with time, the fear had trickled away, like water through cracks in a dam.

It is not dying that she fears; rather, it is those things that accompany dying, remnants of a largely solitary (and horribly lonely) lifestyle based in duty, rather than the softer emotions that she has been told craft a life that is worth living. She prefers to sweep them under the metaphorical rug and pretend that she does not feel them, because she knows they will do little more than provoke her to further anguish. (They come creeping in anyways – most often in the darkest parts of the oppressive, empty blackness of the night. Before she had died, she thought them insignificant, or she assumed them the mark of a paranoid mind. Of course her death would be felt; surely she had done enough, tried enough to mean something. Of course she would be given a proper funeral; her people would not leave one of their own, much less their queen, to rot in a field of flowers and upturned mud. Of course, of course, of course. She was not who she was as a girl, an afterthought, an insignificant little slip of silver built up as a cog in some great, terrible machine. She had changed. Grown kinder. Spoken more – tried to mean something.)

(The truth of the matter was that she still means nothing at all – the idea of her was far more significant than she is, and, even then, the so-called silver queen was a largely unmourned, pale shadow. Perhaps it was selfish, to care so much about the reception surrounding the news of her death when a tyrant had taken power in her wake, starving her people and crushing them beneath a steely silver hoof, but still, she aches.)

When Jaylin springs out of the water, all sharp angles and snarling teeth, her first impulse is to jerk back; water splashes against the bright silver of her coat, staining it with drips of gunmetal in the moonlight. She does not move, though – does not shy away. (She wonders why. She is not scared of Jaylin, though her sudden, thrashing appearance was greeted with a jolt of adrenaline that, ultimately, locked her knees and made her stand rigid. Has her impulse become to meet violence – or, worse, death – by freezing? Like a deer in the headlights, she stands stock-still, only to allow a soft exhalation when she realizes that she has been greeted with a gentle brush against her knees, rather than blood and knife-edged jaws.) She is rewarded by a soft touch and an affectionate gaze (much like a lion with its head laid in someone’s lap), with quiet words that she has so rarely heard lately – but she has so longed to hear them.

“I’m glad you’re not dead.”

It is rare to be greeted with kindness, because the world is so often unkind, and she has become accustomed to it – an apathetic unkindness, at least, which is even worse than a harsh one. She feels a prickling of wet, stinging heat at the back of her eyes, but she blinks it aside. Her work is not done. She cannot break, cannot falter, cannot show the collapsing blackness swallowing up everything inside of her skin; she must look strong and untouched, even if she is not, because, in a world that seems hellbent on taking everything from her, all that Seraphina has is her dignity. The world spirals. She is all that she can control.

“Thank you.” Her voice comes quietly, and she bends, just brushing her muzzle to the ridge of the fin on Jaylin’s forehead, rare affection from the silver. I almost died hangs at the back of her throat, but it never makes it past her lips. “I’m glad that you’re alive, too. Truly.” She has seen too many people die, lately – too many people tortured, flung aside, missing. Too many people gone. Seraphina had worried for Jaylin, trapped as she was in the Oasis; she looks at her with a furrowed brow, her mismatched eyes troubled. “…Raum intends to wall up the Oasis. He wants to keep people from the water supply.” Word on the street, word in the letters that Caine has managed to snatch for her, suggested by documents and missives and the supplies she has seen guards gathering.

She has more to say. She is filling in that space with business, as usual – letting plans eclipse the softer sentiments that snake around the back of her mind, distracting herself from the twisting whirlpool of unexamined hurts spin spirals in her stomach with work, always moving forward so that she does not have to think too deeply about the parts of her that are tender and raw, wounds stitched with salt, because, if she does, she knows that she will break, and she cannot break.

“I have a friend who can free you, so long as you wish to leave. She has…immensely powerful magic that can create almost anything from anything else, and the aid of a dragon.” She struggles with the words, somehow. (She cannot save herself, or her people, but Isra can, and, much as she wishes them saved, she can’t help but feel a prickling of something like resent – no, bitter jealousy - wedged like a thorn in her skin when she thinks of it. She is too weak, too useless, and the Night Queen seems to her much like the embodiment of everything she wishes she were, everything she wishes she had, and she is no older than her, certainly no more devout, with even less time spent as a ruler. But she is so accomplished. So cherished. So loved, so loving, so fierce and kind and eloquent. Denocte blazed with fury when their queen was taken, and Solterra met its queen’s death with little more than apathy. She saved her. Seraphina knows should not feel so quietly, passively upset, unwound – but she is. She should be grateful, but it aches. She did not ask to be saved.)

But for now, her eyes are on Jaylin. There are so many other things to say - I am organizing a resistance or I almost died alone and broken, and I still don’t think that I know how to put it into words, but, for now, she decides to focus on the immediate.



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tag | @Jaylin
notes | sorry for the wait!

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