AND THERE'S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE OF A GIRL AGAINST HERSELF
This place is a graveyard.
This place is a graveyard – and she still isn’t sure why she’s returned to it.
Ereshkigal perches on her shoulders, strangely silent; she has that damned look curled across her beak, Seraphina is sure, though she does not look at her for confirmation. Their reflections in the mirror-like shards of crystal ripple as she moves, chasing after them like shadows on the wall. Ereshkigal is a shape-shifter, in one lion-mawed and winged, in one chimeric and scorpion-tailed, in one thousand-eyed and flaming, in one an unrecognizable and tentacled mass. She is always similar to herself, but somehow looking at the other-Seraphinas is more horrifying than looking at the other-Ereshkigals.
She sees – reality, fractured. Recent. She doesn’t look for long; this is not where she wants to think of how she has spent her last few weeks.
She remembers the first one she saw. Still-collared. Still-young. Her features illuminated in the multicolored light of the stained glass windows that used to occupy the walls of the throne room – the ones that were broken and melted down in the Davke attack. She looked at it, and she was sure, somehow, that she was looking at herself the day that she had taken that accursed throne.
It is far from the worst of them, or the most frustrating. She sees herself as a child, dead-eyed and bloody, mimicking her movements. She sees herself a year ago, bony and aching, half-starved and mad-eyed. She sees herself as emissary, herself as queen, herself coated in a layer of blood and ash, herself suspended in those rare moments of peace that she can barely recall anymore; all the goodness is clouded up. (She is quietly sure that it used to be there, in the spaces between each jagged tragedy – but she can only see the spikes, not the lulls.)
But. But. But - the worst ones of all are the ones that didn’t come to pass. There is a Seraphina with a golden crown on her brow rather than a mass of metal scars, an aberration that she would never let come to pass; she is older, and wiser, and the wrinkles around her eyes seem strangely kind. There is a happy Seraphina walking opposite her, lips upturned in a smile that she couldn’t hope to mimic, a certain lovely fondness in her mismatched eyes that Seraphina – the real Seraphina – can barely look at because she cannot imagine it settling across her own face. (A Seraphina that loves on the left, and loves freely, loves with a love that is not borne of duty or obligation or snipped at the bud before it could ever reach blossom.) There is a Seraphina who never removed her collar, staring her down with haunting, dull eyes. She regards her for a moment. Sometimes she misses the apathy, even longs for it. It was easier.
What catches her eye, really catches her eye – as she turns a jagged corner, avoiding a toothy mass of crystalline spikes that poke out from the wall in a veritable trap – is the massive, unblemished chunk of crystal across from her. This reflection does not mimic her. It lies in a heap, like crumpled paper, and she can barely see something white growing near her fallen muzzle.
She shudders; shivers run the length of her spine, and she can’t seem to stop them. Her teeth chatter, hard, and Ereshkigal is laughing, but she can’t tell if it is in her head or aloud – either way, it echoes, raucous.
It’s wretched, seeing herself bleed out in third person. She looks at her reflection, jaw gritted, and she feels a bloom of resent pulsing up inside of her chest. Her eyes train on the bloody gash across her cheek, dripping a puddle on the muddy ground, and then on the crop of moonflowers – pristine white, where they aren’t splashed red with her blood. They are upturned towards the sky, and only barely visible. She resents them. She resents them, with their open-white faces, like she resents the way that the moon stared down on her as she lie bleeding out, like she resents the man who did that to her, like she resents the entitlement that bred him-
(But, then, it was the night queen who saved her. How ironic.)
She forces her eyes away from the sight – she has never been good at looking away from things – and keeps walking.
(She cannot help but look back over her shoulder before the shard is out-of-sight; the surface is broken in her wake, lined with hairline cracks extending from an impact wound in the center.
Her mind can do awful things. She must always silence that second heart that pulses and throbs within her, keep it still – she knows that, but it is much harder to do than it used to be.)
She presses forward, a cascade of white hair trailing behind her like a banner of surrender.
@
"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
