☼ fia the crownless ☼
I can't even count how many souls I've made off the same deal you're on
remember - the devil ain't s a friend to no one
“I think we’ll both be able to manage it.”
“So do I,” she says, her voice dipping quietly. She wants to try to, even though she isn’t sure that she can. Seraphina isn’t sure that anything will be left for her when all of this is over; Raum killed her, and he took her life. Even if she made her presence known to the world again, once he was dealt with, she couldn’t return to living the life she’d had before he struck her down. And, really, she wasn’t sure that she had anything to return to – she had few friends, and most of them had scattered when Raum came to power; she was sure that Solterra would have no love for her, after she had condemned it, considering that it barely mourned her even before Raum rose as the nation’s tyrant; she had no family of any sort, and it had never so much as crossed her mind that she could have one until it crossed her mind that she was not sure that she had anyone to return to.
She had lived for her country, for its future, for her duty - but all that meant, she’d found, was a cold, empty throne room and a crown she’d never worn.
But that didn’t matter. For now, Seraphina had the luxury of remaining dead, and she was Fia, a different creature altogether. She didn’t have to carry that weight, and she didn’t have to think about the future, because Fia…Fia didn’t have to worry about rebuilding a crumbling nation, or accounting for the sins of a failed queen. Fia just needed Raum dead.
She knew that she was running (and Seraphina did not run), but she told herself that this was all part of the ruse – and she went on.
She looks back just in time to see him shake off a veritable cape of sand; it sticks out in his dark coat, but the moonlight catches on it. During the day, it would be dull. Now, it gleams – like little stars. “Teryrs? Have you ever seen one?”
She notes the way he stumbles over the word teryr; she glances over her shoulder at him. She’d assumed that he was foreign, but his pronunciation did do a good job of hiding it – she wonders what his accent actually sounds like, and where he might be from. (But, even if he can disguise his voice, Caine is no desert creature – she can see it in the way that the sand just hinders his stride, in the way that he moves. She wonders if he is more comfortable in the air. With two sets of wings, she would expect it.) It crosses her mind that she could ask him, but he’s been evasive enough already, so she doesn’t bother to ask – yet. Instead, she decides to linger on his pronunciation for a moment.
“Teryrs,” she repeats, emphasizing the r sound. “Like this - r. You have to lift the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth, near the teeth, and speak from the back of your throat.”
That she has seen a teryr is probably implicit, but she decides to entertain the inquiry regardless, her gaze turning back towards the rolling sea of sand dunes – the gold of the sand like dark roils of silk in the moonlight. “And, to answer your question…a few times. Solterrans hunt teryrs in certain rituals – to choose leaders, in particular, but for some other rituals as well. They are considered one of Solis’s sacred animals, along with the sandwyrms.” The rituals were religious, but they also served as a show of force – she assumes that he can guess as much, however. “…I’d seen them at a distance before, as a girl, but I didn’t encounter one very closely until the hunt that determined Maxence as our sovereign, after Zolin. It nearly killed me.” Her tone is cool and detached, when she speaks of her own near-death, but it quiets when she speaks again. A hint of a waver works its way into her voice, and, for a moment, she seems to stumble over her words. “Maxence was…brash. Full of fire. And he never really thought things through. But he was…a good man, regardless, even if he was an...impulsive leader. The teryr threw me back against a ridge of stones – and he called out to me, while I was bleeding out. It was the first time, I think, that anyone particularly cared if I lived or died.” She’d barely known him, then, and she would barely get to know him. She would never learn where he came from, or why he came to Novus, or what he loved or loathed; but he was the first person who’d ever given Seraphina a chance, the first to have ever looked at her and seen someone worth saving. For a moment, she is quiet, then she continues. “And then a teryr killed him. It attacked the court - the mate of the one that he killed. We hunted it down, and its children, but all we found of him was bones. Solterra is…rarely kind to her sovereigns.” She glances at him, out of the corner of her eye, then looks back to the dunes. “I’ve encountered a few since, but they have been…less climatic. I try not to make the same mistakes twice.”
(She wonders, for a moment, if she should have mentioned Maxence – but he was close to plenty of the members of the court, not just his Emissary.)
All of her stories, she thinks, seem rather violent.
---
He’s trying to avoid the subject, and she knows it.
Though her years in court had done something for Seraphina’s tact, she had never been especially keen on social graces, so she elects to push him a bit anyways. He’s determined to convince her that his motivations are entirely selfish, she thinks, though it doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind that they might be considered altruistic until she brought it up. She reminds herself that she is speaking to an assassin. (At least in part – she has been told, of course, that he does all manner of stealthy work.) He kills people for a living. She has done something similar, but likely for different reasons. Nevertheless, she doubts that most assassins come by their line of work by being good people.
“Fighting a revolution is not the most profitable way to spend my time, that is true. Now that you have pointed that out - But – you are just starting to think me a generous assassin, and I am in need of a new image, so that is payment enough. Selfish, you see?”
His phrasing makes her wonder if he hopes to get under his skin, like the nobles in the palace, with their back-handed statements and their compliments that were never actually compliments; he implies that he is using her, manipulating her, twisting her up around a fantasy. If that were the case, it would be rather foolish to say it to her face.
(And she catches that flicker of an expression – the way his lips curve, and, for a moment, aren’t that toothy smile.)
She continues to watch him, even as he turns, her eyes lingering on his own until they move out of view. Silver as the moon, she thinks – they’re a striking color, against the darkness of his coat. She strides forward alongside him, summons flame, leads him inside; the fire dances across her scarred face, drawing odd shadows.
“Then you’re asking me,” she inquires, tilting her head and fixing him with an unreadable upturn of her lips, the facsimile of a smile, her tone somewhere dangerously middling between deadly-serious and strangely teasing, “to trust you. I assure you, that is a far higher price than anything material-“ and she pauses for a second, as though she is considering her next words, “-but I’ll grant it, and I’ll choose to think of you as a particularly generous assassin, who is helping me because he does not want to see children starving in the streets or a tyrant destroying a nation that has suffered more than enough. Is that the new image that you are trying to cultivate, Caine?” Though her voice dips low and curls when she speaks of Raum and his doings, her tone remains strangely light.
(She does not quite believe him.)
She steps through the haphazard collection of barrels, crates, and sacks, carefully avoiding the goods within them. Where had she put those bandages? (Seraphina was meticulously organized, but she hadn’t been doing most of the collection, and her loose band of rebels hadn’t developed a system for organizing what meager supplies they had, yet.) She strolls towards the back of the cavern, though her ears remain twitched back, towards Caine.
“Did you do all this yourself?”
“Not quite.” She glances at him, allowing a hint of a smile to play across her dark features as she notices how he glances around the cavern, simply stocked as it was. It is gone before he can look back at her. “There are a few others already – you’ll probably meet them, eventually. And the caves were already here, of course. Our people have been using them for hundreds of years.” In various capacities. (Not all of them good; slavers had set up their bases in the caverns, and criminals had used them to hide from the guards.) She turns to rummage through a sack of medical supplies; surely they have some bandages in it.
“It was a shallow scrape, it doesn’t even hurt.” He has been saying something similar since she pointed it out, – whenever she attempts to treat the wound, at least – but he doesn’t say it with nearly enough conviction to convince her to leave it be.
She rolls her eyes, but her back is turned from him. (It might be audible, however.)“That hardly matters. If you intend to go back to the capitol tonight, Sandwyrms and jackals can smell blood from miles away, and they’ve been especially hostile since the blizzard – I think that food is in scarce supply.” She lifts a roll of bandages and a bit of salve out of the sack victoriously and strides back to his side, turning a critical eye to his shoulder. Her scarf unwinds from around his frame, hanging in the air at his side momentarily then flopping to the ground in an unceremonious heap; the bottle of salve loses the cork and drips a bit on the part of the bandage that would meet his skin. She’d been told that there was a bit of adhesive on them, but the salve would aid with healing – and sticking – regardless. The bandage places itself neatly on his shoulder, lying almost perfectly flat against his skin. She adds, absentmindedly, “Of course, you’re welcome to stay here until morning, if you’d like.”
With that, Seraphina turns towards one of the tunnels, hooves clacking rhythmically against the sandstone; in the enclosed space, the sound feels even louder. The tunnel is short, and it spills out in a small room. A makeshift desk has been formed from a few crates, stacked up on top of each other, and an inkwell sits in the corner, with a quill – from a hawk or a vulture – sticking out of the top. (There seem to be a few other vials, too, perhaps of different kinds of ink.) Countless papers are stacked in several neat heaps, and a sack of blank parchment, nearly overflowing, sits alongside the crates, tilted so that the paper is barely prevented from spilling out. A map is pinned up on another pile of crates, and it has been marked up meticulously; documents are folded up (or left open) and pinned at various locations.
She turns to face him again, her expression grim. Seraphina had allowed herself to get caught up in the momentary reprieve from the horrors in the capitol and the overwhelming job laid out in from of her; she didn’t want to think of it, but she had to.
“As for the assignment…if you were to happen upon Raum – or any of his more influential followers - in a dark corner, and they somehow, mysteriously wound up dead in the process, I’d hardly complain.” This is said with some levity, but the look in her eyes is dead serious. “However, at the moment, what I need is far less grandiose. Raum has already begun to limit food and water, and I’m sure that he plans to prevent anyone from entering the Oasis…” And, even in the winter, she shudders to think of what will happen to those without water in the desert heat; they’ll die in droves, excruciatingly slowly and painfully. “I need schedules of the shipments in and out of Solterra. Food, drink, weapons...anything that might be of use. Of course, stealing the schedules might draw some attention, so, if you can find the time, copies would be better. And I need to know what he plans for the Oasis. If he intends to block it off…” She grimaces, thoughts of Jaylin crossing her mind; if she were left in the water, who knew what Raum would do to her. “I have a friend to free, and she can’t survive out of water. The schedules are probably somewhere in the records room in the library, in the east wing...I doubt that Raum has had time to change the structure of the building yet. And, as for the Oasis…anything you hear would be helpful. I suspect that at least some people in the palace know of his plans, and noble Solterrans are very partial to gossip.” If she knows what Raum has planned, she can undo it, or at least conjure some plan to fight back. As it is…she can’t get close enough to him – or any of his people – for fear of being recognized to hear about what he has planned.
She needs eyes and ears. She thinks that she might have found them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Caine
notes | sera? write a short reply to caine? inconceivable. it has to take like four hours and she has to meticulously contemplate everything, ever while also rambling verbally. the floodgates are open. I can't stop her.
I can't even count how many souls I've made off the same deal you're on
remember - the devil ain't s a friend to no one
“I think we’ll both be able to manage it.”
“So do I,” she says, her voice dipping quietly. She wants to try to, even though she isn’t sure that she can. Seraphina isn’t sure that anything will be left for her when all of this is over; Raum killed her, and he took her life. Even if she made her presence known to the world again, once he was dealt with, she couldn’t return to living the life she’d had before he struck her down. And, really, she wasn’t sure that she had anything to return to – she had few friends, and most of them had scattered when Raum came to power; she was sure that Solterra would have no love for her, after she had condemned it, considering that it barely mourned her even before Raum rose as the nation’s tyrant; she had no family of any sort, and it had never so much as crossed her mind that she could have one until it crossed her mind that she was not sure that she had anyone to return to.
She had lived for her country, for its future, for her duty - but all that meant, she’d found, was a cold, empty throne room and a crown she’d never worn.
But that didn’t matter. For now, Seraphina had the luxury of remaining dead, and she was Fia, a different creature altogether. She didn’t have to carry that weight, and she didn’t have to think about the future, because Fia…Fia didn’t have to worry about rebuilding a crumbling nation, or accounting for the sins of a failed queen. Fia just needed Raum dead.
She knew that she was running (and Seraphina did not run), but she told herself that this was all part of the ruse – and she went on.
She looks back just in time to see him shake off a veritable cape of sand; it sticks out in his dark coat, but the moonlight catches on it. During the day, it would be dull. Now, it gleams – like little stars. “Teryrs? Have you ever seen one?”
She notes the way he stumbles over the word teryr; she glances over her shoulder at him. She’d assumed that he was foreign, but his pronunciation did do a good job of hiding it – she wonders what his accent actually sounds like, and where he might be from. (But, even if he can disguise his voice, Caine is no desert creature – she can see it in the way that the sand just hinders his stride, in the way that he moves. She wonders if he is more comfortable in the air. With two sets of wings, she would expect it.) It crosses her mind that she could ask him, but he’s been evasive enough already, so she doesn’t bother to ask – yet. Instead, she decides to linger on his pronunciation for a moment.
“Teryrs,” she repeats, emphasizing the r sound. “Like this - r. You have to lift the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth, near the teeth, and speak from the back of your throat.”
That she has seen a teryr is probably implicit, but she decides to entertain the inquiry regardless, her gaze turning back towards the rolling sea of sand dunes – the gold of the sand like dark roils of silk in the moonlight. “And, to answer your question…a few times. Solterrans hunt teryrs in certain rituals – to choose leaders, in particular, but for some other rituals as well. They are considered one of Solis’s sacred animals, along with the sandwyrms.” The rituals were religious, but they also served as a show of force – she assumes that he can guess as much, however. “…I’d seen them at a distance before, as a girl, but I didn’t encounter one very closely until the hunt that determined Maxence as our sovereign, after Zolin. It nearly killed me.” Her tone is cool and detached, when she speaks of her own near-death, but it quiets when she speaks again. A hint of a waver works its way into her voice, and, for a moment, she seems to stumble over her words. “Maxence was…brash. Full of fire. And he never really thought things through. But he was…a good man, regardless, even if he was an...impulsive leader. The teryr threw me back against a ridge of stones – and he called out to me, while I was bleeding out. It was the first time, I think, that anyone particularly cared if I lived or died.” She’d barely known him, then, and she would barely get to know him. She would never learn where he came from, or why he came to Novus, or what he loved or loathed; but he was the first person who’d ever given Seraphina a chance, the first to have ever looked at her and seen someone worth saving. For a moment, she is quiet, then she continues. “And then a teryr killed him. It attacked the court - the mate of the one that he killed. We hunted it down, and its children, but all we found of him was bones. Solterra is…rarely kind to her sovereigns.” She glances at him, out of the corner of her eye, then looks back to the dunes. “I’ve encountered a few since, but they have been…less climatic. I try not to make the same mistakes twice.”
(She wonders, for a moment, if she should have mentioned Maxence – but he was close to plenty of the members of the court, not just his Emissary.)
All of her stories, she thinks, seem rather violent.
---
He’s trying to avoid the subject, and she knows it.
Though her years in court had done something for Seraphina’s tact, she had never been especially keen on social graces, so she elects to push him a bit anyways. He’s determined to convince her that his motivations are entirely selfish, she thinks, though it doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind that they might be considered altruistic until she brought it up. She reminds herself that she is speaking to an assassin. (At least in part – she has been told, of course, that he does all manner of stealthy work.) He kills people for a living. She has done something similar, but likely for different reasons. Nevertheless, she doubts that most assassins come by their line of work by being good people.
“Fighting a revolution is not the most profitable way to spend my time, that is true. Now that you have pointed that out - But – you are just starting to think me a generous assassin, and I am in need of a new image, so that is payment enough. Selfish, you see?”
His phrasing makes her wonder if he hopes to get under his skin, like the nobles in the palace, with their back-handed statements and their compliments that were never actually compliments; he implies that he is using her, manipulating her, twisting her up around a fantasy. If that were the case, it would be rather foolish to say it to her face.
(And she catches that flicker of an expression – the way his lips curve, and, for a moment, aren’t that toothy smile.)
She continues to watch him, even as he turns, her eyes lingering on his own until they move out of view. Silver as the moon, she thinks – they’re a striking color, against the darkness of his coat. She strides forward alongside him, summons flame, leads him inside; the fire dances across her scarred face, drawing odd shadows.
“Then you’re asking me,” she inquires, tilting her head and fixing him with an unreadable upturn of her lips, the facsimile of a smile, her tone somewhere dangerously middling between deadly-serious and strangely teasing, “to trust you. I assure you, that is a far higher price than anything material-“ and she pauses for a second, as though she is considering her next words, “-but I’ll grant it, and I’ll choose to think of you as a particularly generous assassin, who is helping me because he does not want to see children starving in the streets or a tyrant destroying a nation that has suffered more than enough. Is that the new image that you are trying to cultivate, Caine?” Though her voice dips low and curls when she speaks of Raum and his doings, her tone remains strangely light.
(She does not quite believe him.)
She steps through the haphazard collection of barrels, crates, and sacks, carefully avoiding the goods within them. Where had she put those bandages? (Seraphina was meticulously organized, but she hadn’t been doing most of the collection, and her loose band of rebels hadn’t developed a system for organizing what meager supplies they had, yet.) She strolls towards the back of the cavern, though her ears remain twitched back, towards Caine.
“Did you do all this yourself?”
“Not quite.” She glances at him, allowing a hint of a smile to play across her dark features as she notices how he glances around the cavern, simply stocked as it was. It is gone before he can look back at her. “There are a few others already – you’ll probably meet them, eventually. And the caves were already here, of course. Our people have been using them for hundreds of years.” In various capacities. (Not all of them good; slavers had set up their bases in the caverns, and criminals had used them to hide from the guards.) She turns to rummage through a sack of medical supplies; surely they have some bandages in it.
“It was a shallow scrape, it doesn’t even hurt.” He has been saying something similar since she pointed it out, – whenever she attempts to treat the wound, at least – but he doesn’t say it with nearly enough conviction to convince her to leave it be.
She rolls her eyes, but her back is turned from him. (It might be audible, however.)“That hardly matters. If you intend to go back to the capitol tonight, Sandwyrms and jackals can smell blood from miles away, and they’ve been especially hostile since the blizzard – I think that food is in scarce supply.” She lifts a roll of bandages and a bit of salve out of the sack victoriously and strides back to his side, turning a critical eye to his shoulder. Her scarf unwinds from around his frame, hanging in the air at his side momentarily then flopping to the ground in an unceremonious heap; the bottle of salve loses the cork and drips a bit on the part of the bandage that would meet his skin. She’d been told that there was a bit of adhesive on them, but the salve would aid with healing – and sticking – regardless. The bandage places itself neatly on his shoulder, lying almost perfectly flat against his skin. She adds, absentmindedly, “Of course, you’re welcome to stay here until morning, if you’d like.”
With that, Seraphina turns towards one of the tunnels, hooves clacking rhythmically against the sandstone; in the enclosed space, the sound feels even louder. The tunnel is short, and it spills out in a small room. A makeshift desk has been formed from a few crates, stacked up on top of each other, and an inkwell sits in the corner, with a quill – from a hawk or a vulture – sticking out of the top. (There seem to be a few other vials, too, perhaps of different kinds of ink.) Countless papers are stacked in several neat heaps, and a sack of blank parchment, nearly overflowing, sits alongside the crates, tilted so that the paper is barely prevented from spilling out. A map is pinned up on another pile of crates, and it has been marked up meticulously; documents are folded up (or left open) and pinned at various locations.
She turns to face him again, her expression grim. Seraphina had allowed herself to get caught up in the momentary reprieve from the horrors in the capitol and the overwhelming job laid out in from of her; she didn’t want to think of it, but she had to.
“As for the assignment…if you were to happen upon Raum – or any of his more influential followers - in a dark corner, and they somehow, mysteriously wound up dead in the process, I’d hardly complain.” This is said with some levity, but the look in her eyes is dead serious. “However, at the moment, what I need is far less grandiose. Raum has already begun to limit food and water, and I’m sure that he plans to prevent anyone from entering the Oasis…” And, even in the winter, she shudders to think of what will happen to those without water in the desert heat; they’ll die in droves, excruciatingly slowly and painfully. “I need schedules of the shipments in and out of Solterra. Food, drink, weapons...anything that might be of use. Of course, stealing the schedules might draw some attention, so, if you can find the time, copies would be better. And I need to know what he plans for the Oasis. If he intends to block it off…” She grimaces, thoughts of Jaylin crossing her mind; if she were left in the water, who knew what Raum would do to her. “I have a friend to free, and she can’t survive out of water. The schedules are probably somewhere in the records room in the library, in the east wing...I doubt that Raum has had time to change the structure of the building yet. And, as for the Oasis…anything you hear would be helpful. I suspect that at least some people in the palace know of his plans, and noble Solterrans are very partial to gossip.” If she knows what Raum has planned, she can undo it, or at least conjure some plan to fight back. As it is…she can’t get close enough to him – or any of his people – for fear of being recognized to hear about what he has planned.
She needs eyes and ears. She thinks that she might have found them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Caine
notes | sera? write a short reply to caine? inconceivable. it has to take like four hours and she has to meticulously contemplate everything, ever while also rambling verbally. the floodgates are open. I can't stop her.
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
