leave the horror here;

[Seraphina]

I WILL TELL YOU THIS NOW
this grief wears a crown / this grief wears a burdensome     crown / she is gone and i cannot raise my head / i cannot raise my head

It is terribly, terribly cold.

It is the kind of cold that is painful – the kind of cold that makes Seraphina (a desert creature, by nature and by force of will) realize why people sometimes describe cold as “biting,” in the stories and in the songs. There is snow everywhere, as far as the eye can see, all over these rolling hills, and barren trees. They are so dark a shade of brown that it is nearly black, unlike the leafless, knotted, and ghost-pale gnarls of wood that sprout up some places in the sands of the Mors. It is so pristine that it could be beautiful, and, though covered in a ghostly layer of fog, still manages to sparkle in the dull, peachy morning light, but Seraphina holds no love for it.

It is only cold and wet and emptily monochromatic, as far as the eye can see it. It is not what she expected, if she expected anything at all, but she wanders through the forest (it may as well be dead) like a ghost, a lone shadow against the white. Ereshkigal is somewhere above; she can’t see her for the fog, but she can feel her presence prying at the edges of her mind. She hopes that they aren’t severed again, like they were on the island. A second set of eyes will make the task ahead much easier. She needs to know what the island wants this time, why it has risen again from the sea and whether or not it is a sign of ill things to come – even without a crown on her head, she cannot shake the obsessive need to feel like she is doing something to protect her people, even if she knows that is mere delusion, and all her wandering is worth nothing at all. If she finds something-

If she does anything-

then maybe she can put together some rationale for why she continues to persist. Her grief feels different, now. More hollow. More aimless. In the past, when she grieved, she still had something to do, so she was able to force the grief aside and keep moving. Now, she doesn’t know what to do, and she doesn’t know where to put the grief. It was easier to ache when she had a crown, or a people, or a purpose - but now she is on her own. She knows that it is her own fault. She knows that she could go back. She could be a soldier, or a guard, or maybe a scholar, like she always thought she might be, if she’d had her choice as a child-

but she cannot bring herself to bow again, and she cannot bring herself to return. When she walks those streets, she cannot help but see ghosts. They have eyes made of stone.

Now that she is meant to decide for herself who she is and what she does, she finds herself at an impasse. She has never learned how to live for herself. She has never learned to decide for herself. She doesn’t know what she wants; she isn’t even sure that she knows how to want.

Still – she wanders further through the snow. Sometimes it is shallow, barely covering half of her hooves, but other times it is so deep that she feels like she is wading in it. Snow clings to her sides and legs; it catches on her lashes and tangles in her mane and tail, leaving a patchwork of strands wet and disorganized. She feels Ereshkigal urge her forwards, towards something deeper in the woods, where the dead trees give way to Evergreens so large and thick that they begin to block out the daylight, like those dark woods where she found the dead bird and the cat the last time that she was on this island.

She doesn’t know how quickly she moves, or how long. She only knows that she stops when she reaches a clearing in the middle of the woods, wide enough to be open to the sky. The clouds are still thick enough to block out most of the sunlight, though it must be afternoon by now, and a layer of fog still lingers on the ground, making it hard to see beyond the treeline. She paces tentatively into the clearing, looking for Ereshkigal; she expected to see her above, but the vulture is nowhere to be found.

All at once, bright lights begin to drift up from the ground, flickering like tiny, earthbound stars; they seem to emerge from the snow like butterflies from a chrysalis, beautiful and bright and impossibly delicate, and all she can do is stare at them, struggling to piece together the source of the light. It is so bright – so hard to stare into -, and whatever little darkness is at the center seems to be ever-shifting, like it is not one thing but many things, all forced together into a single form.

Her instincts tell her that she should run, but she stands still as a silver statue, not quite entranced – but curious.

---

@Katniss || <3

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@