[P] take your silver spoon & dig your grave

[Seraphina]

☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼

There were once jaguars everywhere around here.
There will be animals in your deaths, won't there?

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There is something faraway in Jaylin’s eyes. Within them, she sees another place, another time, people who are long-gone; it occurs to her that she does not know how old the hippocampus is. Older than her, she thinks, though she does not know by how much. More often, there is something in her that seems younger, from her manner of speech to her mischievous way of addressing the oasis’s visitors. Now, she wonders if that isn’t the mark of the age difference between them – her seriousness an inability to process pain and live past it, Jaylin’s more jovial demeanor (or something like it) a sign that she had lived through it.

“Yes, Dovahkiin – dragon-born.” Jaylin’s voice stirs her from her thoughts. She blinks at the hippocampus, abruptly stirred back to reality; there is something melancholic in her gaze, and it cuts deeply. “He is Dovahokaaz. My monah would tell me stories when I was young.” Monah – she assumes it means mother. (She wonders what it would be like to remember her own. She knows that Angelie told her stories, too, in the way that someone knows an irrelevant fact; it is just knowledge, without meaning anything.) The words roll of Jaylin’s lips in a way that she cannot hope to imitate, with her thick accent, but she appreciates the sound of them. It speaks of a world she has never seen, that she will never see – beyond the residue. Beyond the speech, or the figure in front of her.

(When she was younger, she wanted to explore. Like her father, her mother had said. Some man she’d never met. She’d figured out, eventually, that he probably wasn’t a good man, but he was a traveler. She hoped that was her only inheritance from him – that, and all her silver.)

“Dovahkaaz,” she repeats, tasting the word on her tongue. “You’ll have to tell him, when you meet him – I do not think he knows much of other dragons.” She can’t be sure, but Fable looked like he was a young dragon, and, if he was young, she supposed that there was the possibility he was hatched by Isra. She doesn’t know, though. She only knows that he doesn’t seem like the other dragons she has met – there is something about him that is less bestial.

“Myself and my first mate, yes. We ruled a place called the Iron Valley, in a land far from here where rosebushes grew like grass.”

She lingers over her words, for a long moment, and she doesn’t know what to say – to the longing in her voice, to the admission of her former crown, to a first mate that clearly wasn’t still here…and the way that first implied there was more than one. Surely, she couldn’t be that much older than Seraphina, though she was certainly older. How much had she lost in such a short time? “It sounds beautiful,” she says, sincerely. Seraphina hasn’t seen many rosebushes in her life, but she knows that she has seen some in Dawn, so she decides to imagine that this Iron Valley looked a bit like it – but, with a name like that, and a queen like Jaylin, she is not sure that it could. (Too many sharp edges.)

And then comes another revelation. “I was born with the wings of a dragon, yes.” She looks at her, with her strange eyes and her sharp, sharp teeth, and, for the first time, she wonders if she was only born with the wings - she can hardly imagine her in flight, with a tail like that, but perhaps she hadn’t always had the tail. Perhaps she hadn’t always been a horse at all. “I was cursed into this… form.” She sounds displeased, and the wrinkle of her nose further emphasizes the point. Seraphina wonders what it would be like, body twisted into something that was not your own – to not be yourself in your skin.

“A dragon…” Her voice is dull with surprise, normally infallible composure minutely fractured because the statement catches her off-guard; she has heard stories of horses that started as one thing and became another, or horses that began as horses and became something else entirely, like Florentine, but somehow the concept is still hard to visualize. For everything that she has learned, Seraphina is naïve. “How were you cursed? Who cursed you?” Can I help you break it? is an implication, not stated outright – but she would. She would do anything for her people, she thinks, absolutely anything-

And she still stops short of letting the word friend cross her mind. Not now. She can’t. It’s too fragile, too – painful.

“--but even in this form, I can serve Solterra’s weakest. I have yet the strength for that.” Jaylin, a noble thing, a creature that could heal – for her teeth and (metaphorical) claws, and the sharp fins-like-spines that ran the course of her back.

“I have no doubt that you can,” she says, immediately, “and I thank you for it. It’s…” Seraphina chokes, stumbling over her words for a fraction of a second, and she looks away, quieting abruptly. “In the capitol, it’s awful. People are starving in the streets - children are starving in the streets. He’s sunk an entire ship of people for no reason but his own amusement, and he…” She sucks in a low, shuddering breath. This is not new to her – this is what Zolin did, too. But she could never have stopped Zolin. She’d never lived with anything but Zolin, and now she had, and she’d really thought that she could make something better of Solterra. “…he locks away or tortures anyone who dissents.” But the sands were beginning to feel like a vicious cycle, and one that she cannot break. “…we need all the help that we can get.”

Much as it hurt her pride to admit it. She’d have to speak to Somnus, and to Asterion – Isra, of course, was already in the city, or she had been.

But it hurts her to sink so low all over again. Memories of the Davke attack still burn in the back of her mind, mingled gratitude and pain from being brought to her knees to beg from aid. Solterrans didn’t beg - it was not their way.



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tag | @Jaylin
notes | <3

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