THAT SCARS AND SCALDS, THAT BURNS MY FEET
and even hell is holy
The first land she explored was an endless jungle.
It was unlike anything that Seraphina had ever seen before, save on the island – but the island was unnatural, and this felt like the opposite of the god-wild magic she’d seen in that strange place. The ground below her hooves never felt precarious; she never wondered that the vines might move, or the trees might reach out their branches to grab her; the only strange creature was Ereshkigal, and she often sent her away to deliver letters. Her magic was stripped from her the moment she left Novus, though her immortality seemed to remain, and she could still feel the throb of Alshamtueur, ever-ready to burn even when it had been taken so far from Solis’s light.
The land felt grounded and quiet. The threats were normal. Finding food and water. Safe havens to sleep. Tigers and venomous snakes – she should have been scared of them, particularly while stripped of her telekinesis, but Seraphina was long past fearing death. The natives were friendly, though they spoke little of the same tongue, and Ereshkigal was often forced to translate. They did not know her. It was a relief.
At first, she felt prickles of guilt whenever she thought of the home she’d left behind. More often, thinking of home only made her want to run further from it, away from gold-painted dunes and palace walls and a kingdom that she had failed over and over again.
She drew deeper into the jungle.
Eventually, the jungle gave way to a range of snow-tipped mountains; eventually, they gave way to passage through prairies, down rivers, across seas, into cities so massive that they dwarfed the Solterran capitol. She spoke with strangers, though never too much. A few times, she would come across a land terrorized by some creature or man, and she would not leave until their blood stained Alshamtueur bright, burning red. Whether it was misguided penance or genuine altruism she could not say, but she hoped that the people were better for it.
All she could bring herself to do was hope and whisper prayers to her foreign god. She was sure that he could no longer hear her, and she was not sure if that simple truth was gratifying or the most horribly isolating thing that she had ever known. Even so, she continued on.
As a girl, Seraphina had sometimes dreamed of the world outside of Solterra. It was a nostalgic, distorted image, tangled up with gaping unknowns and her desperate longing for freedom, though she had always chalked it up to a scholastic curiosity; when did home become a noose? Had it ever been anything but a noose?
Still. She does not stop sending letters. When she dreams, she still hears the desert wind.
When the boat crosses the threshold from sea that is-not-Novus into sea that is, Seraphina feels it. Her magic, buried somewhere deep, deep inside of her chest, springs to life, beating like a second heart through her bloodstream, and she could almost laugh for the feeling of it – and maybe she does, and her laughter is a half-wild and unusual thing, a sound that may as well have been abruptly shaken from deep sleep. She surges up the stairs, onto the deck, white halo of hair fluttering with something that is not only the wind, and she stands by the railings, her eyes on the horizon-
And there, in the far distance, a thin strip of gold.
There is nothing nauseating inside of her, where all those ghosts should be, and she feels their absence palpably, accompanied by more than a hint of guilt; if she is not left to carry them, who will? But what she feels when she looks at Solterra, a roiling expanse of sand and sun half-obscured by waves, what she feels when she looks at Solterra…
It is that same warmth which drew her back, that same soft longing. She could have left, and she did. There was nothing that held her to the sands, no chains or crowns. She left, but she came back – she did not have to come back.
But Seraphina missed her dunes. She missed all those little places you can stand amid the Mors and see for miles upon miles, unbroken. She missed the feeling of the sun on her back, the tang of sweat dripping down her skin, for every sun that was not Solis’s sun was another sun entirely. She missed the sun god, too, and his fickle ways. She missed the smell of spices in the marketplace, the gleam of Solterran steel; she missed the winding cobblestone of the Court and the familiar, weathered battlements. She missed the sound of her native tongue, the whisper of the wind like a thousand hissing snakes across the sand.
She missed desert nights – the strange cool, and a hundred thousand stars in every direction.
But it was not just the desert. In fact, the desert was only a symptom.
Seraphina missed all the living she left behind.
She no longer knows if this world that she ran from will welcome her home, if it has ever welcomed her at all. Surely, she had some degree of responsibility for reviving Solterra…but hasn’t she done that enough? When is it appropriate to stop trying, to stop bleeding, to stop aching? She is no longer a queen. She is barely even Seraphina, sometimes, more ghost than woman. And she certainly does not know what she wants, now that she is nothing again, as insignificant as the child Viceroy plucked, quivering, from the Mors. She is still outcast, outsider; she did not linger long enough to see who would pick up the ashes of Solterra, though she now knows his name, least of all to bother to reinstate herself as a citizen. Perhaps that is for the best.
She will never bow again.
Ereshkigal, making lazy circles in the vibrant blue of a clear afternoon sky, comes to light on her shoulder. For once, she says nothing at all.
The air smells like fish and salt, but she can still taste the familiar, sharp scent of spices and incense. The docks are bustling; the city is still half-ghost. She has not been gone long enough for it to grow back in its entirety, but it does not feel paralyzed, like a line waiting to snap. There are smiles on some of the faces – the people who aren’t working, mostly, she presumes. And there are children. They look like children again to her, though still marked by a certain, recognizable weight that makes her chest tangle up and hurt.
She wanted so desperately to spare them. She wanted them to have something better than she did, to be allowed to be children foolishly, recklessly, unhindered – and she hates Raum in that moment, perhaps more than she ever has before, because how dare he think that he had the right to take so much from them?
But that is her crime, too.
Still, she draws forward, off the boat and onto the docks – still so tentative, possessed by a crawling sense of nerves and the excruciating knowledge that she doesn’t deserve to be alive for her failure, much less here, much less anything but consumed.
Seraphina draws forward, back into her homeland, her scarf loose as her great expanse of snow-white hair about her shoulders, and she pretends not to notice the way that poorly-hidden stares are drawn to the scar on her cheek, like a brand.
@Caine || she back
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
