[AW] by tomorrow we'll be lost amongst the leaves

[Seraphina]

YOU MAKE THE WORLD BY WHISPERS, SECOND BY SECOND
whether you make it to a grave or a garden of roses is not the point

Wind rustles through the pines. Though the branches are covered in needles, the sounds they make as they brush against each other – dull, rhythmic clapping – suggest that they might as well have been bare. Disregarding Ereshkigal, who is leaned over her shoulder like some pale, red-eyed shadow, there are no birds in this stretch of woods, and the thatching of needles is so thick and dark that it might as well be night. (It could be night – time passes strangely here, and she does not know how long she’s been walking besides.) There is a chill in the air that seems unnatural on a tropical island, inland though she may be, and it sends a shudder crawling up her spine. The world is a mesh of dark green and murky brown, with what little light can find its way to the forest floor so dull that it is barely light at all; she has to squint to see clearly.

When the wind halts abruptly, Seraphina is left only with the sound of her hooves against the dead, dry needles.

A distant, looming sense of danger has been building inside of her chest since the volcano erupted; it is loudest here, practically a crescendo, with only her thoughts (a black, tainted growth of grief twisted out-of-shape into a rage that does not resemble her at all, a rage that eats) and her own presence (small and uncertain, among the trees) to block it out. Some part of her can’t shake the feeling that she is in the maze again – trapped on all sides by narrow, winding paths that she didn’t know how to navigate. As she draws further into the forest, the trees grow closer together; she can barely continue walking without brushing up against them. Her movements feel stiff and awkward, here, among all these trees.

Seraphina is a desert creature. She has never felt comfortable in enclosed spaces or forests, much less those that are so lush that she cannot see the sky to navigate.

It is too cramped and too dark. Her mind reaches out for Ereshkigal, who, sensing her thoughts, shifts. “Fly up – see if we’re still going the right way.” The vulture, for once, does not argue, and, with a flap of her wings, springs out of the canopy; Seraphina lets her hooves dig into the soil and waits for her return.

Several moments pass. A gust of wind curls through the trees, and then the world is silent again. Seraphina fidgets, staring into the darkness of the woods. The trees cast long shadows, and the faded patches of light barely make any distinction to their dark forms, leaving the lines fuzzy and indistinct. “Ereshkigal?” The word is out of her mouth before she realizes it; Seraphina leans up against a tree, her gaze trained suspiciously on the distant stretches of wood. She cannot tell if the shadows are trees or something else entirely.

She tells herself to remain calm, but the foliage is too dense to use Alshamtueur for a light. She feels trapped.

No response comes from the vulture. She tries again, over their mental link. “Ereshkigal? Come back.”

“I can’t,” comes the vulture’s reply – it sounds fuzzy and distorted between her ears, and Seraphina cannot tell if she is playing with the sound of her voice again or if something far stranger is at play here. “I tried to fly back down to you, but it wasn’t the same place – I don’t see you.”

They’d been separated, Seraphina realizes, with a shudder. “Are you sure that it was the same place?”

“Yes.” Ereshkigal’s voice comes out as an irritated hiss, but it is still distractingly distorted. “I flew straight up, then back down.”

The forest had separated them. She casts an uneasy look at the line of trees in front of her, shifting her weight from one hoof to another. “Keep flying towards the center of the island,” she says, her ears flattening against her skull. “We’ll meet there.”

(She isn’t sure that she’s walking in the right direction anymore. It was north from where she started – but what direction was north in this perpetual, murky darkness?)

Still she draws forward into the woods, with every gust of wind through the branches enough to make her glance over her shoulder; she does not pull it from its sheath, but her mind holds a vicegrip around the hilt of Alshamtueur, as though the sword could do anything against the strangeness of a god’s magic. She had been the hunter, hadn’t she? A once-queen hunting a madman who took everything from her, or a raven who’d betrayed her fragile trust, or a god who she might have believed in – she had been the hunter, and the vulture her hound. But Seraphina didn’t feel much like the hunter now, prodded by branches at every side, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched by something. In the desert, in the light of day, she was a predator. Here, she was another scared girl, sinking in dark water because she could not swim – another girl, lost in a maze, who, when she managed to crawl out, bloody and bruised and just a bit heartbroken – because she could handle rejection from most anything she didn’t believe in, but she’d never had the skin to survive those things that she did -, would wonder if she was the same creature who’d stepped into the endless tangle of green or if she’d ever really escaped it.

The shadows make her think of that bulbous ink-monster and his dripping mouth – and he could be out there, and she would not know.

She swallows her tongue and keeps walking. Seraphina is accustomed to being alone, or she is resigned to it.

She wishes that she weren’t alone now.

As she continues into the woods, deeper and deeper, darker and darker, the trees become more widely-spaced – and larger. Soon, she finds herself standing amidst trees that seem impossibly gargantuan; they are still pines, but too ancient, too oversized; it takes her two strides to clear their roots. The wind is silent again, and her steps are still crackling against the indistinct brown shapes of needles that are arger than her hooves. At least, she tells herself, as she moves uneasily through the trees, there is more space here.

But she smells blood.

Seraphina doesn’t mean to find the dead bird. In fact, she tries to avoid it; as a rule of thumb, when one smells blood in a strange place, they try to avoid the source, to avoid the thing that caused the bloodshed in the first place. However, though she attempts to walk in an entirely different direction from the source of the smell, she finds it growing stronger and stronger, and finally she finds herself staring at a massive old tree. Cradled in its roots is the body of one of the strange birds she’s seen in other places on the island, but it has been brutally dismembers; its organs, bright red, are spilled out and tangled across the roots, its wings have nearly been severed from its body, and its eyes threaten to bulge out of its skull, though she struggles to make out the details in the dull light. Uneasily, she wonders what killed it. One of the small wildcats, perhaps – she’s seen plenty of them in the woods, dark shadows among the branches…

(She hopes it was a wildcat.)

(She has seen no other living things – besides the trees – for miles.)

Taking a deep breath, Seraphina reaches for Ereshkigal again. “Where are you?”

A moment passes with no reply. Seraphina freezes – she can’t feel the movement of her mind against her own at all. “Ereshkigal?”

Again, she is met with silence.

Seraphina backs away from the dead bird, a dull hint of animalistic panic igniting in her chest; perhaps the vulture is just ignoring her, or pretending like something is wrong. That must be it. Nothing hurts. Ereshkigal can’t be dead - she’d feel it.

Instead, it feels like – nothing. Like she is alone in her head again.

She glances out into the darkness again, then down at the dead bird, and stares out into the dark, unable to discern where she came from. Her mind grasps at Alshamtueur, and she knows that she should use the sword to light her way, now that there is space for it, but instead-

She wonders if that won’t just draw more attention.

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@ || the first open with sera in,,, a while. a tense little post? || grendel john gardner

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@