AND MY SPIRIT WITH ITS LOSS KNOWS THIS;
though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.
When the girl is past the border, Seraphina watches her go. The sun silhouettes her small frame; the light is like a lick of flame along the curve of her spine.
She does not move from her position – statuesque, watchful – at the maw of the canyon until she has disappeared entirely, a fleck of pale red lost to the distant sprawl. And then she closes her eyes. Sighs deeply; drinks of the dry desert wind.
And then she turns – back towards the Mors.
--
It begins when she is cresting a dune.
The sand sprays behind her hooves. In the distance, she sees a teryr circling over what is likely a corpse. She sent Ereshkigal to scout ahead, and, as she tosses a languid stare to the sky, towards the teryr, she thinks that she should be in the city by now.
“Seraphina.” The demon never calls her by her name. She freezes, her hooves skidding in the sand. A cloud of dust swirls around her; she tastes it in the back of her throat when she breathes it in. “They’ve caught your spy."
She is not sure if the jolt in her stomach – a sudden, overwhelming wave of nausea that makes her stagger in place – is adrenaline or horror. “Is he still alive?” She gambles with lives. This would not be the first time that she loses one; she doubts that it will be the last, and she wonders if she will ever get used to the way that it feels like a trail of fire-hot chains coiling around her chest, snaking up to her throat, burning-
And her mind answers for her. Never, never, never.
Ereshkigal is silent. When she does not reply, Seraphina asks her again, voice full enough of urgency to snap. “Ereshkigal! Is he alive?” She cannot save the dead, but perhaps, if she is quick enough-
“For now.” The vulture’s voice comes, finally. It suggests that he might as well be dead. “They’ve tortured him. Publicly.”
She springs into movement, a shudder working the length of her coat – like she just touched something very, very cold. An instinctual flinch of skin. The capitol is a distant and blurry darkness on the horizon.
She runs. “Keep him alive.”
“I can’t.”
“Keep him alive,” she begs. She is so tired of death.
--
Before she can so much as pass the city’s gates, she is met with a cascade of stumbling bodies.
The sound of screams rise from the capitol like some terrible crescendo. All around her, like a swarm of insects, people are struggling to escape the city; they stumble over each other and fall to the sand, writhing like beetles who can’t flip themselves over again, once fallen. If they fall, they are crushed.
She watches, wide-eyed with horror, and stumbles into the mass of bodies.
--
She expects the inside of the city to be a squirming mass, full of struggling escapees. Clouds of dust coat the streets and linger like fog. The world is sepia.
But it is quiet.
It is only when she sees the first statue that she realizes what he has done. It is a child, encased in a thick layer of stone; his eyes are bulging, like they could have fallen out of his skull, and his mouth is open in a frozen scream. He is thin. So thin. Practically skeletal. His hair is short. A few strands of it had fallen into his eyes.
She draws forward, along the street.
Stone faces greet her every step of the way.
--
At some point, while she is walking, she realizes that they will not be able to burn them properly. He has robbed them of everything, even a proper death.
She grieves, she grieves, she wants to grieve – but no tears stain her face. Her eyes do not mourn with her, because it will do her no good now.
She has always been good at that – pressing the mourning out, like wrinkles in a silken sheet, and saving it for later. She does not mourn. She does not grieve. She sees the scattered ashes of everything that she has ever loved around her, and she does not weep for it. All that she feels is a frightful rush of inevitability, a raw and terrifying certainty.
And her magic, like a horrible second heart, which throbs against the walls of her chest.
--
As she steps through the haze, her scarf billowing in some dry and agitated wind, Seraphina thinks, for the first time in a while, of Zolin’s death.
Rather, she thinks of the capitol in the aftermath of his death. She thinks of screaming. The smell of burning flesh and woodsmoke. (It was the burning flesh that would linger, always.) She thinks of stumbling through a throng of bodies, half-blind and delirious and terribly uncertain. She thinks of herself, as a girl. Surrounded by smoke. In front of Viceroy’s dead body. Splashed with blood. There were burns on her sides. Legs. The curve of her throat. She was coughing in the smoke.
And where did she go? (She stumbled blind.) She didn’t know. She didn’t know, she didn’t know why she was living, or what for-
She was a child, then. What could she do?
(She was a child, then, when they collared her. And they brought her before the king, but she was a child, so what could she do? Bow. On wobbling knees. Skeletal, ribs jutting, bleak behind the eyes – she remembers what it felt like to be helpless, and she remembers standing in that throne room again, with the windows all shattered, the glass catching like sparks in the dying light, and there was the smell of smoke again, and there was a girl on the steps, and a spear between her ribs, and she knew her, once- but had she ever caught Avdotya, or made her Davke pay the consequence of their betrayal? And, of course, there she is, body bent double and broken, bleeding from the cheeks with moonflowers and moonlight kissing her sides, dying, dying, dying, and so terribly helpless-)
There is a story here, somewhere, about paying the consequences of one’s crimes. She drifts by statues. Brushes up against them. They watch her, a silent council, a monument to her failure, to her crime, for ever thinking that she could be anything more than that little girl bent down on her knees with a collar strung like a noose around her throat.
There is the fluttering of wings and a weight on her back, between her shoulders. Seraphina keeps her gaze trained on the street in front of her, and she meets the eyes of the dead, this time, unflinching.
She knows that she cannot save them. She knows that she cannot turn back time; she knows that she cannot pull back the stone like a cocoon and reveal the life frozen beneath. (Her magic is only good for one thing.)
She knows, too, that Solterra is like the sun – always rising.
Her magic burns in her blood; she feels it coil inside of her, a snake with fangs outstretched, ready to bite. She is not sure if it is fitting or tragic that her gifts are good for nothing but death – she is not sure if it is fitting or tragic that it so often seems her burden to bear. Oh, but she had wanted so desperately, so desperately, to make something beautiful of this land. She didn’t want to hurt. She didn’t want blood, or tears, or fire. She wanted something beautiful.
There is nothing beautiful here now. She can see the reside of her efforts, crushed beneath the weight of stone.
She knows what must be done.
“Ereshkigal,” she says, “where is he?”
She leaps from her back, and, for a moment, her wings – dark and outstretched, right across her shoulders – could have been Seraphina’s own.
--
She sees him first as a glimmer of silver. She has seen him so many times, in her nightmares – she has seen the blue of his eyes and the curl of his lips. She has seen his beast, too, with its terrible gaze and serpentine tail. They haunt her. She wonders if they will join the chorus of ghosts that – always – linger in the back of her mind, once she has killed them.
Even if they don’t, she will never be able to escape the scar.
Inside of her, her magic builds to a dizzying crescendo. The world is silent, silent, silent, but the space inside of her skull is so terribly loud. She tastes sand on her lips, and dust. It reminds her of ash. Her magic is a rhythmic beat, like a war drum, but sometimes it is a scream, and always it is a knife – and the dead are all around her, with their stone eyes, and they are her jury, and she is, perhaps, an executioner.
Ereshkigal rises from her shoulders with a flurry of wings that could have been her own. Her magic hums in her blood. It pulls her from the surface of the ground – strewn sandstone and displaced sand – and suspends her in mid-air. Her hood tumbles from her face and falls past her shoulders in a thick spool of gold. Her white tendrils of hair pull loose from their braids. They float with her, like a nest of snakes.
She is like a ghost. Her eyes are rimmed with red. Her ribs jut – her cheeks are gaunt. She is like a revenant, or a reanimated corpse. But her stare is cold and hard and unyielding, and it knows; she has no fear left, and no room for weeping.
He will die. He will die, because she is going to kill him.
“Raum,” she says.
And when she looks at him, she is not a dead woman but death.
@Raum || aAAAaaaaAAAAaaaA
though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.
When the girl is past the border, Seraphina watches her go. The sun silhouettes her small frame; the light is like a lick of flame along the curve of her spine.
She does not move from her position – statuesque, watchful – at the maw of the canyon until she has disappeared entirely, a fleck of pale red lost to the distant sprawl. And then she closes her eyes. Sighs deeply; drinks of the dry desert wind.
And then she turns – back towards the Mors.
--
It begins when she is cresting a dune.
The sand sprays behind her hooves. In the distance, she sees a teryr circling over what is likely a corpse. She sent Ereshkigal to scout ahead, and, as she tosses a languid stare to the sky, towards the teryr, she thinks that she should be in the city by now.
“Seraphina.” The demon never calls her by her name. She freezes, her hooves skidding in the sand. A cloud of dust swirls around her; she tastes it in the back of her throat when she breathes it in. “They’ve caught your spy."
She is not sure if the jolt in her stomach – a sudden, overwhelming wave of nausea that makes her stagger in place – is adrenaline or horror. “Is he still alive?” She gambles with lives. This would not be the first time that she loses one; she doubts that it will be the last, and she wonders if she will ever get used to the way that it feels like a trail of fire-hot chains coiling around her chest, snaking up to her throat, burning-
And her mind answers for her. Never, never, never.
Ereshkigal is silent. When she does not reply, Seraphina asks her again, voice full enough of urgency to snap. “Ereshkigal! Is he alive?” She cannot save the dead, but perhaps, if she is quick enough-
“For now.” The vulture’s voice comes, finally. It suggests that he might as well be dead. “They’ve tortured him. Publicly.”
She springs into movement, a shudder working the length of her coat – like she just touched something very, very cold. An instinctual flinch of skin. The capitol is a distant and blurry darkness on the horizon.
She runs. “Keep him alive.”
“I can’t.”
“Keep him alive,” she begs. She is so tired of death.
--
Before she can so much as pass the city’s gates, she is met with a cascade of stumbling bodies.
The sound of screams rise from the capitol like some terrible crescendo. All around her, like a swarm of insects, people are struggling to escape the city; they stumble over each other and fall to the sand, writhing like beetles who can’t flip themselves over again, once fallen. If they fall, they are crushed.
She watches, wide-eyed with horror, and stumbles into the mass of bodies.
--
She expects the inside of the city to be a squirming mass, full of struggling escapees. Clouds of dust coat the streets and linger like fog. The world is sepia.
But it is quiet.
It is only when she sees the first statue that she realizes what he has done. It is a child, encased in a thick layer of stone; his eyes are bulging, like they could have fallen out of his skull, and his mouth is open in a frozen scream. He is thin. So thin. Practically skeletal. His hair is short. A few strands of it had fallen into his eyes.
She draws forward, along the street.
Stone faces greet her every step of the way.
--
At some point, while she is walking, she realizes that they will not be able to burn them properly. He has robbed them of everything, even a proper death.
She grieves, she grieves, she wants to grieve – but no tears stain her face. Her eyes do not mourn with her, because it will do her no good now.
She has always been good at that – pressing the mourning out, like wrinkles in a silken sheet, and saving it for later. She does not mourn. She does not grieve. She sees the scattered ashes of everything that she has ever loved around her, and she does not weep for it. All that she feels is a frightful rush of inevitability, a raw and terrifying certainty.
And her magic, like a horrible second heart, which throbs against the walls of her chest.
--
As she steps through the haze, her scarf billowing in some dry and agitated wind, Seraphina thinks, for the first time in a while, of Zolin’s death.
Rather, she thinks of the capitol in the aftermath of his death. She thinks of screaming. The smell of burning flesh and woodsmoke. (It was the burning flesh that would linger, always.) She thinks of stumbling through a throng of bodies, half-blind and delirious and terribly uncertain. She thinks of herself, as a girl. Surrounded by smoke. In front of Viceroy’s dead body. Splashed with blood. There were burns on her sides. Legs. The curve of her throat. She was coughing in the smoke.
And where did she go? (She stumbled blind.) She didn’t know. She didn’t know, she didn’t know why she was living, or what for-
She was a child, then. What could she do?
(She was a child, then, when they collared her. And they brought her before the king, but she was a child, so what could she do? Bow. On wobbling knees. Skeletal, ribs jutting, bleak behind the eyes – she remembers what it felt like to be helpless, and she remembers standing in that throne room again, with the windows all shattered, the glass catching like sparks in the dying light, and there was the smell of smoke again, and there was a girl on the steps, and a spear between her ribs, and she knew her, once- but had she ever caught Avdotya, or made her Davke pay the consequence of their betrayal? And, of course, there she is, body bent double and broken, bleeding from the cheeks with moonflowers and moonlight kissing her sides, dying, dying, dying, and so terribly helpless-)
There is a story here, somewhere, about paying the consequences of one’s crimes. She drifts by statues. Brushes up against them. They watch her, a silent council, a monument to her failure, to her crime, for ever thinking that she could be anything more than that little girl bent down on her knees with a collar strung like a noose around her throat.
There is the fluttering of wings and a weight on her back, between her shoulders. Seraphina keeps her gaze trained on the street in front of her, and she meets the eyes of the dead, this time, unflinching.
She knows that she cannot save them. She knows that she cannot turn back time; she knows that she cannot pull back the stone like a cocoon and reveal the life frozen beneath. (Her magic is only good for one thing.)
She knows, too, that Solterra is like the sun – always rising.
Her magic burns in her blood; she feels it coil inside of her, a snake with fangs outstretched, ready to bite. She is not sure if it is fitting or tragic that her gifts are good for nothing but death – she is not sure if it is fitting or tragic that it so often seems her burden to bear. Oh, but she had wanted so desperately, so desperately, to make something beautiful of this land. She didn’t want to hurt. She didn’t want blood, or tears, or fire. She wanted something beautiful.
There is nothing beautiful here now. She can see the reside of her efforts, crushed beneath the weight of stone.
She knows what must be done.
“Ereshkigal,” she says, “where is he?”
She leaps from her back, and, for a moment, her wings – dark and outstretched, right across her shoulders – could have been Seraphina’s own.
--
She sees him first as a glimmer of silver. She has seen him so many times, in her nightmares – she has seen the blue of his eyes and the curl of his lips. She has seen his beast, too, with its terrible gaze and serpentine tail. They haunt her. She wonders if they will join the chorus of ghosts that – always – linger in the back of her mind, once she has killed them.
Even if they don’t, she will never be able to escape the scar.
Inside of her, her magic builds to a dizzying crescendo. The world is silent, silent, silent, but the space inside of her skull is so terribly loud. She tastes sand on her lips, and dust. It reminds her of ash. Her magic is a rhythmic beat, like a war drum, but sometimes it is a scream, and always it is a knife – and the dead are all around her, with their stone eyes, and they are her jury, and she is, perhaps, an executioner.
Ereshkigal rises from her shoulders with a flurry of wings that could have been her own. Her magic hums in her blood. It pulls her from the surface of the ground – strewn sandstone and displaced sand – and suspends her in mid-air. Her hood tumbles from her face and falls past her shoulders in a thick spool of gold. Her white tendrils of hair pull loose from their braids. They float with her, like a nest of snakes.
She is like a ghost. Her eyes are rimmed with red. Her ribs jut – her cheeks are gaunt. She is like a revenant, or a reanimated corpse. But her stare is cold and hard and unyielding, and it knows; she has no fear left, and no room for weeping.
He will die. He will die, because she is going to kill him.
“Raum,” she says.
And when she looks at him, she is not a dead woman but death.
@Raum || aAAAaaaaAAAAaaaA
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
