burning cities and napalm skies
fifteen flares inside those ocean eyes
Oh, this place could be paradise – but Seraphina would not see it.
All she sees is red, wherever she looks. Maybe it is a trap. If it is, she does not care. She does not care, as long as the men that she would see dead shudder and fall limp in their graves; if it were up to her, she would burn them, and, god willing, be sure that they would never see a scrap of goodness or mercy for the rest of all eternity. This could be paradise, but she has caught little glimpses – flashes of a silver hide so similar to her own but so wrong, wrong, wrong, of a black darker than ink and night, of all manners of twisted and monstrous creatures. She looks at the island.
Ereshkigal laughs, inside of her head. Every moment, the raucous, violent sound – like waves crashing against the shore, like unoiled hinges, like the screech of metal along stone, like all of those things at once, something unnerving and low and roiling and sometimes unbearably high and shrill – grows louder and louder, and she can’t drag it out of her head, although she presses her eyes shut and tries to breathe through her ill-contained and red rage. Shut up, you damned bird, her own mind snaps, jaws clamping insistently at the near-overwhelming presence of the demon; but she is like a chained and cornered beast, growling at something just out of her reach.
Ereshkigal wants her to kill them. She doesn’t have to say it for Seraphina to know it; she does not know where her fury ends and the demon’s fury begins. Ereshkigal’s anger feels black and impersonal, the stewing vengeance of a watchful fury, and, in more ways than she wishes that she did, Seraphina is grateful for the pull of her logical, surgical outrage against her own – which is blind and unreasonable and often threatens to swallow her whole. Ereshkigal does not care about what they have done, not really; she does not care for mortal life and mortal death. She only cares that blood is met with blood, that tooth is met with tooth.
(Seraphina wants something, too. She knows that it is worse.)
“Which little bird will you pluck first?” Ereshkigal’s voice echoes in her mind, nauseatingly distorted; the tone vacillates wildly, ear-piercingly high and then so low that she can barely hear it. “Bird-bones break so easily. Can I devour them, when you’re through? I don’t mind if they’re a little bit burnt.” She giggles, then, almost girlish in her glee.
“Whoever I can catch,” Seraphina growls, her eyes flickering open; they gleam like twin lanterns in the bright noon-light, dull and unfocused. She takes in the oddity of the woodland – and the shore – without much of a reaction.
(Tempus. This feels like Tempus. And you should not kill in holy spaces, should you?)
(But she does not care, not anymore – no god or man will keep her from her quarry.)
Everything inside of Seraphina screams that this is dangerous; that beautiful things are so rarely beautiful when they are examined with a more critical eye. (She wishes that she’d given that damned traitor a good few scars, now – made them deep and unforgettable, like a promise, so that whenever he looked at them he would know that she was coming for him, and, when she caught him, she would do far, far worse.) She knows that she cannot trust the gods and their magic; Tempus has thrown her to the wolves more than once, and she knows that he would do it again, if she were to stumble. (But everything in the world is a wolf, come to swallow her whole the moment that she begins to bleed. There are sharp edges everywhere, and teeth; and the moment that she thinks that she is safe, it snaps at her again. She cannot breathe.) This is a trap. She does not trust it. She cannot trust it. Tempus will collapse the exit again, and they’ll all fall into the sea, or something will come crawling out, or, or, or -
(But she is already a dead thing. What does it matter if she falls into the sea, so long as he and all of his ilk fall into the depths with her? She would let that dark monster eat her alive, if he were swallowed too. There is no going back, for her, and there is no way forward. Only blood. Only bone. Only flame.)
She runs, like a knife, into the woods.
@ || hmm
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
STAFF EDIT***
@Seraphinahas rolled a 3! She has been awarded +100 signos.
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
