[P] break first or break fast

[Seraphina]

don't waste your light on me

She almost drowned, once.

It was years ago, now, in a maze conjured by Tempus. She couldn’t swim. (It was starting to feel as though the gods had never been much good to her.) A monster, this…strange, bulbous thing made of oil or ink, she couldn’t tell, or maybe she just couldn’t remember properly anymore - it chased her over the edge of a jagged, sudden cliff, and she went tumbling down, down, down into a black, silty river. For a few minutes, she thought that she would die. The blackness was inescapable and suffocating. She knew they wouldn’t find her body. She knew that they wouldn’t even look.

When she thinks about it, Seraphina knows that she didn’t really start to believe that she was significant until – Maxence. The first time she’d ever - known - that someone would care if she lived or die was when that Teryr threw her across the canyon, and she bled and bled, bent and broken against the rocks. But she survived. And he saw something in her. No one else had, not really – not beyond something that they could use. Maxence was the man who’d made her his Emissary, his judge and his justice – who’d trusted her wisdom and her guidance. He’d wanted her. No one else had ever wanted her for anything.

She had been a girl – young and naïve and foolish.

Maxence was different. And then he was dead. And then Avdotya betrayed her. And then there was just Seraphina. And then there were other people. There was Eik. Bexley. Vadim. Rhoswen. Eden. Leviathan. Renwick. Acton. Teiran. Jaylin. Caine. All of them lost to her, one way or another – dead or gone or turned traitor, lost by geography or motivation or the dark clutch of the abyss. She is weighing the measure of everyone that she has ever cared for, and she is realizing, as she stares out at the dark flush of the waves crashing against the shore, that almost none of them are left.

She had thought that she was changing. She is alone as she has ever been.

The sky is magnificently terrible. Dark clouds eat up every speck of blue from horizon to horizon, coating it in a melancholy painting of greys: some magnificently and terrifyingly dark and others pale as dust. The light is barely visible, behind some of the softer shades, and it sifts through in a malnourished and desaturated white-gold, and it tumbles down – across the tumultuous waves and the low, rocky ridges of dunes – in patches. The water froths. The waves clamber against the shore, biting at the sand as though they want to swallow it whole, to eat up the beach – and the shore, and the desert, and everything that lies beyond it. She isn’t sure that she wouldn’t welcome it. Oblivion would excuse her from her duty. Oblivion is the only thing that would excuse her from her penance. It would not be absolution. It would be an end.

An end is all that she can hope for. The waves creep closer, towards the dark curves of her hooves. When she closes her eyes and listens, she can hear the roaring river, and the sound of the monster closing in behind her, and there is nothing but Seraphina and the Monster, one little leap between being eaten alive and Oblivion-

(Her hope is smothered beneath those dark waves. She can no longer see the surface – and the rush is all around her, pulling her in every direction at once. She can only hope that she will kick her way to shore, and the longer she is in the water, the more that it becomes a part of her. She wonders what will crawl out of that black river, when this is all over. She wonders if it will look like her. She wonders if it will be her, behind those jewel-bright eyes.)

Her eyes snap open. Seagulls cry out in the distance, swooping into the dark water; she sees squirming fish in their beaks, struggling to writhe their way free. The wind throws them back, sends water flying out of the sea. Salt tangles in her coat, and clumps of sand; the air is overwhelmingly thick and humid, and the smell of the ocean hangs heavy with each gust. The wind threatens to pull her mane from its braids, so she unwinds it herself, letting her long, long white hair fall freely about her chest. The wind tugs it. She knows that it will frustrate her to untangle it, harsh as the salt and the wind must be, but the cool air, bolstered by a wintery chill, feels almost soothing as it runs through it.

She lets it run like the furthest edges of a trail of smoke, washed out to sea.

After Seraphina had almost drowned, she’d taught herself to swim in the Terminus. She wouldn’t dare to go swimming today – this is Kelpie weather, and it looks like a storm is brewing (she is not sure if the booming in the distance is the waves against some far outcropping of cliffs or the roll of far-off thunder) besides. She wishes that she were herself back then, years ago; she wishes that her only trouble was a fear of drowning.

But the world is full of bigger, more terrible monsters, with sharper teeth and fiercer claws. She had always thought that you were only supposed to meet one of those kinds of men in your life – men like Raum and Zolin, or like Viceroy. Men that were not men. Men that had something that was-not-man behind their eyes, that crushed and consumed and broke apart. Men that ruined her. Men that ruined her.

What did it mean that she had met three?

She paces forward, towards the shore, and sidesteps beached jellyfish and tangles of driftwood. Fragmented shells crunch beneath her hooves. She walks until her fetlocks are submerged in the surf, and then she stands and stares out to sea. She does not know what she is looking for, if she is looking for anything at all.

“There’s work to do.” Ereshkigal’s voice resounds in her mind. She glances up at where the vulture circles above her, like she is some dead thing. Her wings are buffeted by the wind, but she is no normal vulture – her arc is perfectly spherical in spite of the poor weather.

She knows.

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@Boudika || woof this post is dark. she'll brighten up a bit when she isn't just...monologuing, I promise.

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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