[P] I try to keep my skeletons in | vigil

[Seraphina]

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.

The air is hazy with candlesmoke, so thick that it is nearly difficult to breathe. She could not stay at the party; she could not do it. She tried, she really did try, but she couldn’t bring herself to linger any longer than felt absolutely necessary upon entering, and even that was tense and disquieting. Every passing glance made her skin crawl. Seraphina had scarcely been out in public since her so-called death, and, although she had never enjoyed parties, they had never felt like this before. She knows that she is thinking too much, that at least half of the pressure is imagined – but it makes her stomach lurch whenever she catches a lingering gaze, on her scar or her silhouette or any other part of her. On the bird at her shoulders. Whenever she hears her name in passing, and she can never quite discern what the tone is. It never used to bother her, but now…

Now it doesn’t matter what it sounds like. She doesn’t want to hear it.

So Seraphina has found her way to the hospital, Ereshkigal lingering like a shadow between her shoulders. It was where she planned to go from the very start; she has always been better-accustomed to solemn grief than raucous celebration, and the more severe ritual attracts her, for the quiet and the candles and all the things that she has lost in the past year. She has no flowers or baubles or decorations, but she has a single, ornate candle, hovering in the air at her side unlit. She does not know what good one candle will do for droves upon droves of dead, but it is better than nothing. It is better, she decides, than forgetting.

This candle is pale off-white and rimmed with ornate golden filigree; the casing that holds the wax is decorated with cut-out suns, defined by their absence. She supposes it is as fitting a memorial as she can give her people’s dead, with its pale and pitiful burning, though she is no longer sure that her dead would want to be Solterran, least of all honored with the rituals of a god who’d all but abandoned them when they so desperately had need of him. (Turning them to stone was an excess of cruelty. Solterrans burned, returned to ash and flame. Even if they still wished for the proper funeral rites, there would be no way to give them to so many dead. You could not burn stone – but they could no longer ask if they wished to burn anyways, so perhaps it was for the best.)

She passes hunched figures and makeshift gravesites, adorned with candles and red, star-shaped flowers. Incense mingles with the scent of burning wax. There are no lights, but for the flickering, feeble gold of all those candles, and the corridors are narrow and, in some places, crumbling; she has to watch her step. She is grateful that these people seem preoccupied with their remembrance, holding their private but visible vigils. They do not notice her as she passes, her metallic coat flickering like a shade in the dull light, and, so as to preserve the silence, she allows her magic to flare, suspending her hooves a few centimeters from the stone. She makes no sound as she wanders the hallways, so silent and strange that she could easily be mistaken for one of the dead, with her hair floating behind her, bobbing in an unseen tide or wind. Ereshkigal had buried her face in her wings, her beak tucked beneath one joint, but she was still awake. (Seraphina was not sure that she needed to sleep.) Occasionally, her red eyes flickered open, and they seemed to glow with a light all their own, but that was impossible.

She drew deeper and deeper into the hospital, passing rows and rows of quiet, hunched figures until she found a relatively secluded spot in one of the rooms, right by the window. Moonlight poured in through the foggy panes of glass, pale and foggy; it was brighter than in most places, and, though illuminated by the wrong god, Seraphina found it strangely fitting. She settled down in the corner, hairs bristling at the cold air wafting in through thin cracks at the edges of the window, and places the candle before her, striking a match and setting it ablaze. The flame is slender and pale, and it flickers pathetically, but it does not go out. Ereshkigal stretches out one wing, resting it on the silver curve of her shoulder, and she lets her eyes fall closed. She does not sleep, but she keeps her eyes pressed shut, and she tries to piece together something to say in memory of the fallen, of that stone boy in the city or the agents she sent out that would never come home or those whole ships he’d sunk on a childish, vile whim, or, or, or-

But there are no words. She is not sure that she will ever find the right ones. (She’s never been much good at that.)

Her head bows towards the light – not quite in prayer, anymore, but almost.

---

@Moira || whoops she's still moping

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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