[P] take your silver spoon & dig your grave

[Seraphina]

☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼

But how many of death's teeth have I stolen?
It doesn't have any left.

--

Her presence is a comfort.

Seraphina has lived a life that is largely devoid of touch, much less touch that is soothing. When Viceroy came to her, he was always violent; when she touched the other child soldiers, it was for the sake of sparring; when she met other soldiers on the battlefield, their touch was meant to end with their death or hers. For some time, she resented it, but eventually came to appreciate it – rarely – from the few people she could trust. Eik or Bexley, most often, but some rare others, so long as they never touched her around the throat.

Jaylin’s muzzle brushes her face, close to the curve of her jaw, but she does not flinch away as she might have when she was younger. The collar was gone; she ripped it away and left it to rot with Seraphina. She does not move. She does not even tremble, instead allowing her lashes to hang just a bit lower over her bloodshot eyes, allowing a sigh to escape her muzzle. She tries to relax, but she remembers the guards – just on the other side of the pool.

(They are still so young. She does not want to hurt them.)

“I thought so,” Jaylin says, confirming what she already knows. Seraphina’s stomach turns at the thought of the hippocampus imprisoned in the Oasis, awaiting whatever Raum’s soldiers might do to her if they found her, and they were bound to find her. The waiting must have been sickening, she imagines, like the sick anticipation before a battle.

When she mentions Isra and her dragon, Jaylin’s eyes go wide, and she speaks a word that Seraphina does not understand. “Dovahkiin?” She tilts her head, blinking in confusion; she catches kin, but she wonders if it means the same thing as the word she knows. The hippocampus’s front eyes narrow in suspicion, then, and she inquires, “Or – Tahkiin, the small ones? Is that what you mean?” Seraphina shakes her head firmly, her mind drifting to Fable. He was still growing, from what she’d discerned (he was not nearly so large as Isorath’s dragon had been), but he was certainly no pygmy dragon.

“A – large one, from the sea. Not one of the pygmies. He is still young, but I think that he will have wings that blot out the sky when he is older.” She almost shudders at the thought but maintains her composure. She has grown up in a land of sandwyrms and teryrs, but the thought of facing a creature like a dragon (though she never expects to fight Fable) would be enough to give her pause. “Dovahkiin – is that what you called them?” Her thickly-accented tongue slides awkwardly over the foreign word, and she bites back the urge to wince. She has never taken well to foreign languages.

“I would like to be freed,” Jaylin says, then, and Seraphina nods, relieved. Before she can reply, the hippocampus continues, tossing her head over her shoulder to look back towards the Oasis. “I have been a prisoner far too often in my life -- I am tired of it. Even my crown once felt like a prison. I would wish to fly again, but I do not think that will happen -- so I will settle for the freedom of movement instead.”

“Then we will free you,” Seraphina says, and her voice is a promise – but then she pauses, considering the rest of her words. “You were a queen, once? You…flew?” It occurs to her that, though she has met Jaylin here many times, and spoken to her far more than many other citizens of Solterra, she knows very little about her; she cannot imagine her with wings, for the presence of her fins, but she can almost see a crown on her head, for the way she carries herself.

“I can -- help, once freed. My father taught me how to mend wounds, how to treat ailments. I would be honored to do so for you,” she says, then, and Seraphina feels a prickle of something – warm. Relief. Or the sensation of being touched; she has become so used to being hurt or betrayed or broken that she sometimes forgets simple goodness, until it is offered.

“I would appreciate that more than you know,” she replies, and does not attempt to hide the soft waver in her voice. “We have so few healers in Solterra – and even less, now that Raum is in power. The sick and the wounded will need help desperately.”

She does not want to think of the violence she knows will come.


--

tag | @Jaylin
notes | <3

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