[P] a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow

[Seraphina]

HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE GUILTY, TO ABSOLVE THEMSELVES
does the sky ever let me out of its sight? does shame leave the body? mine crawls up my throat nightly, asking for water.

To her remark, he grants her a look that she doesn’t know how to read and asks, softly, And who’s to say this shouldn’t be? There is a part of her that wants to fight him on that point, but she doesn't. She just watches the waves.

“You’re right,” she concedes, which isn’t quite an answer, because she knows what he is getting at – magic has no law, and neither do the gods, “of course. But I have…spent my entire life in Novus – I remember when things were simpler. I am worried at what it means that the gods have reappeared, and that these displays of magic have come with them.” She remembers a time when magic was a genuine rarity, when the gods were little more than figments, suspended somewhere in the sky; she remembers a time before the maze, when the worst things that Seraphina had to worry about were corrupt noblemen and Denoctian soldiers. Those problems were normal, and she knew how to handle them. Even Raum was not unfathomable. He could die, like any other man.

But Seraphina has never heard of gods dying, and she doesn’t know if she wants them dead anyways. She has never heard of magic dying, either, or so much as being fought – not in its raw form, like this.

These are unknown waters.

He thanks her, but the smile he gives her doesn’t feel like a smile; it rings hollow. The gesture is more grim than anything, and she shifts in place, grains of sand grinding beneath her hooves. It occurs to her that she hasn’t heard much about Florentine, beyond that she was hurt and that’s why Asterion took over in her stead; her expression darkens with something that’s not-quite shame and not-quite guilt. “How is Florentine?” She thinks of his sister, with a coat as golden as Bexley Briar’s. Seraphina knew little of the once-queen of Terrastella, but, in the few times they’d met, she’d liked her.

It is his next remark that gives Seraphina pause. Of course he would help, and then that quiet admittance - I don’t know how to keep everyone safe. In the meantime. She doesn’t want to admit it, but it reminds her of herself, younger – newly-crowned. Long before the Davke attacked, when she was buckling under the weight of her own responsibility.

And then – she didn’t. She didn’t keep her people safe, and they died, and that was all there was to it. She looks away from Asterion and out towards the sea; the ridges of foam remind her of the crests of dunes, and she wonders, with a pang, what she has missed in Solterra while she has been gone.

“That is…” Seraphina trails off. She sucks in a breath, and she thinks of all the people she’s seen dead – she thinks of all the Solterrans burnt and bloodied after the Davke attack, swallowed up by snow in during the disasters, starved in the streets by Raum. She thinks of all the people that she couldn’t save, and she looks at Asterion  “I think that all you can ever do is try to protect them, Asterion. And sometimes that isn’t enough.” Seraphina pauses for a moment. To breathe. (There are glossy eyes in the back of her mind, the faces of ghosts; when she dreams at night, she dreams of the dead. Her mind is a sepulcher.) “But you keep trying anyways.” She pauses, then, and opts for less abstract advice; she doesn’t have a crown anymore, and she doubts that she ever will again, but she’s still leading a rebellion, and this island is something more easily fought against than controlled. “The contingent on the shore was a good idea. Can you send your Halcyon to scout the islands from above? It would make patrolling such large distances easier, in case anything changes-“ She is sure that things on the island will continue to change, but she doesn’t say it. “-and I think that it might be smart to have someone keep an eye on the bridge. If something changes there, we could all be stranded on the island.” She looks at him sideways, her eyes narrowing fractionally. “And you, Asterion…you have magic, don't you?”

She can’t be sure, of course; mostly, she is guessing at what she saw when she first encountered him on the island, during that makeshift meeting.

But-

But before she can think too much about Asterion or his magic or lack thereof, her attention is distracted by the sound of thumping. Her head turns. Inclines. She finds herself staring at an iguana, slapping its tail against the bleach-bone sand of the shoreline. Once. Twice. Three times. The sound is low and flat, and it sends a shiver up a spine – she doesn’t understand what it means, but it makes her skin crawl.

The scattered sand grows colorful wings and small black bodies with curling antennae; she watches, blinking, as it flies away as a cloud of butterflies.

She exhales, then – low and uncertain – and looks back at Asterion. “It feels like…things here are becoming stranger and stranger,” she says, and she’s not so sure that it’s a good thing.

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@Asterion || <3

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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