keep my body
for the fire
for the fire
There is a brief moment in the tumult where O rakes her eyes over the strangers and thinks she sees Seraphina.
It is the worst kind of surprise, it is a bullet to the chest. It almost knocks her off her feet. Seraphina is dead. Her heart breaks and breaks and breaks. O has never been the emotional type, but she had felt something upon news of Seraphina’s death, something between horror and sympathy, and she feels it twice as deep now, looking at the girl-who-isn’t-Seraphina. Looking at the shadows that line her face under an ochre hood. Looking at her strange, terrible eyes, yellow and blue.
She wants to kill the girl-who-isn’t-Seraphina, for getting her hopes up, that she might still be alive.
Anyway it brings a black ringing inside her ears, and she misses (partially) not-Seraphina’s speech, and her cackling bird, and the soft, somber voice of Dusk’s boy-king. (O is not sure what possesses her to call him boy-king except that he looks too soft to have lived past three — she wants to smile at the darkness of his eyes, the twilight freckles on his hips, but doesn’t.) And then it turns into an argument. The whole group, oscillating back and forth between go in groups, don’t, be careful, don’t.
All the while there are birds singing overhead, ripe and dark; O’s heart is still pounding in her chest as she stands small against the crowd and tries not to look so weak. It is the first time she can ever remember worrying about weakness. Always she has been the warrior, the axe-girl, who could be weak with Bexley Briar for a mother—? But Solis himself took Bexley’s magic away, once, and there is a scar on her face that speaks of weakness only just scabbed over. O sets her jaw and tries to breathe. Tries not to break. If that girl is Seraphina (it’s not) then everything is different, anyway, and weakness is only a construct, O tries to remind herself, only a mirror of what does not think it can be killed. Her ears flicker as Isra speaks: it is not us who should be afraid. Oh, isn’t that a pleasant thought—that for once the gods should tremble, and not them?
A pleasant one, but not entirely realistic. (Although none of this is particularly realistic, O thinks bitterly, as she watches the obsidian of the statue turn to oxidized copper.) Still she is silent. She holds the promise of a threat or a complaint in the back of her mouth, heavy as a rock, salted like the ocean. The island is dangerous enough without the threat of anarchy, and no amount of griping will make its magic any less evil.
What good is a little girl in a situation like this? Even if she is a little girl with an axe.
The Dusk king and the girl-who-is-not-Seraphina congregate. They are a funny sight against the vibrancy of the island in their perfect, muted colors, almost a comfort that something has not totally changed. And O wants to say something. Wants to come close. Wants to participate, to offer something of worth, because she can see the worried movement of their lips and knows that even kings and queens are not all powerful. The longer she looks at them, the more she thinks that even if this girl is not Seraphina (and she isn’t) there must be something she knows that O doesn’t, something that the rest of them need.
She wants to say something, feels it in every line of her body and every screaming muscle, but there are too many people around, too many eyes. (Some of them, she thinks, are still in hiding yet.) So it has to be something… subtle. Something only for not-Seraphina.
A phantom bird comes swerving through the trees, oddly bland in comparison to its siblings. It is dressed only in brown with perfect black eyes. It hovers in the air for a second, then darts down to rest in Seraphina’s white hair, just behind her ear, and says into that ear in a voice that sounds just like O’s —
Tell Seraphina we still love her.
Then disappears in a burst of smoke.
Across the clearing O’s eyes are burning with effort.
@| "speech" | notes: <3
