O & IN THESE DREAMS I'M RUTHLESS
what if i told you i've imagined everyone i've ever loved dying. i've imagined all the ways to leave a hole in the world. i can tell you which parts of me would wither. in my dreams there are so many corpses. & i am still there. shouting.
The dead bird lies in front of her hooves, and, though she wants to look away, she can’t seem to drag her gaze away from the mutilated corpse. What could have done such a thing? It isn’t the work of a common predator; the bird hasn’t been eaten, in whole or in part. Instead, the poor creature (unnatural as it was, and unnerving) seems to have been tortured. The wings are almost severed, but not entirely; the legs are broken, but they are not torn off; and the sheer number of wounds suggests that whatever had killed it had not wanted to make the process clean or quick, like any good predator. Teryrs, sandwyrms, jackals, snakes – they all bit in the most vulnerable places, and then they devoured the corpse. Whatever had killed the bird wanted the creature to suffer before it died, and it hadn’t killed it for a reason…
She swallows down a shudder, the copper-scent of blood gnawing at her lungs. She takes a step back, and-
“You look like you could use a companion.”
Ashamed as she’d be to admit it, the appearance of the boy nearly makes Seraphina jump – but only nearly. Instead, she whips to face him, her mind twisting around the arrow buried beneath her golden scarf, but, as her eyes come to a rest on his own (large, as blue and gold as her own, and young in a way that is not young at all – strange) and find them warm, her grip around the arrow relaxes. A companion. He’s young, perhaps three, and smiling in a manner that is too warm for a place like this; nevertheless, there is a rigidity to his posture that suggests that he is as uncomfortable in the dark forest as she is. His coat is a patchwork of black and white, though, like her hair, the brightest portions are reduced to a dull grey in the darkness. She can hardly give him as scientific a look as she’d like, but he is built like an athlete – not a soldier, because he is unscarred, but an athlete, for his muscular, unforgiving physique. He would make a fine Solterran, she thinks, but she’s glad that he isn’t one. The last thing that she could stand to see in this forest, on this damned island, was another starving child.
(He isn’t a child. She must have been around his age, when she took the throne. But she was still a girl then, wasn’t she? A girl, but old enough to be accountable – for all of the blood…)
She shakes her thoughts aside. They’ll do her no good, now; at least she has some company, in Ereshkigal’s absence. “Two sets of eyes are better than one, in a place like this,” she says lightly, with a ghost of a friendly smile, “so I’d certainly appreciate the company.”
“Have you been here long? I’m Pravda." There is something in his voice that suggests he is speaking to fill the silence. She is grateful for it; the quiet was stifling, and she’d rather think about something other than the trees and the shadows, the way they seemed to flow and curve inward, like a snake, slowly constricting her...
“Not long,” Seraphina admits, returning her gaze to the bloodied corpse of the bird; her lips curve distastefully. “Not long enough to see what did this, at any rate.” She looks back up at him, forcing her stare away from the little dead creature, the splatter of blood on the roots. “Pravda.” She repeats his name, rolls it around on her tongue – it’s foreign, and she isn’t sure that she’s pronouncing it correctly. (Either way, her thick accent changes the sound.) “A pleasure to meet you. I’m F-“
And then a shadow emerges from the woods.
She knows him before she knows that he is there; she has seen him in her nightmares, midnight and void given form, with those moon-silver eyes-
“Excuse me for the intrusion.”
Almost instantaneously, she turns, putting herself between the youth and the shadowed assassin, with a curt murmur of “Stay behind me.” Her jewel-bright eyes are like little pyres, burning with a flame that hadn’t existed a moment before. Dark lips curl up, and her mouth is all snarling teeth, brute violence against that contemptuous smirk – if she had the time, or her mind would have allowed it, she might have cursed herself for never seeing it before. He might notice that she is gaunter than she was when they met, that her eyes are dark-rimmed and red from sleeplessness - he might notice the way that she is uncontained, with all of her careful composure lost to shuddering rage. If he does, she doesn’t care. All she cares about is that the boy is behind her, and that he will have to go through her to get to him; all she cares about is her teeth around his throat, a threat she’d make good on-
“Three’s a crowd in most situations, but when death lingers so close…” He has the nerve to look at her, those cold, cold silver eyes coming to a rest on the sharp embers of her own.
Her fury is a rampant, white thing, building up behind her eyes; it is bright enough to be blinding, and she can barely see through it, much less think.
“It makes you appreciate the company.” She hates his voice, the unbearably smug curl of his lips; she hates his eyes, and she hates to think that she thought they were beautiful, once. She hates him, and she’s not sure where the personal, raw hatred of betrayal ends and where her vehement loathing for his employer begins-
Her magic flares.
It is no smoothly-flowing river, no gentle tide – it rushes out of her as a maelstrom, like a wind that bites. In the canopy above, the branches rattle furiously, as though they are wracked by some tempestuous gale, but the air is quiet and still; needles fall to the ground in heaps. Roots drag themselves part of the way from the earth, scrunching up against the trunks of trees and clinging to the earth with little more than thin, pale tangles. Pravda is behind her, shielded from it, but it snaps at Caine like a hungry dog, raking through his feathers and tearing at his hair – like a mass of fingers, jerking at whatever they can find, or an overwhelming pressure.
She can see what she can do to him, in her mind’s eye-- she can see him thrown back against a tree, spine snapped against the trunk; she can see that Solterran steel arrow buried between his ears, a thin trickle of red; she can see Alshamtueur run along his throat; she can see him choking, suspended in air, legs kicking-
She wants to kill him. She desperately wants to kill him. If she had time to think about it, the idea of - wanting - to kill might have nauseated her. That is not Seraphina; she has always met the burden of her duty as a solemn, bitter necessity. She does not like to hurt. She does not like to kill - but she has, many times, because it has been necessary. The only option. A cold, cruel inevitability. Seraphina has survived by holding herself at a distance – from her history, from other people, from her own actions. Viceroy drained her until she was empty, and she thought that she could stay that way: impassive and frigid, like a marble statue, with neither love nor hate to drive her.
It isn’t so simple. It hasn’t been so simple in years, since Maxence, or since the gods returned, or since Raum killed her. (Maybe she can take some comfort in the knowledge that Seraphina is dead – why else would Ereshkigal have come for her? Fia remains. Fia remains, and her sins – black and gnawing, growing across her skin like mold on rot – are her own. The girl who bled out in that field is not her, just a carcass; she was fragile and desperate and all too mortal. She tried. If she didn’t hate her, Fia would pity her. She is not fragile, though she is desperate, and she isn’t sure that she’s mortal, anymore – and what she does know is that her thoughts have teeth. She’d envied Isra, with her creation magic, but, if she can’t make the world she wanted, at least she can tear apart what grew up in its place; if she has to be this burning, bloody thing, at least she is in control of it.)
She wants to kill him, and she knows that she could do it. He’s been foolish, showing his hand, with that damned smirk that makes her grind her teeth; she knows that she could kill him. It wouldn’t even be difficult. She’d barely have to think about it.
But blood might draw whatever had killed the bird – and the boy is right there, soft-eyed and warm. She forces her magic to heel, though the pressure of her telekinesis likely lingers for a moment against the assassin’s chest, like standing against a stone wall. She does not straighten, however, and her body remains tense as a cat ready to pounce.
“Caine.” His name is a snarl – a rabid thing on her tongue. It tastes like those bitter weeds she’d had to take when she was younger, some medicine that the Viceroy forced down her throat. (Hadn’t she said it lightly, once? Hadn’t she been kind? But he’d asked a high price of her, and, for his betrayal, she would be sure that she took from him what she was owed.) “You are certainly lucky that there are three of us, aren’t you?” In spite of her thinly-veiled threat, her heart pounds wildly against her chest, strained from the sudden outpouring of magic – and the slow, dawning realization that he had been there, and she hadn’t realized it until he’d elected to reveal himself. (It doesn’t occur to her that his behavior is strange – why would an assassin show himself to a potential target? Surely Raum would pay a pretty price for her head.) He could have caught her, killed her – she hadn’t been careful enough.
Perhaps it was because of Pravda. No use in killing her with witnesses, and strength in numbers, in such a strange place.
(She remains close to the youth, her mind wrapping itself, white-knuckled, around Alshamtueur’s hilt.)
“Why are you here? This place hardly seems safe for birds.” This warrants a haphazard, pointed glance back at the dead bird, though she is quick to look back at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion; regardless of his answer, she doesn’t think that she’ll believe him.
She’d trusted him once – and, as she’d told him before, she preferred not to make the same mistake twice.
@Pravda @Caine || she's #angry
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
