[SWP] the waves can see

[Seraphina]

What do you call it when girls keep dying, what do you call it when your body is a zeppelin?
How do you become something other than wounds?

She is silent.

Seraphina is no queen, now. She is still reminding herself what it means to be crownless, and, with it, returned to her prior insignificance. In a sea of unfamiliar faces, spotted with a few people who know who she used to be, she has no measure of command or authority. She would be lying if she said it didn’t sting. It is impossible not to think of herself as a girl, or as a guard, or as whatever she had been before she was an Emissary or a Queen; it is impossible not to think of herself as fodder for the Solterra of her girlhood’s war machine, one of those ghost-children who served no purpose but to be wiped off the face of the map and forgotten in defense of more powerful, important figures.

(At least there is no collar around her neck, now. At least her shame is something hidden - her worth with it.)

(It still seems so wrong, so horrifically wrong, that so many people have died because of her failures. It still seems – so, so wrong – that she survived when they are dead, when she is the one who committed a crime. Oh, she loves Solterra, and her intentions were so good. She wanted to protect her people. She wanted so desperately to be better, to build a land with life and love instead of blood and flame, but she has been no less a devastating force than her predecessors. The eyes of history would never view her fondly.)

Of course she is no queen now. What queen walks like a broken thing, with a doom-whispering demon perched on her shoulders? What queen holds her head so low, her shoulders so slumped? She is not sure what she is, now, but she is no queen.

Asterion draws away from her, as she intended, and she feels his absence palpably. It is necessary, when they seek to hunt a king, and they cannot possibly know who favors him, but she nevertheless feels a pang whenever she loses an ally, even for a moment. (It makes her stomach knot. She has always been a solitary, standoffish creature, and she is not so sure that her good intentions have ever shown.) The empty space that Raum carved out has been replaced by a persistent itch for something, for any kind of company or any kind of solidarity, and she does not know what to do with what is left.

Her gaze lingers a moment on Maerys, who, she thinks, likely wishes to help but has no idea how to; brave girl, she thinks. Brave girl, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing – she knows it from experience. (Of course, now she is as good as paralyzed by fear. Her nightmares make a trap of her.) Asterion trains his stare on Isra, and he makes some frankly clever suggestions about shifts, and Halycon, and healers. (If her people weren’t scattered, and primarily still in Solterra, she might have sent some of them to help. As they were…)

That is before he turns and disappears, a shadow beneath the trees; and she will follow, in a moment. (In fact, she whispers to Ereshkigal to follow Asterion, and very nearly misses how her red-eyed stare is trained on a dark man, relegated to the fringes of the clearing, who is staring at Isra with a look of disdain. Her jaw opens, revealing her rows and rows of carnivorous teeth, and perhaps she smiles. He looks at her once, before leaving.

She laughs, soft and menacing, and her face is nothing but teeth.)

Ereshkigal springs off her back to follow Asterion, and Seraphina looks at the remaining figures. The painted mare leaves, with about as much grace as she has come to expect from her, and Seraphina considers following suit, but then-

Then she hears the beat of wings, right by her ear. A bird, strange and plain, not at all like those on the island, is lingering right by her ear. It opens its slender point of a beak, and, in a voice that seems almost-familiar, it whispers (in a voice that she is sure is inaudible to most any of the other gathered figures) we still love you.

Seraphina blinks. She feels eyes. We still love you. Her gaze turns, rolls across the clearing – comes to a long, slow rest on O, who is bent double, her two-tone eyes strained with the effort of upholding the illusion. (Bexley’s daughter, or Acton’s daughter – no, both. Who else did she expect?) She lets her stare rest upon her, gaze knowing – grateful, in that way that she has always struggled to express, and needing, in that way that she has never been able to put to words – but lips unmoved. There is no smile. There is no response.

(Sometimes, there are things too fragile to speak.)

I’m sorry, her stare whispers, and she is. I’m sorry - I couldn’t avenge your father, or protect your mother, or protect you. I’m sorry - that you are growing up in the face of a war, like I did.

(Wasn’t that what she wanted, when she took the throne? Protect Solterra’s children. Make them different from me. But this girl is still raised with a weapon in her hand; she has not been granted toothlessness, or two parents, or a childhood free of corpses.)

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@/everyone @Apolonia for the extended mention || *aaaa*

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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