[AW] teeth of many martyrs;

[Seraphina]

HOW ELSE CAN I EXPLAIN THE TIME MY BODY FROZE ITSELF UNTIL MORNING?
I could die without knowing what is tender now, priming itself for night.

Denoctians. So presumptuous - always assuming that the world owed them something. (And she knows – she knows, in the cruelest and most intimate ways – that it owes no one anything at all.)

When the painted mare summons flames to dance at her feet, Seraphina arches her brows at her, clearly unimpressed by her still-feeble show of magic. Enough to make a point, but likely all that she could summon. (Why did Caligo always give her blessings to her most volatile subjects? She would never understand the whims of the gods.)

Rhoswen and her fire magic cross her mind, unbidden – they leave a sour taste in her mouth, bitter and cold as iron. Her patience wanes to a crescent. She has to find Raum, and she doesn’t have much time to do it. Certainly none to spare on

“I’d advise against threatening strangers,” she advises, her voice glacial; if she needed to, Seraphina knows that she could put an arrow through her skull with nothing but the barest twitch of her thoughts.

Perhaps, she thinks, she should learn to save her threats for occasions where she knows that she is more deadly than her opponent.

Moira somewhat soothes her flaring temper, though the other mare’s insistent demands sour her otherwise friendly reception. She speaks poetry, as usual, and Seraphina might have admired her for it, had she more space in her heart for such sweet things nowadays; now, her words just seem like an enviable softness. Nevertheless, she has to appreciate how graceful she is, even as she rounds on the other mare and chastises her gently for her sharp tongue.

But grace, Seraphina knows, is not necessarily equivalent to authority. If Reichenbach, Isorath, and Aislinn managed to keep Denocte in check (or strove to) by force, what ailed the new regime was an abundance of tenderness. Perhaps Isra is crueler now than she had been when Raum kidnapped her and killed Acton, and perhaps she is crueler for what she had seen in Solterra – she seems it. And Moira…from what little she knows of the Emissary, she seems to be more inclined to healing, some noble lady. She wonders if she can kill.

Leadership is a willingness to be bloody – to cover yourself in it. She used to think that you could lead kindly, and she knows better now. Look at where it got her.

She looks at the painted woman, her heterochromatic eyes glinting in an empty, cold way – like polished stones in the place of eyes. The hood falls back and rests on her shoulder in a pile of thick gold; her white hair, half-loose from its braids, falls back in tangles and wild coils. She stares at them through red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes, her features dark and sallow from lack of sleep and near-starvation, a matter of principle and necessity. (Why should she eat while her people starve? Enough to survive – enough to kill him, because that was all living was for, now – but nothing more.) That horrible, horrible scar glints in the dull, strange fog-filled light, utterly inescapable. It might as well have swallowed her face. Brighter than the feverish gleam of her eyes, brighter than the ghostly, indistinct white glow of the fog, illuminated by an invisible sun, brighter than the pale row of her teeth when she spoke. Her head tilts, and the gesture is somehow unnatural, like a praying mantis might eye a fly. Perhaps it is because of the eyes, or the scar, or the way that the gesture is somehow too stiff, like she moves on strings rather than of her own accord. Ereshkigal still hangs over her shoulder, beak pulled into a toothy, unnatural grin.

She feels sick. She feels unlike herself, and she wants to pull the hood back up and hide beneath it, but-

“I wear this hood to hide my face,” Seraphina says, flatly, “and I met Lady Moira at a party, a long time ago now.” Lifetimes, perhaps. That answer, she knows, tells her nothing at all. “Does it mean nothing to you that your emissary and your queen know me and consider me no threat at all? My matters are delicate - if I told my secrets to every stranger I encountered, people would die for it. You’ve given me no reason to trust you.” Her people would die for it, at least, if he came for them; she struck a careful balance, walked on a fragile string. She could kill him, if he came for her. She tells herself that she could kill him, that all she needs is her mind…

And yet.

Moira speaks of the island. She turns her attention to the bright red form of the phoenix, her stare still impassive and dull and exhausted, and she speaks, though she seems only somewhat more animated. “I saw something like it once, before, I think, you were of this land…when the courts had fallen into disarray, and none had a sovereign.” She thinks of that time – when the world was so much simpler, and she was so much stronger – and aches. “But this island is…kinder. In the maze, every traveler was alone, save for what they encountered on the way.” And there are no monsters of ink come to tear her apart or throw her into a river. “…but I feel that there is something here that has yet to reveal itself. Tempus has not been found yet, and neither has his relic…and he is fond of dangerous tests.” Perhaps she just assumes the worst, but she cannot deny the tension she feels all over this place, like a storm that is about to break or a crack of lightning about to hit the ground.

“Take care of yourself here. This island plays tricks.” She might as well be one of them – a dead woman back to life, as much as the dead could be. (Which, she thinks, is not so much at all.)

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@Morrighan @Moira || still irritated, I see || "mother-of-pearl," callie siskel

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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