[SWP] ACT II: a pilgrimage made strange

[Seraphina]

What no one ever talks about is how dangerous hope can be.
Call it forgiveness with teeth.

Ereshkigal circles above Seraphina’s head as she picks her way down the beach, hooded and spectral in the murky light of a foggy dawn; the beach is covered in white ash, and the air still smells almost overwhelmingly of smoke. Still, the vulture is barely visible through the clouds, her shape distorted and flickering in the patchwork of dark and light. Seraphina, too, moves like a dancing wraith, the long expanse of her scarf like a reaper’s cape, fluttering in a trail behind her. She is obscured and ghostly, pale as the snow-ash that litters the shoreline. She feels like a revenant, following in the wake of death; she moves with a quaking dread or a terrible resolve, and she wonders if there is any difference.

Ereshkigal’s laugh rips through the silence of the dawn – violent and crashing, like the waves against the pale crescent-moon of the shoreline.

Exhaustion tugs at her like a weight, and it is not only because of her armor. When the volcano erupted, she was far north of here, in Delumine; but the destruction, like a beacon, pulled her south. (She ran all through the night, sleepless and haunted, red-eyed as a banshee – but she has forgotten what it means to feel anything but fatigue, but the leaden pull of her limbs and a constant sense of weary, weary devastation. She wants to hurt – she wants every terrible thing to set her ablaze, to burn like a blade torn into her gut or a trench of claws drug along her face –, but life has stumbled to a dull, constant ache. There is terror and terror and terror and terror until there is nothing left in the world but terror and the dark shape of Ereshkigal, twisting and flickering, and worst of all things waiting.)

She continues down the beach, towards the volcano...or the lack thereof.

There is a crowd gathered, when she draws close. Seraphina is not surprised – violence (And a volcanic eruption is an act of violence; but whose? Either way, the mountain is gone there, and its absence suggests something worse is at play.) always draw people like flies, eager to bite at a bleeding wound. She listens to their whispers. They blame the gods. (She blames them, too, but maybe not for this.) They weep, or they scream, or they say nothing at all. She says nothing at all. They think that this is the end of the world, but she has seen the end of the world – bleeding out in a patch of dry grass and upturned dirt, one eye facing the sickly white curve of the moon, thin and upturned as a laughing mouth – and this doesn’t feel like it. Ereshkigal dives down from the clouds and lands on her shoulders, the massive expanse of her wings outstretched to their fullest length, barely ghosting across the sides of passers-by; behind the curve of her neck, those great black things might as well be her own.

“Where does it lead, Ereshkigal?” She reaches for the demon with her mind. Ereshkigal’s talons curl into the leather of her armor; she can feel them dig into her skin as she settles, her wings slowly closing in at her sides. Ereshkigal leans in towards her ear, and, with the softest of chuckles, drags her tongue along her pointed teeth.

“Towards death,” she whispers, her voice low and dark, like a threat, then adds, “Dove. I don’t know, little dove. The air is too much to fly.”

She does not want to move.

Towards death – does she want to die? She thinks so, but not like this, not in the unnatural, pointless way this strange bridge seems to want her to die. She has better things to die for than this, and they call her away from this, towards great expanses of sand and a country and a people who need her to bleed out for them, not for the gods who might have prompted this (What else could? She doesn’t want it to be them, but what else could?), not for the nations it creeps so close to. But this thing – she feels like it could swallow everything. It feels like a test, and she is tired of tests. Everything inside of her begs to go home. (But that desert is no more her home than that bridge, than this ash-coated shore.)

“Sweetling,” Ereshkigal croons, her voice dipping to the dusky mimicry of affection. “Sweet thing. Darling. What will you do?” The water is dark and thrashing and terrifying, torn up from the eruption and the presence of – horrible things, creeping on the horizon. And even from the shore, that bridge feels unsafe, like glass, and she has seen enough shattered glass to know how easily it can go crumbling, crumbling down.

At the back of her mind lies Solterra; it is always there, and she does not think that she will ever be free of it. Her love for the sand-swept kingdom does not feel like the love she was told about in stories or hymns or books. It feels like a noose. (The collar is gone, but it is still there.) If she steps onto that bridge, it occurs to her that she might never return, and she knows that she has unfinished business. (That is why ghosts cling to the realm of the living, isn’t it? And he is no ghost – but if he can steal her name from her, if he can steal her title from her, if he can steal everything from her, she can take every bit of him, too.)

She steps onto that dark spill of gloss anyways, her strides surprisingly steady against the slick lava. If Seraphina were to pinpoint the thing about herself that she resented the most, it would be her faith. She does not believe in the glorious way that most people seem to – she believes like a kicked dog believes in its master, with a faith that is violated over and over. (In gods, in people, in the faraway, dizzying concept that perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, if she just tried hard enough, if she just did enough, if she just continued, things would get better. As though any of those things had ever been worth believing in before.) She is scared of the dark, fathomless depth of the sea and the way that it licks at the volcanic bridge. She is scared of the monsters within the sea, with their tendrils and their teeth. She is scared of men with violent blue eyes and what they have yet to do, and she is scared that she will never be enough to put an end to them. Her faith does not save her from any of those things. If the ocean wishes to drown her, it will; if Tempus is waiting at the end of the bridge, and this time he decides to kill her for answering incorrectly, she will die; if Raum burns Solterra, and she cannot do anything to stop him, Solterra will burn, and she will burn too, and she will hope that there is no one to drag her out of the flames that time; if, if, if, if. Faith is not a saving thing. It is not assurance. It is-

If she has to call it anything (she thinks, as she crosses the thinnest point of the bridge, her movements steady in spite of the way that the pull of the waves turns her stomach in knots), she would call it a snakeskin that she can’t seem to shed. It is hopeless and worn and dead, but she drags it along behind her; she still catches her hooves carrying to Veneror, and she still catches her lips shaping the form of a prayer, even though she knows he won’t answer. She thinks that it would be better to believe in nothing at all than to believe in this half-hearted way.

She should be shocked at all these things that she passes, the pearls and the scales and the cogs. But she feels nothing at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing – just the absence that nothing leaves behind, the gaping place where she knows that shock should be. This place is wrong. Perhaps she should find it beautiful, but it leaves her with a dull sense of threat and a panic that stutters in her chest, but never lets bloom.

And then there is the ivy.

“Well. Look at that. It leads,” Ereshkigal murmurs into the shell of the silver’s ear, her voice low and growling, like the depths of a raging sea, “to a great wall of ivy – a wall that goes everywhere and has no end. Does that make you think of anything, sweet seraph?”

Yes.

It makes her think of drowning. It makes her think of staring what she thinks was god in the eyes and failing to answer his question. She has never been good at riddles; she has never been good at anything, and now she is paying for it. Seraphina back out at that black-glass bridge, and her stomach twists like she is still drowning, and she does not know if she will ever reach the surface, or if there is even a surface to reach for at all. She failed there, too. (She wonders if that ink-monster is there below the waves, with those tentacled creatures and slips of mouths; she wonders if it is coming for her, because anything that she fails to destroy will come back to destroy her in time, just like Raum.) If life is full of tests, that was the first one she was aware of failing. There were others, before that, but she barely remembers them, her memories as fragmented as they are; the first time she had failed, she had failed before god.

And then again, with a skull cracked back against rough stone. And then again, with a teryr that blotted out the midday sun. And then again, with a viper and a sea of flame. And then again, in the face of – her – god. And then again, in fallen snow. And then again, in a field that was now covered by jewel-flowers, soaking up her blood. And then again, with the dead, who watch her. And then again, with those that have walked – away.

The ivy rises up in the distance, endless and insurmountable. She looks at it, and she waits for the world to open wide – and swallow her up, with everything behind them.

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*slams this down* 300 posts! also, I'd prefer you bop me if you want to have someone spot Sera, with her faking her death and all. Can't accidentally reveal things ahead of schedule.... <3|| "Change Came To Me Like A Crooked Beast," Clementine von Radics

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

STAFF EDIT***
@Seraphina has rolled a 3! She has been awarded +80 signos.